From the Jan. 29, 1982 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

The meeting room above the firehouse at Beetlebung corner in Chilmark is long, narrow and low-ceilinged. A single strip of bare fluorescent lights illuminates a row of masonite-topped card tables and what looks like the makings of a home for orphaned chairs.

Once a week, this drab but serviceable setting becomes the place to be in Chilmark. Once a week, this narrow room echoes with the convivial banter of men on their night out, and is redolent with the perfumes of sweet pipe tobacco and fresh coffee.

Wednesday night is cribbage night in Chilmark.

Daniel Mayhew began attending the weekly cribbage games at the tender age of 13 years, and the habit took. A tour of duty in the armed forces took him away briefly, but he returned to his home and his pastimes.

Mr. Mayhew, now 36, embraced with a glance the gathering this week and said: “The town’s always safe on a Wednesday night. Everybody’s at the firehouse.”

The cribbage coterie in Chilmark goes back about half a century, according to David Flanders, who’s the closest thing the group has to a historian. Before the men met at the firehouse, they played at the community center; before that, games were held at the Chilmark Store and post office run by Rex Weeks.

It’s only natural that over so many years some tradition should accrue, and so it has. The keeping of records, for example, has devolved upon Robert Lawrence. Since before the advent of the electronic calculator, Mr. Lawrence has kept each player’s record of games won and lost through each season, using a table of his own making to figure averages.

Mr. Lawrence is responsible for reporting each player’s average — accurate to three decimal places — to the Gazette each week. He is also responsible for bearing the abuse of his colleagues when those averages are not promptly published.

The playing season begins every year on the first Wednesday after the Martha’s Vineyard Bass and Bluefish Derby, and ends with the second week in April. Mr. Lawrence collects a 25-cent fee from each player every week, a dollar on the first week of the new season; he spends these dues on coffee and on a $50 savings bond for the leading player at the end of the season.

Players keep their own records of wins and losses over the 12 games played each Wednesday night. For the rare player who wins all 12 games on a given night, there is the tradition of the silver pegs.

The silver pegs are the Stanley Cup of Chilmark cribbage. Tony Rezendes, now a 20-year veteran, won them eight or nine years ago. He has held them ever since, and he still remembers the games he played to win them.

“I was lucky,” Mr. Rezendes recalled Wednesday night. “Jim Howell had a 198 count,” — slang for a bust, a worthless hand — “in the seventh game. He didn’t make it, and I counted out.”

But tradition, however present, takes a low profile at the games above the gleaming white fire trucks in the Chilmark station. The cards are Bicycles, bridge size, and the cribbage boards are regulation, but the counting pegs are old swizzle sticks, galvanized nails, bits of electrical wire. And the players manage to maintain a constant banter without missing a beat.

At one table, Manny Estrella counted points ­— “Fifteen two, four, six and three is nine” — while Mike Renahan carried on a conversation with Reuben West at the next table. “Somebody installed the water pump in your outboard backwards,” he was explaining. “That’s what blew it.”

Are most of these guys married, a reporter asked Chris Keniston. “Year,” he replied. What do the wives do when the husbands go out? “They breathe a sigh of relief.”

“Put this in the paper,” his partner piped up: “We come here to play cribbage and it costs us each a quarter. Our wives go play bingo and it costs 20 bucks a pop.”

Cribbage in Chilmark shows every sign of surviving the advent of radio, television, cable or anything else the modern entertainment industry can throw at it. Wednesday’s celebrants ranged in age from their twenties to their eighties, from relative newcomers to hardy perennials.

George Silva has been playing now for about a year, and said he feels pretty good about it. “I love it, win or lose,” he said. “It’s great fun. It sure beats the TV.”

Everett (Spider) Merrill is an old-timer from Vineyard Haven who has been driving up-Island to the cribbage games for about three years with his friend Tom Murphy. He learned to play cribbage as a child, in the front room of his mother’s boardinghouse in East Ware, N.H., where the men who worked at the mills gathered to play.

What about the nickname, Spider?

“I got that when I was a kid....I was always fight or something. I was small, but I was so quick, I guess, they always wanted to see me fight . . .”

Mr. Merrill paused and smiled. “Actually, it’s been so long, I really don’t remember.”

Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
library@vineyardgazette.com