HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

It’s odd to be shocked at the death of a 101-year-old man, but once a person — particularly a cogent, articulate and fairly fully ambulatory one — makes it to advanced late age, we tend to believe he’ll live forever, or at the very least for one more year.

And so it was with Albion G. Hart of the Methodist Camp Ground in Oak Bluffs. I first met Mr. Hart in the relative youth of his mid 90s, and after that, annually, I was understandably delighted to get my first springtime glimpse of him sitting contentedly on one of the rocking chairs of his porch facing the Tabernacle.

We always raised a hand and smiled a “hello,” although I received the distinct impression he regarded me as another familiar Vineyard face, no particular name or identity attached. This had nothing to do with elderly forgetfulness but more to the fact that he was a genuine Island celebrity; so many scores of people greeted him each day during his ritual porch-sittings, that it would have been impossible to recognize each one of his fans, just as it would have been for Al Pacino, had he lived at that address.

Albion had an absolute genius for Camp Ground history. He was the go-to guy for anyone researching the village of Victorian dollhouses. He knew so much, in fact, that I always imagined he had not only spent every year of his childhood in the Camp Ground since his birth in 1908, but that his antecedents went all the way back to the 1840s or thereabouts when camp meeters began to replace their white canvas walls for non-insulated bead-board walls and, later on, fancy Queen Anne filigree.

It was surprising, then, to learn that the Hingham native had only begun to spend full summers here in 1976 after he retired from his teacher/principal profession in Atlantic City, N.J. He and his wife, Cora Ripley, spent the fall, winter and spring of those post-retirement years in Florida. When it came time in 1992 to settle on one place for a year-round lifestyle, they headed to Massachusetts even as tens of thousands of New England retirees were migrating past them in the opposite direction.

Cora died a couple of years ago, and spent the last few seasons of her life at Windemere (her husband visited daily), but before she passed away, her own longevity into her nineties was a source of great happiness for the couple. Albion once told me, in a rare papal visit to his living room, that he and Cora used to sit at home on winter nights, chatting, reading (unless there was a Red Sox game on) and they would exclaim for the ten thousandth time how lucky they were to be living on Martha’s Vineyard, together, and still have plenty to say to one another.

Mr. Hart described his days and nights to me during that same visit. Except when his grandchildren were visiting (his son Albion Peter Hart Jr. had tragically died some years before), the second floor was cordoned off in that old Yankee tradition of using only that part of the house that was strictly necessary to keep body and soul together. Too, as hale and hardy as Mr. Hart happened to be for a nonagenarian, that climb up a narrow flight of stairs must have seemed like more of a mountain hike than a trip to a drafty bedroom. He walked into town for his daytime errands. At night he went on reading and watching Sox events, then he bedded down on an inconspicuous cot between the kitchen and the living room, kept company by his beloved cat which, in cat years, may have trumped its owner in age.

In the summer, Albion’s celebrity came to the fore when tour guides hauled their visitors off the bus and paraded them to the Hart porch where the professional lecturer and amateur historian would greet the crowds with supreme geniality, before opening the forum up to Q & A. Aside from queries about how the Camp Ground got started, and was it true that people would pack up their cottages and leave if booze was confiscated from their property (quite a few, judging by the empty lots), assuredly the most-asked question was, “What’s it like living here in the winter?” One imagines the king of the Camp Ground had a curt, witty answer, such as all of us have developed to keep ourselves from flipping out from boredom. Had he taken the time, however, (which he very well may have done) to describe his downstairs comfort zone, his memories, his constant love of books, and his surprisingly affectionate cat, his listeners might have considered that these last years of this fascinating man, were close to idyllic.