From the Dec. 31, 1965 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:
It is customary at this turning point of the calendar to say a few words about the year that is gone, and the good things it held. As always, the good things of 1965 are likely to remain unremembered and unsung, for the good is usually general and easily assimilated into a universal background. The specific things that loom as landmarks are apt to be sensational, or — let’s face the fact — ill.
Take 1965, for instance. The general prosperity, the even and agreeable passage of summer days, the freedoms enjoyed by all, are slipping into a twilight of yesterday. We are most likely to remember 1965 as the year the Oak Bluffs wharf burned. It is easy to imagine Vineyarders in no distant future asking one another, “When was the Oak Bluffs wharf fire? Was it the summer of 1965?” So even this claim to memory will become hazy and uncertain.
The building of the new Uncatena is one of the 1965 events, certainly not an ill one, which is a sort of thing Vineyarders like to recall. But who can remember offhand the year the new Nantucket or the ferry Islander came into service?
To brush up on such items of history the Gazette and other weeklies used to print occasional departments of Argument Settlers. These lists of dates would include a record of the last time Vineyard Haven harbor froze over, the last time the steamboat line ran to Edgartown, the years of the hurricanes, when the Gay Head Coast Guard station was moved, and so on. From 1965 the Oak Bluffs wharf fire, the building of the Uncatena and the new Oak Bluffs town hall would have to be included.
Many things, of course, do not belong to any particular year; they just string along, often without end. For example, in 1965 the anti-poverty campaign was begun, and the Dukes County Action committee was set up. And the Area Redevelopment Administration, which had been working a couple of years toward the same objective, carefully concealed all that it had undertaken and accomplished. Regardless of years, one bureaucrat springs from the expired term of another, without end, like the successions attributed to the Phoenix.
In December, 1964, the total number of resident and seasonal telephone subscribers on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod was 56,039. Since that time the total has increased to 58,462 — 2,423 additional telephones within the period of twelve months.
Rose Treat, who discovered “seaweed art” at Martha’s Vineyard, is to have an exhibition of thirty seaweed collages in the James Room at Barnard College in New York city. Mrs. Treat is the wife of Lawrence Treat, a writer of mysteries, and they have a summer home at Lobsterville, the former ALbert J. Saunders property. In announcing the forthcoming exhibition, Barnard College recalls that seaweed display dates back to Victorian days when albums of pressed seaweed preserved memories of summers long gone. Today, Mrs. Treat works with the blues, reds, and greens of seaweed to form collages suggesting faces, birds, whirlwinds, or abstract designs. The patterns are forms of dried seaweed Mrs. Treat found on Island rocks suggested to her many phantasmal and humorous possibilities. Submerging a good quality rag paper in water with seaweed on top of it, she forms the patterns with a toothpick. The natural mucilage of seaweed adheres it to the paper.
Mrs. Treat’s works have been shown at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and at a number of galleries in Westchester County, New York city and on the Vineyard. Her home is in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
If anyone on the Vineyard sees any U.F.O. — unidentified flying objects — W. P. MacKenzie, would like to know. Mr. MacKenzie writes to the Gazette that he is collecting data of U.F.O. sightings and landings and will appreciate all reports.
The Island’s most famous flying object was discovered long after it landed at Gay Head, and after prolonged study and tests it is no longer unidentified. Reference, of course, is made to the tektite, that fragment resembling glass which may have come from the moon. Although agreeing upon the identification, scientists differ as to the probable origin. Years ago there was a report of a carved object falling from the sky upon Chappaquiddick. That was at a time when Charles Fort, a notable of a sort in his era, was attempting to confound scientists by compiling data that they could not explain. A carved object from the sky would certainly have had the scientists in a dither, but no such thing could be produced and no one knew anything about it.
One guess is that the carved object may have figured in some of the pioneering science fiction written by Roger Sherman Hoar under the pen name of Ralph Milne Farley. Mr. Hoar had a great love for Chappy.
But the Vineyard is a good place for strange and occult happenings, and the sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects has undoubtedly occurred in the past and is likely to occur in the future.
Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
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