Walter E. Bettencourt, for 27 years a member of the Gazette’s composing room staff, and for two of those years its superintendent, died Feb. 5 in Port Charlotte, Fla., after a brief illness. He was 80. He was admired at the Gazette not only for his speed at the linotype machine, his unerring spelling and his even temper when he was the man in charge, but for his great strength. Though he was only a few inches over five feet, he was able to lift the heaviest pages of lead type with ease. He is remembered outside the Gazette for his warmth and grace as a host, his green thumb, his love of travel and his writings about it, and for his discernment as a dealer in antiques and collectibles.

He was born April 6, 1928 in Oak Bluffs, a son of Anthony Alves Bettencourt and Lillian (Bernard) Bettencourt and spent his earliest years in Oak Bluffs, but when he was in the fourth grade, the family moved to Edgartown. There his father had acquired the Chappaquiddick Ferry service, which then operated a scow providing transportation from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick. On Chappaquiddick, Walter’s grandfather, Casemiro Alves Bettencourt, a native of the Azorean island of Gracioso, had a farm.

Walter was a graduate of the Edgartown School and of the Edgartown High School, class of 1946. Ever popular, he was elected class president in both his junior and senior years. It was when he was a high school junior that he went to work for the Gazette’s back shop after school and summers. His first job was as a printer’s devil — burning leftover paper at the end of the week after the Gazette had come out, melting down used lead for the next week’s paper and doing general odd jobs. A tireless worker, however, young Walter was never satisfied with only one job and soon was also gardening and mowing and picking beach plums for the jellies made and sold by Louise Meikleham from her South Water street home. Never a spendthrift, he had soon saved enough to be able to build a small house for himself on Silva street where his aunt, Mary Simas Silva lived. But he always found time, too, in his young days, for parties down at South Beach in the Donnelly camp with his friends John Donnelly, Steve Gentle and Buzzy Hall. In 1951, however, he left the Vineyard after being inducted into the Army and went to South Korea as a signal corpsman.

A little more than a year later, Sgt. Walter Bettencourt was back home after a fall down a mountain declivity in which he suffered a compound fracture of his jaw and was sent to Japan to recuperate. Before his return to the United States, he was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service in Korea.

During his time in the Far East, a love affair with all things Oriental began that made him a lifelong collector of Oriental art. When he built a house on Pinehurst Road in 1963, the centerpiece of the circular drive was a mimosa tree with a Buddha beneath it. Inside, Oriental china was almost everywhere. There was none in the cellar, however, for there, the theme was nautical rather than Oriental for Walter was also a man of the sea — the owner for many years of an Edgartown 15, Snafu — that he sailed with enthusiasm in and around Edgartown. He also crewed in the Caribbean with George Moffett.

Walter called his cellar rumpus room The Dory and in it the bar had been fashioned from the stern of a genuine dory, while the bow had become the pulpit in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Gazette poet Joseph Chase Allen wrote of that cellar room: “On every bulkhead hung, within convenient reach the bottles, buoys and other things, the harvest of the beach, along with cables, blocks and falls, net needles, oars and locks, of paintings of the sea and ships, of breakers on the rocks . . . And here the guests all ate and drank, the schools of fish they swirled, and from each point of vantage gazed upon a fisher’s world.”

Walter was not a fisherman. But he never tired of quahaugging on Chappaquiddick and returning home with a basket of quahaugs to stuff for dinner guests. He would also often combine linguica from his Portuguese heritage with fried rice from his Oriental sojourn. All would be washed down with Japanese saki, his homemade blackberry or grape wine or his home-brewed beer. When Walter was not in the mood for doing home cooking, he enjoyed fine dining out, and if it happened that there was good music on the juke box, as there was sometimes at the old Ocean View, he might take to the floor with a dinner partner, for he was a fine dancer.

His adventures as a traveler took him across the United States in 1966 with stops to visit Vineyard friends and relatives everywhere. Then in 1972 and 1976 he looked up relatives in the Azores with his cousin, Foster Silva and his wife Dodie. They also visited Hawaii together. In 1977, with E. Thomas Smith and his sister, Frances, of Edgartown, he went on a 17-day trip to Italy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, after his retirement from the Gazette, he went into the antiques and collectibles business with Priscilla Magnuson, opening an antiques shop in the cellar of her Cooke street home in Edgartown. Before that, they had worked together handling estate sales across the Island.

Also, once he had retired, with his cousin, Foster Silva, he began to fix up his grandfather’s old Chappaquiddick farm. Not only did the old house come back to life, but so did the farm and garden itself, with Walter planting flowers and vegetables, experimenting with planting peanuts and miniature watermelons and proudly presenting the fruits and vegetables of his labors to neighbors and friends.

Winters in the 1970s he began driving the Herbert Cogghalls of Edgartown to their Florida home and staying for awhile before he returned to the Island. He would take them down and back in one of the Cadillacs that he always drove and cherished. It is said that when James and Sally Reston were considering buying the Gazette from Henry Beetle Hough and saw back shop employee Walter Bettencourt’s Cadillac outside, Scotty Reston paled and asked what sort of salaries he was going to have to pay if he took over the paper. And Walter often quipped about having bought two burial plots on Chappy — one in which he was to be buried and a second for his Cadillac.

In the early 1980s, when the Cogghalls were thinking they might sell their Port Charlotte home, Walter was ready to move south and buy it. In recent years, after making that move, he would come only occasionally to the Vineyard. But Walter Bettencourt and his gifts to the Island of his birth — as Gazette staff member, gardener, mentor, bon vivant, relative and friend will never be forgotten.

He is survived by his half brother, Skip Bettencourt of Chappaquiddick and his half sister, Rebecca Day of Belton, Tex., and a stepsister, Andreanna Bettencourt of San Antonio, Tex. His brother Richard predeceased him.

A graveside memorial service will be held at the Chappaquiddick cemetery at 11 a.m. on May 18. Contributions in his name may be made to the Chappy Fund of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, 57 David avenue, Vineyard Haven MA 02568.