Editor’s Note: A small piece of history came down this week when a portion of an old house near the intersection of Old County and West Tisbury-Edgartown Road was torn down. The sagging buildig on the east end of the house was a familiar sight to all who drive that road. The building was formerly a general store that sold hand-cranked ice cream. The following piece was published in the Gazette in the summer of 1996.

Just as summer ended, there was a yard sale in West Tisbury outside what used to be Gifford’s General Store on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road.

Tim Maley and I were among those rummaging around among iron muffin pans and vinegar cruets and coverless books, steamer trunks and odds and ends of hardware one Sunday afternoon. Willis and Betty Gifford’s granddaughter, Heather Miller, was doing the selling honors.

Yard sales being a major Island summer attraction, there were plenty of cars that stopped and plenty of prospective buyers who joined us in our rummaging. But I doubt that many of them had ever heard of Willis Gifford or Gifford’s General Store or the hand-cranked lemon ice cream that Willis and his brothers George Jr. and Flavel made nearly half a century ago, and sold to the thirsty in the general store annex.

It’s a pity, for, if they had, they would treasure the slightly tarnished curtain rings and slightly rusted drill bits they picked up at the yard sale for a song.

I came away with a box of bird identification cards and a kitchen whisk. When I left, Tim was still digging around in the hardware box, shaking his head and saying he didn’t really need anything that was there, but it just might come in handy someday. And we talked a little about Willis, and we both knew, without saying anything, that it was really memories we were picking up, not objects.

Willis Gifford died in 1987. He had been born in West Tisbury at the turn of the century, gone to the West Tisbury School and Tisbury High School, the old East Greenwich Academy in Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island, where he had been captain of the football team. He got a master’s degree in education at Harvard and began a lifetime of teaching and being a school principal. Then, in 1968, he and Betty returned to the Island.

It was just a year later that I met him — lured that time, too, by a yard sale. He and Betty were transforming the old family general store into a house and “pretending” they wanted to sell what remained on the old store shelves. But they didn’t want to dispose of anything, really. After all, Willis’s father, George, had been a grocer there for more than 50 years, and before that Willis’s great uncle, William Rotch. It was rather like Tim and me. The memories just flew around.

That 1969 “sale,” when Willis and I first got acquainted, was just the first decade of such events — at which virtually nothing was sold because Willis didn’t want to sell memories.

Around July 4, he’d first haul out a table and set it up in the yard. There’d be high button shoes on it and boxes of calico buttons (designed to go, of course, with calico dresses), and egret feathers for ladies hats and watch keys for pocket watches.

But once you said you were interested, Willis would say he had to go inside to see if Betty really wanted to sell what you had asked to buy. Nine times out of 10, when he returned to the yard, it was to explain they weren’t quite sure they wanted to get rid of the item you’d asked for yet.

After attending Gifford yard sales for years, and never being allowed to purchase a pair of high button shoes or a feather, I decided Willis brought the old store’s goods out just to get acquainted with the prospective customers. They would screech to a stop, lured by his artistic display of memorabilia arranged under the American flag he always hung out for the event.

For Willis loved people, and loved spinning yarns of the old days for them. He could enthrall the most jaded with his stories of Capt. Joshua Slocum, who had been a neighbor up the road in Willis’s boyhood. Captain Slocum, the first man to circumnavigate the globe alone, back in 1898, would sit in the sun outside his house, and little Willis would sometimes go up to sit with him. Once, as Willis liked to recount, Captain Slocum had fashioned a horn for him from a conch shell. Seven-year-old Willis had been especially delighted with it when he found out that, blowing on it, he could make the windows rattle and the walls vibrate back home. He speculated in later years that a horn like that was probably what Joshua Slocum had used as a foghorn.

Willis remembered the time a barrel of molasses — 50 gallons of it — had been dropped in the store’s back yard during a delivery and all the sticky mess had spewed forth.

He liked to reminisce about the “ape” his friend Charlie Foote had fashioned from rubber tubing in boyhood and set up so it would crawl out of the West Tisbury woods when a string was pulled. Word of an ape in West Tisbury caused so much excitement a posse was sent out to scour the woods in search of it. (Willis never admitted to having participated in the prank, but you wondered about it.) He did, however, admit that each Halloween he and his young friends would steal the bell from the West Tisbury School that is now the town hall. They’d set it up in the back of a truck and make the rounds of town banging on it.

He and Betty came to dinner once at our house. He dutifully admired the aqua and pink Singapore Bird ironstone on which his dinner was served. It was a wedding present my husband, Tom Cocroft, and I had received and cherished.

“Well,” said Willis, after a reasonably polite length of time. “Betty and I had china like this once. Let me tell you about it. You see, it got chipped, so Betty said to take it to the dump. It wasn’t all chipped, though, so I left it at the top of the dump for anyone who might not be so particular as Betty was about chips. A couple of days later, we had a dinner invitation here from a very good West Tisbury family. It was hard keeping quiet when the dinner appeared on our old china. Glad yours isn’t that china come third hand!”

It’s not hard to see why I hope enough is left on the old store shelves at the Gifford house so there can be annual yard sales for many years to come. They’re the perfect memorial to a grand man and the West Tisbury that once was.