From Gazette editions of April, 1985:

The struggle to bring cable television to Martha’s Vineyard is all over, but for the wiring. Some five years after bidding began for the right to wire the Vineyard for cable television, one last round of haggling with Dukes County Cable TV produced a final license that selectmen in all six towns signed this week. “It’s finally been done,” John Schilling of the Island cable advisory committee said, and the selectmen signed the license that paves the way for the cable company to build the system. The license requires the company to wire major roads within 14 months and to reach the outer limits of public roads up-Island within two years.

The last signatures brought a sigh of relief and a formal statement of thanks from Tom Olsen, local manager for Dukes County Cable. “We wish to thank everyone, especially [the advisory committee composed of] chairman John Alley, Jeffrey Madison, Lenny Jason, Ed Coogan, John Schilling and Ted Morgan.” Selectmen had delayed final approval while the committee and company officials tried to iron out questions ranging from subscription rates to hookups up-Island, where residents live farther apart and are therefore less profitable for the cable company to connect.

Real estate developer Ben Boldt’s elaborate plans for a hotel, health spa and housing complex on the Trade Winds Airport property came under official scrutiny in two public forums last week, and in both cases encountered a barrage of questions and reservations about the proposal to develop the 75-acre land parcel off County Road in Oak Bluffs. In a town planning board hearing on definitive plans for 52 units of cluster housing and a board of appeals hearing on a proposal for a 100-unit hotel, talk turned away from specific elements under review to the scope and impact of the entire project. The two hearings ended up as discussion sessions and both will be continued next month.

A brief sketch of the plan calls for a large sports complex, with a swimming pool, tennis and racquet ball courts, and room for exercise equipment, attached to a three-story, U-shaped hotel on a seven-acre-parcel of land designated as a B-1 business district. Ann Margetson commented, “This project may work for the people who build it, but it will never work for the town in this size, place or form.”

Vineyard readers of movie credits, keep your eyes open when Woody Allen’s new film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, comes to the town hall theatre in Edgartown. The location manager is Jonathan Filley of Alpine, N.J. and Chappaquiddick, and Michael Wild of Brooklyn and the Great Plains is a production assistant.

Windy Gates, the tract in Chilmark nourished on folklore, romance, legend and persistent oddities, is stirring again in its bed of history, as the Vineyard Conservation Society, always vigilant, has been prompt in discovering. The society points out in a recent bulletin a new uncertainty about Windy Gates.

The property extends from the State Road to the cliffs of Wequobsket, a name signifying “at the ending of the rock,” and virtually surrounds the Chilmark library, community center and post office complex at Beetlebung Corner, and also includes a brook emptying into Chilmark Pond and nearly 1,000 feet of ocean shore rising to lofty bluffs.

What may be called a different dimension is named in the petition of an heir, Carl Baldwin, for division and sale of the property. He would require “not less than three million dollars.” There is no scientific way of correlating this figure with the height of the Wequobsket cliffs, but it would seem to hold about the same rank.

As the summer estate of Roger Baldwin and his daughter, Helen Mannoni, Windy Gates saw a period of settled but stirring dignity with such occurrences as the nuptial flight of the woodcock, visits of varying length by notables known the world over, and occasional requests for a showing of the bathroom in which Mrs. Lucy Sanford, who put the place on the map in the 19th century, was said to have installed golden fixtures: This was a claim Newport could not rival. The region that became Windy Gates was shown to Mrs. Sanford by the Rev. Caleb Rotch of the William Rotch family on the way back from a long drive to Gay Head. She felt its fascination, and it became the Sanford summer home. After her husband’s death Mrs. Sanford began a series of lavish expenditures. There was also in due course a resident foreigner, taken locally to be an Italian count.

The alertness of the Vineyard Conservation Society has led to the formation of a group, aided by the society’s executive director, Tom Counter, to study the future of Windy Gates in relation to the interests of Chilmark and the Island.

Compiled by Cynthia Meisner

library@mvgazettecom