Opinion
As Thomas Ricks was writ ing his definitive account of the planning and execution of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, he would sometimes look out his window and see children walking home from the kindergarten down the street, and have an awful premonition.
“I would look at those kindergartners and think ‘one of those kids is going to fight in Iraq’,” he told a small audience at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore last Friday night.
The solution to the problems facing our great ponds is so simple that I can hear the slapping of foreheads as I write this — the Martha’s Vineyard Clam Club. Why not? If we’ve got clubs for folks to chase tiny balls and produce nothing better than figures on a scorecard, can’t you imagine a club where folks scour our ponds to produce a tasty meal? The problem is that clamming doesn’t have panache. Well it does, among a select few, but not the right select few. We need a CCC — a Celebrity Clamming Corps.
The Public Park that Never Happened
For two decades, so-called Boch Park on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven has sat in a limbo made of court battles and subsequent, drawn-out negotiations between the Boch family and the town of Tisbury.
The scruffy condition of the parcel, which overlooks Vineyard Haven harbor, is a sad and continuing testament to a failure to reach resolution on what could be one of the bright spots of the town waterfront.
Return to Tivoli Day
The town of Oak Bluffs, planning a new celebration at the end of summer in 1978, turned to its own history and took the name of Tivoli from the community arcade building that was the pride of the town and the center of its nightlife at the lively turn of the century. Since 1978, Tivoli Day has taken root as a favorite celebration in the afterglow of the Labor Day holiday, a festive landmark placed squarely at the intersection of Island summer and fall.
By Leonard M. Robinson, longtime Tisbury resident and sometime contributor to the Vineyard Gazette. From the Vineyard Gazette editions of May, 1951:
I live on Frog Alley. I often wish that the town had kept the name. It is now known as Owen Little Way, whatever that means, but when I was a boy everybody knew it as Frog Alley, and that had a meaning.
Two Ponds Share Common Theme
The images linger in the mind long after they first are glimpsed: the tranquil surface of Mill Pond at the entrance of West Tisbury, the dancing waters of Menemsha Pond a short distance away from narrow Menemsha harbor and the open expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.