Melissa (“Missy”) Tinker Howland died at her home in Lambert’s Cove, West Tisbury, on Feb. 26, 2009. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Born in New Haven, Conn., on July 2, 1925, she grew up in Wallingford, Conn., where her father, the late Harold Ferrell Tinker, longtime resident of West Gooseberry, was a teacher at the the Choate School.

She was a summer kid on the island from the age of 11 after her father and mother, the late Helen Wingate Tinker, brought a half-Cape on New Lane in West Tisbury in 1936.

Young girls were not felt to be appropriate at boys’ prep schools at that time, so Missy was “boarded out” to Northfield Seminary for Girls, now Northfield Mt. Hermon, from which she graduated in 1944 — a year late as a result of horseback riding accident on Meeting House Lane.

She entered Pembroke College of Brown University class of 1948. It was at Brown that she met her husband to be, Jack, a returned Pacific-theatre Army veteran.

They were married shortly after graduation. They lived variously in Bridgeport, Conn., where Jack’s first job was as a trainee at General Electric, later in Montclair, Chatham, East Hanover, N.J., and Manhattan, N.Y., where Jack was director of advertising at AT& T.

Frequent summer visitors, Missy kept up with her Island friends, and after retirement in 1982 returned permanently to their home overlooking Duarte’s Pond in Lambert’s Cove, where Missy became known as “The Duck Lady,” feeding the local wild fowl.

It was her wish to be cremated.

Services will be private.