Sam Bungey
Why does food cost so much on this Island?
Coming from Steve Bernier, owner of Cronig’s Market, the answer is part career grocer’s insider view, part disaster warning.
“There’s a flood coming,” said Mr. Bernier, sitting in a cocoon-like office space above the Cronig’s main store in Vineyard Haven. “The rise now is exponential, dynamic. We’re at the end game of what goes around comes around.”
It jumps out at you. In paragraph thirteen of an article written by Mara Liasson in July 1976, then a Vineyard Gazette intern: “Right now in the up-Island swamps the bushes are covered with heavy clusters of cream-colored flowers and purple berries.”
Of course, by the time an elderberry bush bears berries, its flowers tend to be long gone.
Tim Laursen, who writes the majority of the lyrics for The Billionaires, looks through his screen porch out at the woodland behind his family’s Vineyard Haven home, and tries to explain his song-writing method.
“Okay, popping into my head right now, wood,” he says, humming a tune and then seamlessly cranking out a lyric: “Must be romantic cutting wood by hand/Put down the power tools and give me back the land.”
While the bullet-riddled corpse of a feral turkey lies stiff in a Chilmark police freezer, a fuller picture of its violent past on Old Ridge Road and the surrounding neighborhood is emerging.
There is no state or federal grant money available to offset the damage wreaked by an Independence day fire which destroyed Café Moxie and decommissioned Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, according to state representative Eric T. Turkington who traveled to Vineyard Haven meet business owners and town leaders on Friday.
In its sixth year of a capital campaign, the Martha’s Vineyard Museum is carrying an operating deficit from 2007 as it considers a different location for a future museum campus.
Keith Gorman, executive director of the museum since January of this year, has taken control of the nonprofit business at a difficult time. Determined to avoid a repeat financial performance in 2008, he is also presiding over a reassessment of the campaign to expand the museum which began in 2002 with a $27 million price tag and is currently undergoing a period of major reassessment.