The Business of Life
From Gazette editions of July, 1985:
Scant leftovers weren’t the only indicator that the recently formed Ocean Heights Association accomplished important business at its first official meeting and block party held at the Rod and Gun Club. “We’re concerned about commercial activity in a residential area,” said Sandy Cutler, the group’s organizer. That opposition transformed itself into small-scale strategy, when the non-profit group agreed to oppose an auto repair business on Pilgrim Road, which members say operates in violation of Edgartown’s zoning bylaws. Efforts to clean up the landing off the boulevard, which is used for launching boats into the pond, will also get under way.
Begun as a loosely organized contingent of citizens concerned about preserving the residential nature of the area along Sengekontacket Pond, the association opposed the granting of a special permit to Andrew Marcus to operate an automotive repair business on 3rd street. A major concern at the meeting was last week’s revision of septic regulations by the Edgartown board of health, which eases construction limits in the area, where contiguous 30 foot by 100 foot lots are common. Revised regulations allow 330 gallons of wastewater flow per 10,000 square feet of land area, which makes possible the construction of a three-bedroom house.
Take a drive up-Island on a gray day with Nancy Furino and the landscape artist from Edgartown will point out sites she has captured in her paintings of the Vineyard. “There are so many things to paint here and the same subject can be painted all the time because it almost never looks the same. I was so overwhelmed by certain views that I saw, it was just an emotional thing to want to do it. Everything in the wind and in the way the clouds move and the constant play of light here — the whole thing is just so exciting and challenging.”
Her paintings are a marked change from the work she did some 30 years ago. At that time, she was a student of graphic arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her prints of semi-abstract objects and people were included in shows there and at the Brooklyn Museum. She also participated in shows as a recipient of her school’s traveling fellowship, which took her to Italy. She met her husband Dominic there.
“I spend a long time thinking about a subject or a place before I go there to actually paint. Usually I start painting on location and may return there several times at the same time of day. My paintings are simplified and strong. I call myself a romantic impressionist.”
The Nathan Mayhew Seminars begins its tenth summer semester next week with courses in Whitman and Melville, the music of black Americans, journal writing, portrait painting, storytelling and a line-up of music, dance, lecture and film festival. But over in the Seminars’ headquarters, in an office filled with books, president and founder Thomas Goethals privately worries about finances and the education program’s growth and survival in the Vineyard community. “We’re still searching for an identity. It’s slow, hard, and exhilarating as hell,” he said.
Mr. Goethals started the Seminars in January 1975 in an old rented house on North William street in Vineyard Haven. He, Jim Norton and Woody Sayre each taught three courses, and 66 people signed up. In the decade since then, the seminars bought the house and another next door. It added courses, added students, added teachers, added the summer arts festivals and lecture series and, in conjunction with several Massachusetts colleges, added courses for college credit and degree programs.
In the summer of 1983, the Seminars began a $350,000 capital campaign drive. “We still need $150,000 to keep us going,” Mr. Goethals said. “We survive by dedicated teachers subsidizing the program, by teaching for little, for the sheer joy of it.”
There is something wonderful and something sad now going on in the debate about the proper kind of new Island memorial to honor both those who died and those who served in the Viet Nam War. What is wonderful is the Vineyard veterans of Viet Nam are getting together to discuss a monument. They deserve the full support of the entire Island community.
What is sad is the division, at times emotional argument, about what is appropriate for this new Island memorial. Is it place of birth, for example, that is to dictate what names are to be memorialized? Is this memorial only for those born on the Vineyard, or is it also for those more recent arrivals who served in southeast Asia? These are but some of the issues now being argued. Surely there must be a way to ease the agony of Viet Nam for all. The Viet Nam veterans must find a way to resolve their differences in a new Island memorial that is fitting to unity and not to more division.
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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