In a Blink of the Eye
From Gazette editions of August, 1960:
Fifty years in the past were re-created and memories relived at the gala celebration of the founding of the East Chop Tennis Club. Two hundred members and their friends crowded the clubhouse for its golden anniversary. Greeting them as they entered was a bulletin board boasting pictures taken five decades ago of East Chop, then a downs of low huckleberry bushes, scrub oak and springy gray moss, when from the clubhouse one had a lovely vista looking across to the Cape. There were old tennis rackets on display, championship cups from the first annual tournament, even the old metal marker for the eighth hole of the golf course which at one time rambled across the gently rolling Highlands.
It was the year 1919 when William Howard Taft was president, when there were no income taxes, and a good ten years before woman suffrage, when the East Chop Country Club was founded as a community center and tennis club. Until that time the only courts on East Chop were those belonging to George Dowley and Edwin Metcalf. Most of the summer residents were delighted at the thought of a real gathering place, although there were some who were thinking it a radical step and that the Chop should remain as it was with the emphasis on the religious aspect of the community.
J. Alfred Guest, club president, presided over the ceremonies, giving a short history of the club. A honking horn interrupted the proceedings as Alexander S. West’s 1929 air-cooled Franklin drove up, carrying four women tennis champions of years gone by, Mrs. William D. Barnes, Mrs. Kenneth C. Dowley, Mrs. Dunbar Lewis and Miss Fanny Upham. Attired in long dresses, the foursome batted balls around the court, slightly hampered by their garb.
Quite a wonderful structure is evolving in the Tashmoo Herring Creek area, as a charming guest house is being created from bits and pieces, as it were. All this is going on near Aunt Rhoda’s Pond, as that small section of Tashmoo Pond is known. To begin with, there is the old barn which belonged to Katharine Cornell’s Chip-Chop property and the surrounding field. This was purchased from Miss Cornell by Nancy Hamilton, who promptly proceeded to buy a three-car garage and a shed from the property dispersed by the government when it disposed of its Coast Guard property at Gay Head. The barn is said to have served as a town jail, a morgue, and even a bowling alley in days past. These unlikely companions, barn, garage and shed, have been assembled into a handsome dwelling with a “bit of Beatrice House gingerbread” acquired when that sturdy old Oak Bluffs hotel was torn down last year. Special features include a mural painted by Stan Murphy to hook the buildings together.
Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Treat of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have again checked in at Sunny Sands, Lobsterville. Mr. Treat is a well-known mystery writer, whose next book, Lady, Drop Dead, will be published by Abelard-Schuman. This is Mr. Treat’s fifteenth mystery, of which several were included in the ten best of the year in which they were published. Mrs. Treat is a rug-hooker who recently won a medal for her rug, Paper Dolls, now on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York city. There were about 2,000 entries, of which 114 were chosen for the exhibit.
The devastating news that Dutch elm disease has struck hard at Vineyard Haven was made public this week. The move is on to cut down the four or five affected trees. The elms which are definitely known to have the disease are in the vicinity of the town parking lot, an area in which they have lost the needed strength to resist infection, as concrete has replaced the earth through which Mother Nature allows the trees to breathe and gain nourishment; and also where they are subject to infection carried by cars coming from the Cape.
The July book sale which was held in the West Tisbury church parish house for the benefit of the free public library brought in $391.25. This exceeded the receipts from the sale last year by more than a hundred dollars. Miss Jane New-hall and the two librarians, Mrs. Percy Burt and Mrs. Daniel Manter, were in charge. They were assisted by Mrs. Milton Mazer, Mrs. Malcolm Jones, Comm. Henry Briggs, Nathan Briggs, George Magnuson, Mrs. Donald Campbell and Mrs. Argie Humphreys. Mrs. Edwin Newhall served lemonade and cookies.
The children of the community did a wonderful job moving the books from the library to the parish house and then moved the leftover books back to the library when the sale was over. They were Jackie and Debbie Mayhew, David Schwartz, Noah Kahn, Johnnie Athearn, Mike and Johnnie Herrick, Mark and Ruth Mazer, Leslie Flanders and Richard LaHart.
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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