From the Vineyard Gazette editions of July, 1958:
Certainly worth a first page position is the fact that James Thurber, the American humorist, whom the Vineyard proudly stakes a proprietary claim to because of his visits here, lunched in London with the editors of Punch.
The significance of this event can be understood from the facts as set down in a Reuters dispatch as follows:
James Thurber joined an exclusive circle today when he lunched with the editors of Punch, Britain’s weekly humor magazine. Not since 1907, when Mark Twain attended, has an American dined at Punch offices. In the intervening years there has been only one other invited guest, the Duke of Edinburgh.
There is a great tendency in these times to look for obscure causes. Take that traditional friction sometimes occurring between summer people and all-year people, so called. Often we hear it attributed to remote psychological origins, as sharply differentiated as the frigid zone from the torrid. Nobody is expected to get really to the bottom of it without the aid of sociologists and psychologists.
Yet we are of the opinion that the friction is often nothing more than the natural difference of viewpoint between a working man or woman who has risen at 5:30 in the morning or thereabouts, and a vacationing man or woman who has risen at 9:30 or 10 in the morning. When you come down to it, this gulf, though attributable to so small a matter as the hour of getting out of bed, is as wide as the temperamental difference between dogs and cats.
By 9 o’clock in the morning, the man who has risen at 5:30 often begins to feel he has outlived his youth. By noon, he is hungry, probably cynical and despairing of the millenium. He is also frustrated, for summer is the fairest of all seasons, and he must toil through a grimly appointed term. By 8:30 in the evening, he’s had it, as the saying goes.
But the man who has risen at 9:30 or 10 is only just beginning to come alive when the noon hour strikes. He is a summer vacationer, and all sorts of things interest him. He is full of small talk, vim, youth, and, not infrequently, of advice. How can he help it? His day passes like the old fashioned parade of the circus, and at 8:30 in the evening he is raring to go. The night invites him not to sleep but to new activity.
Well, is it necessary to labor the point? We propose, by way of experiment, to reverse the roles and thus find out if the viewpoints are not automatically reversed at the same time. Any candidates for such a test?
The remains of a beaver lodge that may be 10,000 years old, situated in the Squibnnocket cliffs, was inspected by Clifford Kaye, geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, E. Gale Huntington, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Archaeological Society, and Peter Leavens, summer visitor. The lodge is in a bog deposit high up on the side of the cliffs, and consists of a layer of saplings felled by a beaver.
Each small log is cleanly pointed at one end, and close inspection reveals the teeth marks of the beaver.
Further study is to be made of this find. It provides a valuable clue to animal life on Martha’s Vineyard in early post-glacial time. Although beavers have been extinct on the Island so long that no real tradition remains, they are among the animals found by Gosnold’s voyagers in 1602. Brereton’s account of the Gosnold visit includes this enumeration: “Deere in great store, very great and large Beares, Black Foxes, Beavers, Otter, Wilde Cats verie large and great . . . .”
Mr. and Mrs. Alpha Leonard observed their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Leonard received her guests attired in her original wedding gown and gloves. The Leonards have been residents of Oak Bluffs for some forty-two years. Mr. Leonard first came to Oak Bluffs as a teacher in the Oak Bluffs schools and then served as its principal. He has operated Leonard’s Motor Service on Lake avenue for the past thirty-five years.
The flying season started off strong, over the weekend, with more than a hundred personal airplanes visiting the Katama Airpark. The New England Wings, a flying club with headquarters at Hanscom airport at Bedford, held a cookout at the air park beach with twenty airplanes represented. Others came from mainland points from Maine to Washington, D.C. Those who witnessed the spectacle can forsee the part that personal aircraft will play in the future of the Island.
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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