A graveside service for Aquinnah summer resident, John C. Ketcham, will be held Monday, August 5 at 10 a.m. at Abel’s Hill cemetery in Chilmark. John was 92 when he died at his winter home in Elon, N.C., more than a year after being diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

Introduced to the Quitsa section of Chilmark in 1954 by his then-fiancee, Eleanor Helm, whose parents had been summer residents of Chilmark since 1930, he was a seasonal Vineyarder every summer after that. For the last 25 years he spent the whole summer in Aquinnah. He loved lunch on the dock at Larsen’s in Menemsha, evening beach picnics and sunsets over the ocean. He attempted do-it-yourself clambakes (not always successfully), as well as beans and hotdogs.

When he was younger, he loved golf at Mink Meadow and tennis in Menemsha, but later, limping, he focused on Vineyard projects. He drove two battery-powered electric cars in the 80s and 90s, often needing a booster-charge down-island in order to get home.

After discovering a 1957 Richardson cabin cruiser abandoned on NY’s Lake Cayuga, he hired skilled woodworkers and mechanics to restore it. As a result, at age 89 he enjoyed a beautiful trip through twenty-five Erie Canal locks and down the Hudson to Long Island Sound and then to Menemsha, where “Majic” is still berthed.

John is survived by his wife of 63 years, Eleanor Helm Ketcham, and their three children, Jim, Cliff and Mary, as well as five grandchildren, all of whom have worked or summered on the Vineyard every summer of their lives.