From the Vineyard Gazette edition of October 22, 1948:

Rain? Yes, rain on the night before Cranberry Day. It was no wonder several calls came to see if the great day was to be put off.

“When I was a boy,” said Napoleon B. Madison, acting cranberry agent in Leonard F. Vanderhoop’s stead, “the first Tuesday of October was always Cranberry Day and there was no postponement for anything. The men got there before daylight and began picking as soon as they could see. If some of the berries were not ripe it made no difference, the green ones had to be separated from the rest and put on a floor in an unused room to ripen. Some of the women and children were left till later, till the bogs were drier, often getting there about 9 o’clock. But there was no deferring the day.”

There were sixteen cars and one oxcart, the last named carrying the family of Granville S. Belain. Two of the cars came from Vineyard Haven, bearing Gay Headers. In all there were about sixty people scattered about the bogs.

As the Vineyard gets squared away for the winter season, one of the things which comes along is the matter of community concerts. For two winters now, the Island has been the gainer by a concert series at the Vineyard Haven school gym, with first rate artists and programs. To judge from the large audiences, the music has meant a good deal here, and the demand for concerts of the kind is widespread and continuing.

Everyone profits by radio and phonograph music — we should hate to lose this source of so much of the world’s great music, performed by the greatest artists — but there is still a craving and a need for a music clothed in humanity. The presence of the artist is an element to be cherished.

There are so many special weeks and days — from Fire Prevention Week to Sweetest Day — that they go by without much notice. One of these, evidently a newcomer on the list, was Oil Progress Day, which was announced by the petroleum industry to celebrate its own pioneering spirit and development. The day was Oct. 14, and on it, if anybody had been paying attention, official flags might have been displayed at half staff on the Vineyard.

For in commemorating the chance by which Samuel M. Kier distilled a certain patent medicine — Kier’s Rock Oil — and produced kerosene, the petroleum industry is celebrating an event which wiped out this Island’s big stake in whaling. We have fared pretty well since, but the Vineyard’s only numerous and considerable fortunes were made from whaling; it wasn’t easy money, but it was big money, and there has been nothing like it since. Whaling capital was, for a time, community capital; its influence lingers in fine homes and traditions.

Incidentally, the whaling industry has been revived and intensified in the south polar seas, only to make for itself a final ruin. Willard G. Van Name of the American Museum of Natural History, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, declares unreservedly that in spite of international controls, mostly ineffectual, the whale is being pushed close to extinction in its final sanctuary by “reckless butchery.” Moreover, the slaughter is carried on wastefully, with a vast squandering of a food supply which, by modern methods, could be used to feed the hungry of the world.

If we, by dint of that old era in which Vineyarders dared dangers and privations to kill one whale against hundreds machine-killed with convenience and comfort today, may be said to have acquired a special interest in whales and whaling, we sons and grandsons of American whalemen will join in asking for genuine international protection so that the greatest of the mammals may survive. There could hardly be a better memorial to the captains, mates and boat-steerers than living whales in the ocean.

Just about now the woodbine, elsewhere more commonly called the Virginia creeper, is coming into its special autumnal glory. The colors, running the scale of intense reds, are fully as triumphant as those of the poison ivy which is likewise breathtaking in its celebration hues of fall.

The extent of the woodbine in the countryside is hardly appreciated in summer when the vine is only one of the countless prolific green things — but now it emerges, and one can see how it possesses stone walls, makes itself companion of the grapevine, rambles over fields and through thickets. Anonymous during the green months, it becomes the materialization of autumn, assertive and resplendent, a constant invitation to every eye.

In many places the woodbine is cultivated, but here it is a part of the general Island garden, springing up without invitation and lasting through dry summers and bitter winters alike. Vineyard soil must especially please this vine as it does so many other gallant and individual shrubs and plants. To name the Vineyard without sassafras, sumach, bayberry, huckleberry and woodbine would be to name it incompletely.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com