From the August 29, 1975 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

“I’m never cross, but I’m very abrupt. Anyone who’s been in military service is hard to get along with, and I am,“ Muriel Toomey said matter-of-factly one afternoon, in her big white South Road house that long ago was Chilmark’s first schoolhouse.

“I was in the army for four years in World War II and I covered a lot of territory. I was in the George W. Wainwright Company. I went in as a medic, and after the war was over I was in the army of occupation in Germany. And in between I was in Secret Service work.”

Muriel Toomey — as she says — doesn’t mince words, and makes it known if she feels she isn’t being treated with proper respect. In September, she will, after all, be first vice commander of the George W. Goethals Post of the American Legion.

In 1946, when she told her first husband, the late William H. Smith, Chilmark highway supervisor (her son, Bill Jr., now holds that post) that she thought she’d join the army, it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing many wives and mothers were doing. It was true that her children were grown (in addition to Bill, she has a daughter, Mrs. Shirley Weeks, who teaches at the University of Hawaii now).

“I’d thought I wanted to be a nurse when I was 18, so I’d had some nursing training, and that gave me a headstart on being a medic. I said to Bill I thought I should enlist under the circumstances, and he said if they needed medics he thought I should too. So that’s just what I did.”

This early Vineyard women’s liberationist comes from old Island stock. Muriel Norton Toomey’s father was an Edgartown Norton and her mother was a Chilmark Tilton. She spent most of her growing up years in Chilmark, however, and remarks with a distasteful wrinkle of her nose that she can’t stand Edgartown.

Chilmark, though, is something else. Although she travels a good deal winters, visiting army friends across the country and once taking a cruise around the world on a Yugoslavian freighter, she can’t imagine living permanently anywhere except Chilmark.

For close to 50 years, the old schoolhouse — filled with Chilmark memorabilia and memorabilia of Muriel Toomey’s travels — has been her home.

“There are old cupboards where they kept supplies like pencils and erasers, and there was a girls’ entry on one side of the building and a boys’ on the other. The building’s been added onto, of course, and changed some where we had a chimney fire once. We were all out one day and Reginald, who used to drive the oil truck, passed by, and he saw the flames coming out of the chimney. We didn’t have a fire department then, so he just stopped everybody that he could going by on the road. All the neighbors came. They tried their best, of course, but they made a mess. Bill had to replace the fireplace, but at least we still had the house.”

Muriel Toomey is sturdy and gray-haired and still has a military bearing and military sharpness. “You weren’t paying attention,” or “You miss a lot of things,” she is likely to snap at visitors whose minds wander for a minute. But as soon as she has snapped, she makes amends generously. “You have to do something nice for somebody once in a while,” she is inclined to say. And she can be fey, too.

A thunderstorm was lowering over Boston Hill. The curtains at her living room windows were fluttering ominously in the wind that precedes a storm. She shivered, admitted that, for all her army training in bravery, she doesn’t like lightning, and picked up the telephone for a chat with her friend, Mrs. C. Earl Vanderhoop in Gay Head, and to issue a warning of what was in prospect.

When Mrs. Toomey hung up, she remarked that her late second husband, whom she married in 1956, after William Smith died, had been an electrical engineer with the Bell Company, so she had some knowledge of electrical problems and pitfalls.

Reminiscing about the time when Chilmark was a quieter place — “Not like it is now. Why, I counted 45 automobiles going by here in five minutes last year, and 16 bicycles” — she talked of horse and buggy rides to reach Chilmark from Edgartown, and of the days when oxen pulled cartloads of tourists up the Gay Head cliffs. And she recalled, as a little girl sleeping in a trundle bed once.

Muriel Toomey, for all her traveling and free-thinking attitudes likes old things and surrounds herself with them — a painting of heath hens over her dining room mantel, powder horns and rum jugs and hurricane lamps, cream skimmers and shotgun rammers and old china, scrapbooks and notebooks and picture albums. And unspoiled landscape, too, is among her loves.

On the subject of developers making headway in Chilmark, she is characteristically outspoken. “There’s one up in Gay Head some people say is very nice. He wouldn’t seem very nice to me,” and her blue eyes flashed as fiercely as they might have when she was displeased with a recruit in her days as a World War II corporal.

Compiled by Hilary Wallcox

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