On February 18, William R. (Riley) Deeble died at the age of 94. I knew him first in 1938 as one of the members of the Vineyard Haven softball team. Other players included Tom Goethals, the younger, his brother, Henry, their cousin, George Goethals 3rd, and a number of Vineyard Haven year-rounders.

Most of the softball games were played at the ball field that still exists just above the Lake Tashmoo waterworks. The Vineyard Haven team regularly played teams from East Chop and West Tisbury and also a team on the Cape. Nelson Bryant played on the West Tisbury team.

The softball years in the late 1930s were the end of an era. The first hurricane came that fall and soon we all went to war.

Old Tom Goethals, an obstetrician who had kept his commission in the Army reserve, was promoted to brigadier general and headed the Massachusetts General Hospital Unit, Nelson Bryant took part in D-Day at Normandy as a paratrooper, and young Tom Goethals, who died about a month before Riley, served as an aide to General Sibert. Both Henry and Riley spent the war ferrying troops and goods by water. Once, sometime after the invasion of southern France, Henry was surprised to find Riley, the captain of a tugboat, pulled up beside his own ship in the harbor of Marseilles.

After the war, Riley had a long career teaching history and English, and coaching wrestling at The Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va. One of the wrestlers Riley coached was John McCain, the son of a well-known admiral. At the beginning of each summer, Riley would sail his boat from Alexandria to the Vineyard, and then sail it back to Alexandria in time for him to begin the next academic year. He never married.

Riley’s memorial service took place on March 5 at Grace Church in Vineyard Haven. About 10 members of Riley’s family were on hand. They were the children and their spouses and the grandchildren of Riley’s late cousin, Mason Harding, whom I remember meeting briefly on the Island in the early 1950s. One of the younger Hardings, Stephen, an Episcopal minister, assisted at the service and gave the homily.

The Harding side of the family goes back a long way on the Island. Riley’s grandfather was General Chester Harding, who, in retirement, lived on William street in Vineyard Haven. He had served as Governor of the Panama Canal Zone after the conclusion of the governorship of General Goethals in 1917. The general’s grandfather, the original Chester Harding, was a major painter in the early 19th century, having done fine portraits of, among others, Presidents Madison and Monroe and Senators Clay and Calhoun. He also did the only extant portraits of Daniel Boone. Riley’s mother, Katherine, nee Harding, was also a gifted artist. She designed the kitchen in our farmhouse, and painted a portrait of my mother. Katherine did an impressive job of capturing something of my mother’s complex, hard-to-read personality.

At the service I was able to reconnect with several residents or former residents of Lambert’s Cove, where Riley lived for most of his life on the Vineyard. These included Margaret Maida who told me that her grandfather, Norman Benson, was born 131 years ago on the first of March. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Bensons still had a fish weir (or trap) stretched out into the Sound. Early in the 20th century there was a whole line of weirs extending from the shore into the Sound and ranging along the coast northeast from the vicinity of Gay Head to at least as far as the Bensons’ weir.

I also talked with Mary French, whom I knew in the old days as Tabbie Stokes. She still lives near Seth’s Pond, close to where Riley lived. Mary’s grandfather, Frederick A. Stokes, started a publishing house in 1890. The firm published the short stories of Stephen Crane and some of the Dr. Dolittle books.

The burial itself was a military one, bitterly cold and windy, and held in the early afternoon at Lambert’s Cove Cemetery under the auspices of the George W. Goethals Post of the American Legion. Three rifle volleys were fired. Edson Rogers, a fellow graduate of my wife’s at Tisbury High School in 1956, blew taps as well as could have been expected given the freezing weather.

Riley’s ashes had been placed in a wooden box that was about a foot and a half long and four or five inches on a side. It held a champagne bottle. A hole had been neatly dug in the ground just large enough to accommodate the box after the obsequies. A stuffed Yale bulldog about a third the size of a real bulldog and with a Yale kerchief tied around its neck sat to the side.

After the burial we all returned to the church to reminisce some more about Riley, the old days and the Vineyard we once knew.