The Vineyard has a way of attracting people with big personalities and big ideas. Some stay forever, some make a mark and move on, but the biggest leave something behind that forever changes the place.

One of those people, Bob Windsor, died this week, but not before leaving a legacy of community radio that lives on today in WMVY.

Bob’s idea was a radio station for the Vineyard and Nantucket — its call letters were WVOI, the Voice of the Islands. He gathered a coterie of well-known Islanders, including Tom Bardwell and the late John Schilling, Manny Duarte and David Dunham, and a small, unassuming Cape behind Carroll’s Trucking became the headquarters for an experiment that seemed risky and a little odd in the early 1970s.

While holding onto one end of a paint brush or hammer — because this was a truly communal and community effort — Bob drove everyone toward our live debut. It might have been a little rickety at the start, but he gave WVOI a unique place and sound on the dial that continues to this day.

WVOI was my first professional job after college and that made Bob my first professional boss. I fancied myself a journalist, though I had never been on the air or filed a story beyond my student newspaper. But I’m sure because my price was right, and my eagerness palatable, I became the first news anchor and news director. It was all a little heady.

For fans of the Mary Tyler Moore show — the one set in the newsroom — Bob sounded just like Ted. His voice was network perfect and so were his standards. My first on-air assignment was to drive to Edgartown and interview then Gov. Frank Sargent, using the station’s one portable tape recorder. No problem.

I thought the interview had gone reasonably well until I returned to the station and played back the tape for Bob and we heard, well, nothing. The tape was completely blank. Not one sound, either from the governor or me. I of course suggested to do the story without the audio, but Bob wouldn’t hear of it and sent me back. I returned to the event, begged forgiveness and a very generous governor granted me another shot. Bob taught me very quickly that my voice wasn’t news, the governor’s was.

As his obituary noted, in those early days, Bob did it all — from signing on the air first thing in the morning, to scrambling for ad revenue, to insisting the sound of WVOI be distinctive and pay special attention to local talent. The late Hamilton Benz had a remarkable jazz show. Peter Simon anchored an eclectic music mix he called Good Vibrations. Islanders heard real-time Steamship Authority reports, weather reports, high school football games and local sports coverage. We filed reports from town halls, utilized the ticker-tape news wire machine from the Associated Press (it was called rip and read in those days), and interviewed visiting celebrities.

None of it may sound all that special now, and much of it is less urgent in our current Web age, but at the time, it was not just new, it added value and flavor to life on the Island, particularly after Labor Day. And for those of us who have cheered each iteration of WMVY on through the years, we owe a debt of gratitude to one former big news guy who had a vision and made it real on Martha’s Vineyard.

Mary Breslauer is a longtime resident of Chilmark and a former managing editor of the Vineyard Gazette. She has a business in media consulting.