Forty seven years ago in August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King made the I Have a Dream speech, a speech which I now know was heard all over the world. I have been learning about this speech since I can remember going to school. It was always meaningful, but I was never able to grasp the full effect of what he was saying because I’ve always gone to integrated schools with kids of all races and ethnicities. Though I felt that here on Martha’s Vineyard, I was treated fairly and that the Vineyard in many ways resembled Dr.

Nightclub Versus Liquor Store

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

In the mid-1980s, after EduComp moved into its big brick building at the head of Main street, Vineyard Haven, I was a frequent visitor, either renting time on the store’s laser printers or buying office supplies. One big bonus, especially in summer, was the off-street parking in the sloping dirt lot behind the building. The tricky part was — and still is — the getting in and especially the getting out. You leave the parking lot, pass alongside the building, and then start creeping across the sidewalk toward the road.

MOVING ON

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

The election is now over. Thankfully, the ridiculous television commercials will no longer play on every channel twice an hour as they were these last few days. Phew. To both Democrats and Republicans, I say this:

Two Islands, One World

Here on this Island so often derided as home to the elite, many residents have long devoted energy and charity to help the people of Haiti, an island country so often noted for the being the poorest in the hemisphere.

Despite the claimed end of the recession, the number of foreclosure proceedings on the Vineyard appears to be increasing, along with unemployment.

Analysis of the space taken up by foreclosure-related advertising in the Gazette shows that it took up more than twice the column inches in the December quarter of 2009, compared with the same period in 2008.

And Chris Wells, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank, said this week he believed unemployment on the Island could be as high as 50 per cent over the next couple of months.

A large group of Island planning and conservation officials gathered last week to debate what is expected to be a central dilemma in the months and years to come: how to allow and regulate large-scale wind turbines on the Vineyard while still protecting the Island’s unique culture, environment and economy.

Widely considered one of the most beautiful and fragile places in the state with delicate ecosystems, fishing grounds and habitats for rare and endangered species, the Vineyard also has some of the best wind conditions in New England.

Vineyard voters stood decisively for Democratic candidate and state attorney general Martha Coakley in Tuesday’s special election, but it was Republican state Sen. Scott Brown who staged an unexpected surge to win the U.S. Senate Seat left vacant by the death of liberal leader Edward M. Kennedy.

Statewide, voters split 52 per cent to Mr. Brown, 47 per cent to Ms. Coakley.

The Cape Cod Canal was still an idea. And it would be years before the advent of navigational tools that are taken for granted today such as radar and global positioning systems. Mariners could only communicate with each other and the shore by sight and sound, and they established their location in the huge expanse of ocean with the aid of a sextant, clock and compass if the sky was clear.

A smiling sandy-haired toddler hung from his mother’s hip as he dipped his hand into a colorfully decorated box to pull out a hot pink card. “This one,” he said cheerfully as he handed off his selection to Chilmarker Todd Christy.

Mr. Christy glanced at the card. “Four Beech Grove,” he said.

The boy’s was just one in a sea of smiling faces, but none were brighter than his mother, Jennifer Wlodyka’s, as she heard Mr. Christy call out her new address to the crowd.