From the September 25, 1973 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:
The Boston House, for more than a century an Island institution as well as a restaurant on Circuit avenue, Oak Bluffs, has passed into the custody of a new ownership that looks to the past for its guidance into the future.
“We want people to feel at home again,” said 35-year-old chef William St. George, brought in last week to take charge of the kitchen and the two dining rooms. “We want to get back to being the meeting house where people who live on Martha’s Vineyard the year around like to come for food and drink.”
Taking over in September were Louis J. Cimeno of Vineyard Haven as majority stockholder, president and treasurer, and Boyd T. Rines as vice president and clerk to the corporation. They had purchased the interest of Mr. and Mrs. Leo J. Convery of Edgartown. Stock is held also by Mr. Cimeno’s wife, Anita, and a former proprietor of the establishment, George Munro, under whose management it was known by his name.
Mr. St. George, trained as a chef in California and a veteran of service in name restaurants in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington, Lake Tahoe, Manchester and New York, said the restoration of a traditional Vineyard environment is under way and people are welcome to come into the kitchen and see for themselves.
The three who talked about their plans for the newest of the successive Boston Houses over a table in one of the dining rooms yesterday morning came together by intricate coincidences.
Mr. Cimeno, a mason contractor with a couple of years in the restaurant business as proprietor of the Ocean View, met Mr. St. George through their mutual friend Benjamin Finn, a Boston meat packer specializing in beefsteak from whom the Boston House is getting its supply. Mr. St. George had just finished organizing and staffing the second Washington restaurant within a year committed to his management, and it had been “sold out from under me,” he said. He was thinking of giving up his career in the kitchen and going to an actors’ school in California when Mr. Cimeno invited him to look a the Vineyard and the Boston House. He stayed.
Mr. Rine’s career until last year was in Washington. He was assistant to House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana. When Mr. Boggs vanished on an airplane flight in Alaska Mr. Rine retreated in shock and grief to the Vineyard, to which he had been coming since the early 1950s. Here he met Mr. Cimeno.
For a year, Mr. Cimeno said, the two have been visiting the Boston House and taking notes on food and service.
“I wish them a century of success,” Mr. Convery said. And ownership over long terms of years is a Boston House tradition. Mr. Convery said the original premises dated to 1850. The restaurant was acquired by the late Krikor (Jerry) Barmakian early in the century. During his 30 years of ownership the old Boston House was destroyed by fire. He rebuilt it and reopened it as the New Boston House in 1939, and in 1946 he bought the block obliquely across the street and constructed the building in which the post office is housed. It had been occupied by the old Metropolitan Hotel, also destroyed by fire. Mr. Convery said he had run the Boston House for 25 years.
There was a Barn Party over the weekend at Mr. And Mrs. Stanton Leggett’s in West Tisbury. As it happens, their handsomely renovated barn used to be in the Albion A. Alley Sr. family, and numerous Alley children have played in it through the years. James F. Alley, some years ago, was among them, and he also was a guest at the party. On his way in he greeted the guests by pointing to the holes in the rafters where he had tried out a new shotgun. On his way out, he drew Mr. Leggett aside to whisper discreetly, that, “Over in that corner, was where I kissed my first girl.”
A whopping 53 lb. 6 oz. bass, the largest one caught from a boat in 28 years of the Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, was weighed in last Monday by Fred Waitzkin of New York city. The New York angler and his fishing partner, Doug Fischer of Chilmark and Florida, know where the big ones lurk, for the next day Mr. Waitzkin brought in a 36 pounder. So back he came the day after with a 33 lb. striper that gained for him the third daily prize.
The headline proposed by the contributor reads “Toothache Victim Rescues Dentists.” The text follows: “Ask Jerry Jeffers to tell you how he got out of a sickbed Saturday evening to go and winch out two guys from Lowell who had driven their rented car into the sands at the Wasque parking lot. And how, when he had pulled them out, they had noticed he wasn’t well and asked what ailed him and he said he had an abscessed tooth. And how they then told him they were dentists, and told him to open wide as he sat there in his truck, and proceeded to give him a prescription for relief of the pain until he could get to his own dentist.”
The headline might have added “And vice versa.”
Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
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