While mainland newspapers and radio scouts hunted in vain, to use their own expressions, for President Roosevelt, on Tuesday and Tuesday night, the Chief Executive was lying snugly and quietly aboard the Potomac, anchored in Tarpaulin Cove. The presence of the presidential yacht in the cove was known on the Vineyard in the early afternoon, but so far as is known no one attempted to approach the craft and certainly no one who knew of her presence there, tipped off any institution or individual that might have invaded her privacy.

 

Menemsha residents rubbed their eyes in amazement yesterday afternoon when six warships loomed up on the horizon shortly after noon, approached to within a mile of the beach and anchored. It was learned that among them were the cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa, the destroyers Samson and Winslow and two other unidentified destroyers. A fifth appeared about an hour later and joined the others.

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation’s first real seagoing chief executive, made port at Edgartown Sunday afternoon in the midst of the nor’west squall, and lay there at anchor until the following morning when he got under way for Nantucket. The visit was entirely impromptu weather conditions making it highly practical that he seek shelter, and the president did not himself land, although invitations to remain overnight ashore were extended to him. But his son James landed and made the acquaintance of the town, exchanging friendly remarks with various persons he met.

Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States, sailed into the waters of Dukes County late Wednesday, although not into the waters of the Vineyard. The Roosevelt yawl, Myth II, slipped into Cuttyhunk after logging fifty miles from Stonington, Conn., where the previous night was spent, and Mr. Roosevelt stepped ashore, his arms aching from a long day at the wheel.

 

Twice the thirty-first President of the United States came close to Martha’s Vineyard, into Vineyard waters, once a few weeks after his first inauguration in 1933 when he skippered the yacht Amberjack II into Edgartown harbor and lay overnight, and again in August 1941, when on the yacht Potomac, bound for the meeting with Winston Churchill which resulted in the Atlantic Charter, he kept rendezvous at Tarpaulin Cove.