From the June 11, 1954 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

It’s quite a thing to see a season open. The houses and cottages that have been closed for winter are all at once coming to life. The express trucks are busy, trunks are arriving, luggage is piled on porches. An emptiness in dooryards and gardens is varied by new presences, comings and goings, a sound of voices and laughter. The hotels stir in expectation, stir with the industry of preparation and anticipation. The stage is being set, and nature obligingly takes care of countless details.

At night the former darkness is changed by window lights and lights across the water into something new and alive.

The city is coming to the country once again, and the all-round experience is good and not to be missed. An annual appointment returns, the occasion is for smiles and greetings.

Let no one miss the opening of the season who can possibly reach the Island for this great event.

“Rocky” Marciano, world heavyweight champion of the squared circle, will rest after his coming bout in defense of his title, in Oak Bluffs, as the guest of Arthur Ben David, one of the partners of Ben David Motors.

Rocky, his wife and manager, will spend a week at Mr. Ben David’s guesthouse, meanwhile being entertained by his host.

So far as can be determined by such research as can be carried out, this is the first visit to the Vineyard by a champion heavyweight boxer since the visit of John L. Sullivan, back in the Eighties. Although the late James W. West of Vineyard Haven, was not the host of the famed John L., he was the only Island acquaintance of the old champ.

An example of how silently the present becomes history occurred this week when with neither alarums or excursions the last yoke of oxen in the town of Gay Head departed for parts unknown at the hand of cattle dealer Maurice Resnick of Plymouth. The high-boarded cattle truck that took Granville Belain’s pair, whose names, if they had any, are unknown, across the Sound on the ferry afforded the genial beasts no last view of the Island that had been their home since their birth. Nor were onlookers allowed to take a last wistful look at the animals who had become an institution, a part of the sights of Gay Head and of the agricultural fair every summer.

It was a reluctant departure as far as their master was concerned, too, Mr. Belain having been recently in ill health and feeling that he could no longer care for them, as he had from the time they were born.

Oxen have not entirely faded away from the Vineyard, however, since there are still two pair at the Hornblower estate in Chilmark, but those remaining are not the public celebrities that Mr. Belain’s were during their five or six years on the Island.

Ambergris! Ambergris! Sounds akin to the cries of Gold! during the California gold rush hit Edgartown Sunday morning when deposits of what was thought to be the valuable substance were located near the partial carcass of a whale washed up on South Beach last Friday near the opening of Edgartown Great Pond.

Immediately there began a flurry of activity in an endeavor to find out if the substance was the genuine stuff, while several of the discoverers went about collecting all they could find.

Gerrit Duys Jr. of West Tisbury, who is connected with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a friend, also connected with the institution, came to the pond to inspect the stuff, expressed great interest in it and took samples to undergo analysis in the institution’s laboratory.

Ambergris, a solid, fatty substance greyish or blackish in color and variegated, sometimes with a dull red color, like marble, is confined in use almost entirely to the making of perfumery.

Whether or not the part of the whale carcass on the south beach is from a sperm whale would decide the matter once and for all, since ambergris comes only from that type.

A photograph of the jaw bone was taken to the institution where it was examined by the whale expert, Dr. William E. Scheville, who declared, unequivocally, that the bone was that of a baleen whale, not a sperm. Furthermore, samples of the stuff discovered on South Beach at the institution by biologist Harry Turner, proved to be completely different, possessing a number of alien qualities.

As the first excitement of the ambergris died away slightly, people began to wonder where on earth a whale, or part of a whale, in such dreadful condition, could have come from in the first place. Then memories began to function. There was the news some weeks back of a whale washed up on Rhode Island shores, of its being towed back to sea and of its being blown up by the Coast Guard. Is South Beach’s treasured whale the same as Rhode Island’s exploded one? It is certainly within the realm of possibility. At any rate, as the week began to come to a close the dream bubbles of great fortune began to explode just as the whale they emanated from did.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com