From the Vineyard Gazette editions of February, 1968:

The prospect of a 40 per cent reduction in weekend seats and of a 20 per cent reduction in daily seats on Northeast Airlines flights between the Vineyard and New York next summer has been the cause of concern to the Island officials in recent weeks. The reduction is expected to come about because the runways at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport are not long enough for jet planes, and the smaller turbo-jet planes are not attractive to Northeast — or to other airlines — as investments.

Extension of the runways has been in the planning stage for a considerable time. Delay is attributable mainly to the fact that the same lengthening will be needed at Hyannis and at Nantucket, which are served by the same Northeast flights. Projects at both Hyannis and Nantucket have been held up by controversy and inaction.

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One person who was not particularly impressed by the cold spell that had the Vineyard pretty solidly frozen in last month is Mrs. Arthur C. Vincent of Edgartown. “In 1866,” she said the other day, “we had one worse than this one.” She was 14 years old at the time, and still vivid is the memory of one Saturday morning during that earlier cold snap when she and her best chum, Elizabeth Ripley, who was to become Mrs. Charles H. Marchant, the wife of the Old Editor of the Gazette, went skating on Edgartown harbor.

The boat was frozen in for three weeks that year, and Mrs. Vincent remembered that the lighthouse keeper at Cape Pogue walked across the harbor to town to get his supplies.

During Mr. Norton’s years as steward on the Vineyard boats, usually on the little sidewheeler Monohansett, Mrs. Vincent recalled, “he had to get up at half past four in the morning and go down to the boat, and he did not get back until seven at night, and he got paid a dollar a day. When he got through, the head man gave him $35 out of his own pocket, and that’s all he got out of the company.”

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Joseph Indio Jr., founder in 1947 of the Nantucket Town Crier, a weekly newspaper which he edited and published until 1963 when he sold it to be merged with the older Inquirer & Mirror, died on Saturday after a brief illness. He was 56. Mr. Indio was best known to Vineyarders during the period when the Town Crier took part aggressively in the effort to divorce Island steamship service from New Bedford. He made his paper an effective force, refusing to hedge or straddle, and his editorship was marked also by warmth of personality.

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After much discussion, the Regional High School district committee voted Tuesday night to phase Latin out of the school curriculum. Latin as a language to be taught in the Regional High School seems to have few defenders but their authority is great, and so should be their influence. Latin is less practical than household arts, less necessary than English, and less easily mastered than history. But it stands near the threshold of our culture, and those without grasp and use of its heritage will have lost one of the great sources of learning.

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At the height of the Island’s slow period, 203 workers are now receiving unemployment compensation. From only a few persons in the summer to 13 in the fall, the number has steadily climbed to its height at this, the period of lowest employment. From now on the number will drop as the Island begins to revive.

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An odd thing about zoning is that those who so often manage to defeat it in town meetings are usually more discouraged than those who, at the moment, happen to be on the losing side. The reason, of course, is that the common sense of zoning, like all other forms of common sense, has an immortality all of its own. Snowed under by votes one year, it rises again the next year.

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The annual West Tisbury budget, presented by the finance committee, which will be put before the town meeting next Thursday evening, totals $118,013.59, as compared with total expenditures of $104,433.66 last year. The budget contains an article asking acceptance by the town of all the property, real or personal, of the West Tisbury Free Public Library Corporation.

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“Penny postcard” and “three-cent” stamp are phrases long vanished from the American vernacular, having been left behind in the escalating cost of living. The three-cent stamp had been an institution and it was a long time before the four-cent stamp was thoroughly accepted, but no sooner was that in than it was out, and the five-cent stamp held sway. Now that a rapport has been established it is time to change, and on Sunday next the six-cent stamp will begin its reign.

Compiled by Alison Mead