From the May 21, 1937 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:
This is the time when summer homes, long closed and silent, are thrown open to the breezes of early summer and the streaming sunshine of May. The annual re-opening is an event worth attending. All winter long the empty house has stood untenanted except by lethargic wasps creeping to life on warm days, maybe a deer mouse or two taking shelter from the outdoors, or a squirrel, if the house is near the woods and the owners are unfortunate. Now, suddenly, the long emptiness and the long silence are broken. It is time for the brightness and the gay cries of the season.
Looking into a summer home for the first time in a new spring is like holding back upon a past life. Last fall it all seemed natural enough. Things stopped as the season ended, and the summer inhabitants went away leaving certain shadows of their activities behind them. Now they return and these same shadows are still lurking, and they seem to belong to someone else, or to be the ghosts of a very long ago.
The mixture of fresh, warm spring air with the still atmosphere of the closed house as it has stood all winter has a strange appeal to the nostrils. There is a sort of meeting of currents or tides of life, and of seasons.
The thoughtful visitor, returning to his home and opening it for summer, observes that life does go on even without human occupancy. There has been a sort of existence in the closed house, a quiet existence of course, perhaps amounting to nothing more than a slow aging or ripening, but nonetheless a kind of life and a kind of time. All that is now broken off, and the lush spirit of summer enters in, bounding and teeming. The summer opening has come.
Selkade III, the new cabin cruiser of C. G. Child, Vineyard Haven summer resident, arrived on Tuesday from Wilmington, Del. The Selkade was delivered from the builders by Capt. Ralph M. Packer and Elmer L. Rogers, the two going to Wilmington to take charge of the boat and bring her home. Mr. Rogers will sail as skipper of her this season.
The Selkade is a single cabin cruiser, one of the A. C. F. models, and is forty-two feet, two inches. She is powered with two 110 horsepower Chrysler Royals, and will make twenty knots. Her tonnage is twelve net.
An after deck is protected by a permanent awning supported on stanchions, and is fitted with furniture for lounging, which may be removed for fishing. The main saloon and pilot house are one, with a dining table and built-in seats abaft of the wheel, binnacle and instrument board. The cabin is forward, with two bunks and a complete galley, and the entire boat is fitted with the latest appliances in every department. Her interior is finished in mahogany and cream, and the waterfront critics who have seen her under way have pronounced her to be the finest kind of a craft of her type.
Two mackerel, one of good size, were drailed by Capt. Thomas W. Pease of Edgartown Sunday morning, the first reported for this season. Captain Pease took the fish just inside the bell buoy, off Cape Pogue. He reported sighting several schools.
Four striped bass were taken Wednesday at the Katama Bay opening, South Beach, by Levi Ripley of Edgartown. The largest of these hooked bass weighted about six pounds.
Capt. Phil Norton in the Josephine II of Edgartown took more than seven hundred mackerel off Gay Head in a trip late this week.
The first trees and plants to flourish and blossom for us in May have an advantage over those which follow later in such thick succession. This advantage lies in the fact that the pioneers of spring and summer are first to answer the longing in our natures, and we hold them more dear and observe them more carefully than the later representatives of their kind. The spring growth happens so slowly and gradually at first that we may eye it anxiously, noting the advances and the checks, and giving full attention to particular trees and plants. Then the rush comes, and everything seems to burgeon overnight. Anxiety is gone, and attention to the specific is likely to be gone also.
Already the horse chestnut is in blossom, supplying the yards and streets about it with upright candelabras of white bloom. The horse chestnut is a great aid to spring. Among the first satisfactions of the season are the shiny buds of this tree, sticky like bakery buns adorned with sugar and brought fresh from the oven. Then the buds swell and burst, and the leaves given some of the first real shade of the new summer, and the flowers are open before many other trees have even begun to leaf out.
There are other pioneers, and as soon as they have shown the way, the entire countryside begins to be affected, and the first thing anyone knows, there is a rural trend. A rural trend toward summer is a pretty fine thing, and no matter what the problems of the rest of the world during the next few months, the rural regions are in for considerable satisfaction.
Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
library@vineyardgazette.com
This article appears in May 22, 2026.