Kevin Parham’s new book, The Vineyard We Knew, certainly dispels the long-held stereotype that all of we African Americans who inhabit Martha’s Vineyard are rich, famous or both.
Oak Bluffs seasonal resident Neil Rolde for 16 years was a representative in the Maine state legislature and the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from that state in 1990. He has long been concerned with what it means to be in governmental office.
If we want written accounts of Island life before the Gazette began to publish in 1846, we must usually rely on letters, town records, deeds, wills and diaries, many kept at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, some at the newspaper office, others at the county courthouse.
Sam Low craves at least two things in life — the
strong
embrace of an ocean and the presence of a true ohana. He’s found both in two somewhat dissimilar places — Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii.
Ohana is a Hawaiian word that means extended family. Mr. Low’s father grew up in Hawaii but moved to New England at the age of 17. On the East Coast, he sought a lifestyle similar to his Hawaiian upbringing and found it on Martha’s Vineyard, where “everybody let their hair down and everybody was fishing and clamming,” Mr. Low explained.
Did you know that America’s deadliest maritime disaster was not the Titanic? Or that an African-American woman refused to give up her seat on a bus 11 years before Rosa Parks did the same?
The Vineyard community will always have a strong love affair with its four lighthouses. Nearly all of the local ones are still standing, though some have been moved. All but one of the lighthouse keeper houses, though, are no longer with us. Automation ended the era of climbing the stairs to the top of the tower each afternoon to light the beacon.
SQuire Rushnell’s latest book, Divine Alignment (2012, Simon & Schuster Inc.), is the fifth book in his Godwink series, the term he coined to describe how life’s un-coincidental coincidences all come together to create a purpose in our lives. Once again he rejects the idea that we are all “twigs floating down a river to destinations unknown.” Instead, he believes these coincidences, or godwinks, have divine underpinnings.
Capt. David Dutra, 67, of the 60-foot Eastern Rig dragger Richard & Arnold, fished for fluke for most of this summer out of Menemsha. His 88-year-old fishing boat is an unmistakable old black wooden dragger that smells and looks like something out of another era. It is a handsome boat, the last of its kind, not unlike the captain. Richard & Arnold, out of Provincetown, is but one of a very few working wooden fishing boats left on the East Coast. They make neither the boat, nor the captain like they used to.
