The Vineyard weather has been the pits, so I hear. I flew to Florida to join Flip to bring our boat back to the Vineyard. While you have been under gray skies and drizzle, we have been running in hot and humid weather. The temperatures inside the boat have hovered around 93 degrees. The water temperatures have been 82 degrees in the Intracoastal Waterway and 76 degrees offshore. The nights have been cooler bringing the boat’s interior temperature down in the 80’s.

From a 1972 Gazette edition:

The little white house behind shrubs at the corner of Cooke street and Tilton Way that, for more than three decades, has been a home away from home for household help in Edgartown, no longer will be welcoming the lonely next summer.

Mrs. Edna Smith, who in 1939, with the late Mrs. Louise Harper conceived the idea of the Open Door Club, a friendly, hospitable place where black help in Edgartown could come on their days off, cook their meals and rest a little, has been forced by poor health to sell her house.

RARE SURVIVOR

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Carole Cohen misses the point. I did not decide the pre-Revolutionary Tilton/Weckman house was historically significant, the town of Chilmark did, when it designated it as such in the town’s master plan. Which is why public comment is invited before a rare survivor of 250 years of Island history is consigned to a dumpster and lost forever.

Rescue This Old House

So the Chilmark historical district commission has given an eighteenth century home — one of just a couple of dozen structures existing on the Island from before the American Revolution ­— six months to live. Inspiring stories abound of patients who beat the odds in doctors’ death sentences, and so too perhaps can houses, provided they have strong advocates.

There was a hoedown at Morning Glory Farm on Saturday. The farm was celebrating its 30th year as an Island agricultural institution, with friends, customers and other farmers showing up to share in the fellowship on the eve of the first day of summer.

With approval in hand from all but one Vineyard town, Vineyard schools superintendent Dr. James H. Weiss was all set to move ahead on a plan to relocate the superintendent’s headquarters when Chilmark selectmen grabbed his arm going out the door.

Shelter Hours

The Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard in Edgartown (at the former MSPCA location) is open Wednesday to Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Island police had a busy weekend.

Oak Bluffs police responded to 72 calls for service from early Friday morning to late Sunday night and made six arrests.

Just after 7 p.m. on Friday, police responded to a report of a man on County Road seriously bleeding from the head. After speaking with the victim, police learned he had been hit in the head several times with a brick by a man who then fled the scene.

The Martha’s Vineyard Regional Transit Authority will receive just over $1.8 million of the $15 million total stimulus cash awarded to Massachusetts last Friday to fund improvements in transit systems. The stimulus program is part of the Federal Recovery Act, signed in February by President Obama.

The money will be used to purchase nine new buses for the Vineyard transit authority.

The gray that has canopied the Vineyard of late opened to blue skies on Saturday, but twelve logic-savvy gamesters spent the afternoon indoors slumped over tabletops in the meeting room of the Oak Bluffs Public Library. Equipped with reading glasses and spare pencils, the poker-faced crew absorbed themselves in competition, filling blank squares with lead-drawn numbers and letters as contestants in the Vineyard Gazette-sponsored Crossword and Sudoku Challenge.