Nest Eggs
From Gazette editions of October, 1936:
George M. Jenks of North Tisbury, at the age of 86, took for his bride Mrs. Elizabeth Hallett Hammett, 71, at the Jenks home on Wednesday evening. Mr. Jenks has renamed his residence the Love Nest. The bride was dressed in dark plum wool crepe. Mr. Jenks, a champion jig dancer of the Vineyard, was nattily attired for the occasion. He is still active as a farmer.
A temperance rally, the first held in Edgartown for some years, attracted a fair gathering to the town hall. The purpose of the meeting was to mobilize sentiment against the licensing of places in Edgartown for the sale of alcoholic beverages to be drunk on the premises where sold.
The drum and bugle corps of the Edgartown Boys Club turned out and led the way to the town hall, following the union prayer meeting held at the Methodist church. The corps also played at the hall, and the spirited showing was rewarded with a vote of thanks from the meeting.
Edward T. Vincent presided, and told the gathering the purpose of the meeting. “We are opposed to the sale of liquor to be drunk on the premises,” he said. “I don’t believe we need such a place in a town of this size, and it is not for the best interests of Edgartown. I went down Main street at 4 o’clock this afternoon and saw two men going into the place where liquor is sold, and I had just been presented with a bill for coal and groceries for those two men. Anyone has a right to drink, but not on someone else’s money.”
Mrs. Etta Luce said she believed a town of any size should not have a saloon. She referred particularly to the drinking by young women and girls. The saloon takes from them, she said, the quality which God gave them and which men want them to have. “What have you left?” she asked.
Fourteen were admitted to citizenship at the naturalization session of superior court held Tuesday: Maud Baird Tilton, Agnes Maxwell Morrice, Otto Friedrich Wustenberg, Mary I.D. Downie, Mary A. F. Alley, Ralph Ernest Grant, Katherine Wustenberg, John H. Cecilio, Manuel C. Mello, Antone Ana da Cruz, Agostinho P. Souza, Seraphina Viera, Edward C. Shaffner and Gabriella Mae Campbell. They were presented by James J. Lynch, United States naturalization examiner from Boston.
Activity in presenting federal projects to aid unemployment is on the increase in Tisbury, where preparations for submitting a plan to raise beach plums is being prepared by George L. Sears, tree warden and highway commissioner. Interest in the project has been aroused in the state Department of Agriculture by the efforts of Mrs. Wilfrid O. White, and Mr. Sears has been asked to prepare the plan for the project for consideration by that department. Four months of work for twenty men will be provided under the plan, the work to consist of clearing the land and planting the beach plum bushes.
Henry Fuller has offered twenty acres of land bordering on Lake Tashmoo for the purpose, his offer being a five-year lease to the town without cost. Should the plan be approved, the fruit will be raised, then picked and canned or made into jelly.
It may seem trivial, or obvious, or repetitious to turn in print to the beauties of October. The things which are assailing the offices of urban newspapers quite evidently have to do with politics and international perils and various swords of Damocles which are dangling, pendulum fashion, over the pit of our modern world. We are assailed by these things, too, but not to the same extent that we are assailed by the potentialities of October. We read of the sickness of civilization and are grave; but all that is far away. Here on the Vineyard the window is open, and October is reaching in.
This is a local newspaper, concerned with insular affairs. Our own local civilization is hale and well. The salt spray of the last big blow is still on the window panes and the weather side of the trees in the yard. This seasoning is an annual process which is part of October, a month which comes with a richer store of possibilities than any other month of the year.
Unfortunately we cannot bottle the Vineyard’s October and ship it out over the world as a panacea, as Dr. H. A. Tucker’s famous No. 59, and Perry Davis’s Pain Killer (first concocted on Chappaquiddick) used to be shipped. But we can at least remind the world that it is here, and hope that the thought and memory of it will stir something in the hearts of absent friends and give them a momentary gladness.
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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