JANE N. SLATER

508-645-3378

(slaterjn@comcast.net)

Chilmark is all about town meeting this week. We convene at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 23 for our annual spring town meeting. Voting by ballot will take place on Wednesday at the Community Center with polls open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It will provide us all with an opportunity to say thanks and farewell to our outgoing selectman, Frank Fenner Jr. who has served us for 10 and a half years. We will miss him around town hall and his contributions to town business.

Word has reached friends here of the death on April 5 of Olga Leigh at age 97. She has resided for many years in Monchique, Portugal. She and her late husband, William, lived in Chilmark for many years. He died in 1976. Olga was often visited by Chilmark friends and she had fond memories of her days here.

Emily Meegan and her son, Jake, are due back at their Middle Road home this weekend after a tour of colleges that took them as far west as Oregon.

This school vacation week took many of our young residents off-Island for a spring frolic. Some from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School headed off to Spain. Others traveled closer to home. It is back to the books on Monday. Hopefully we will have some happy stories to recount.

We send best wishes for a return to good health to Ann Boyer, who is home after treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. Your Chilmark friends send you cheers!

The 24th Women’s Symposium will take place on Saturday, May 5, at the community center from 9 a.m. to noon. There will be speakers on the topic Leaps and Bounds, discussions and refreshments.

Harriette Poole Otteson is at her Menemsha home after a most interesting 16-day tour of Belgium and the Netherlands. The trip was by boat and coach and the tour included many highlights of the two countries as they traveled from Brussels to Amsterdam. She tells us there were many unforgettable events, such as visiting Flanders Field, seeing the Anne Frank home, visiting beautiful gardens in bloom, and even meeting a Dutchman who had sailed Vineyard Sound for a season and knew the Menemsha harbor and Coast Guard station well.

Tom Dresser reminds us of his recently published book, Disaster off Martha’s Vineyard: The Sinking of the City of Columbus. The City of Columbus went down 28 years earlier than the Titanic. His book details many facts about the sinking and is available locally.

April 19, yesterday, was the day in 1775 that the first musket shot was fired that began the American Revolution. That shot in Lexington was the result of Paul Revere’s riding out to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock of the approaching British soldiers. We remember that action this week and celebrate the many Chilmark connections to that successful revolution and the fact that direct descendents of John Hancock have made Martha’s Vineyard and Chilmark their home for many generations. See you at town meeting!