It reads like an old feel-good, hometown story. A local boy grows up on the Vineyard, watching his father and mother work hard. The father works for the Steamship Authority and then later runs an ice cream stand. His mother works at the local grocery store. The youth goes off to college, enters the corporate world, gets a master’s degree from Columbia Business School, and, through a line of successes, he and his wife decide to come home and take ownership of a longtime local business.

That is George J. Rogers Jr. of Tisbury and his story.

Earlier this month, Mr. Rogers and his wife, Sheryl Roth Rogers, took over Edgartown Marine, the Island’s down-Island boatyard and marine service operation. They purchased the business from Maurice (Maury) Dore and Anthony (Tony) Chianese. Coincidentally, Mr. Dore was Mr. Rogers’s high school basketball coach.

For Mr. Rogers, 57, and his wife, this is a new beginning. It’s a big step away from the corporate grind for both of them, from spending hours commuting between home and work, and immeasurable hours and troubles commuting to the Vineyard. This is about stepping forward into the familiar and recommitting to doing a lot of hard work, but doing it here.

“People want to know who I am,” Mr. Rogers said at the outset of the interview. “The message we are sending out is that we aren’t going to change anything or make any radical changes. We will gradually embrace the full process, and understand this business.

“We want our customers to know we aren’t going to rock any boats. They will get the service they got in the past, and hopefully that it will continue to grow and improve,” he added.

To the waterfront skeptics: No, this is not about coming into a business for a year or so, making it more profitable and then flipping it, though Mr. Rogers knows a little bit about that kind of business on the mainland. For the new owners, this is about finding a way to make Martha’s Vineyard home again.

Mr. Rogers is a 1971 graduate of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. He grew up in Tisbury. “I was on Look street until I was about six or seven years old. Then we moved to William street. I have a brother and two sisters.”

In 1976, Mr. Rogers graduated from what today is called Bentley University in Waltham. He worked for General Mills Corporation, for a short time at Parker Brothers in Salem, a subsidiary of General Mills. “I was a financial guy, I worked in the accounting department,” he said.

In 1978 he worked in Minneapolis and that is how he met his wife, Sheryl, a 1977 graduate of Smith College, and later a 1979 graduate in business from Columbia Business School. She also worked at General Mills, in marketing.

Their jobs took them to many residences: Orlando, Fla.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Stamford, Conn.; Moorestown, N.J. and finally Lexington, before they moved back to the Vineyard full-time.

The geographical changes reflect Mr. Rogers moving up in the world of finance. He worked at Paine Webber on Wall Street and for Fidelity Investments. At one point he became chief financial officer at a multimillion dollar company. He did some venture capital business with partners. Together they created businesses. “I became the chief financial operating officer for a firm and I did that until 1995.”

But through it all, the Vineyard was where the couple came on vacation, and it was home. Mr. Rogers has vivid memories of his father working for the Steamship Authority as quartermaster and later starting an old-fashioned Hood ice cream truck that did the beaches. His mother, Florine, worked at the A& P in Vineyard Haven.

Five years ago, the couple who now are the proud owners of Edgartown Marine bought a home in lower Makonikey. He fished the north shore in a 23-foot Pro-Line powerboat. As a couple they have a long list of memories of driving every weekend to Martha’s Vineyard. “At one point we were driving 350 miles,” Mr. Rogers said.

“We were not thrilled about doing the grind,” he said. “You are either in the corporate world 100 per cent or you are not. At one time, we looked at each other and said, ‘I am tired of it.’

“We are in our mid 50s, this is a last chance to really do our own thing,” he explained. “We didn’t want to start a new business, it would be too fearful for us in our 60s, the energy required would be too much. We thought either do it now, or not.”

They started looking for a business to own in the Boston and Cape area. Then, through a series of events and conversations on the Island, they turned their sights towards the Vineyard, and then to purchasing Edgartown Marine.

Finding a year-round business on the Vineyard was critical to moving back. Mr. Rogers got the idea of purchasing Edgartown Marine from a local friend.

But his interest in the boatyard was at first met with brutally frank opposition: Mr. Rogers said Mr. Dore hung up on him, more than once.

Mr. Rogers said Mr. Dore and Mr. Chianese were reticent out of a concern that the business needed to be in the hands of someone committed to the Vineyard and to the boating community. But over a span of time, earlier this year, the purchase started taking shape.

Edgartown Marine is a boatyard with many moving pieces. The business has a long-term lease with the Town of Edgartown to operate a lift and have a business store presence at North Wharf.

There is a 4.7-acre parcel of land at Mill Hill for the repair service and the boat storage component of the business. There are 10 year-round employees and in the summer they hire an additional six employees. “We have 325 boats,” stored, Mr. Rogers said. “We offer and provide services for up to 600 boats.”

What is most striking about the success of the business, in Mr. Rogers’s opinion, is neither the wharf nor the land, though they are important: It is the people.

“The work crew is dedicated. They often know what a boat needs more than their owner,” said Mrs. Rogers, and she too will have a hands-on role in the business.

Mr. Rogers emphasizes, “The real value in this business is the employees. If there is anything that Maury [Dore] did beyond the call of duty, in an exquisite way, is to identify the people who have made a commitment to the business. The people who work here have a love of what they are doing. Some of these guys have been working here around 35 and 40 years.”

“When people think of Edgartown Marine, they think we are indigenous to Edgartown. We want to serve the whole Island,” Mr. Rogers said.

Mr. Rogers pays tribute to his father for his entrepreneurial style. He recalled that when his father started his own business, there was new vigor in his work. “He worked for the Steamship Authority for many years and when he got away from that his personality changed. It was exciting for him to run his own business, to control his own life,” Mr. Rogers said.

Looking at his own journey, Mr. Rogers said, “Even though we did very well in our corporate lives, we made money and we had responsibility, we traveled around the world —but to have that independence, of working for yourself, that is valuable.”