Time Machine Terms
July 5, 1996
Founders Vision: To Root a New Newspaper Deep in Island Life
The great storm had wheeled off into the Canadian Maritimes about 45 hours before, leaving a jungle of limbs and power lines almost two stories high on the corner of South Summer street and Davis Lane, just outside the Vineyard Gazette office in Edgartown.
July 5, 1996
Gutenberg to Computers: Gazette Printing Keeps Up With Changing Technology
There’s little to record in the history of the printer’s art between the invention of movable type in the early 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg and the first publication of the Vineyard Gazette some four hundred years later. In fact, if Joe Gutenberg could have been brought back to stand in front of the old Adams press still on display in the Gazette’s downstairs museum area, he certainly could have printed the first papers himself.
July 5, 1996
Oak Bluffs Celebrates Fourth
Oak Bluffs is the place to be for the Fourth of July weekend.
That’s always been the case, according to many residents, and now they have one more reason to think so.
This weekend, the community will conduct its First Annual Juneteenth Day of Independence, a Multicultural Celebration. Events include a beach concert Friday and a dance Saturday. Both nights will feature live music, plenty of food and several vats of non-alcoholic ginger beer.
And townspeople are predicting great success.
July 5, 1996
Gold Fever: Impoverished or Greedy, Islanders Sailed for California
Six ships sailed from the Vineyard to San Francisco between February and October 1849, carrying away more than 400 Island men to the gold mines of central California. Not long ago Ann Allen calculated that in Edgartown and Chilmark roughly one man in five between the ages of 18 and 50 set off for “the El Dorado of America”; in Tisbury it was closer to one in four. Many gathered - and died - in a settlement that came to be known as the Vineyard Camp on a southern bank of the Stanislaus River, two miles east of the town of Melones. The town and the camp now lie under a reservoir.
July 5, 1996
It Took Many Years for the Gazette to Fully Report the Tisbury Fire
The Tisbury fire, which began one summer evening in the very heart of downtown Vineyard Haven, destroyed 62 buildings valued at $200,000. Photographs of the center of the village the next morning show smears and patches of black spread across a grid of lanes and roads. Every store but one burned to the ground.
July 5, 1996
When Oak Bluffs Seceded: The Gazette’s Fulminations Were Bitter But Unavailing
The whininess, contempt and partisanship with which the Vineyard Gazette reported this story over six years is journalism in its brightest rain-slicker yellow - all the more embarrassing and entertaining today because the paper lost the fight.
July 5, 1996
Death of Whaling Ended an Island Way of Life
No single event finished off whaling, of course. It was doomed from the moment in 1859 when geologists discovered oil in the crust of Pennsylvania. Then came the piracy and scuttling of whaling ships during the Civil War (including the Edgartown whaler Ocmulgee, sunk by the Confederate raider Alabama), the loss of most of the New England fleet to Arctic ice in 1871, and the transfer of investment by the richest Vineyarders from whaling to the resorts at Oak Bluffs and Katama during the post-war building boom.
June 28, 1996
Tisbury Loses Stately, Historic Linden Tree
Tisbury has lost one of its oldest residents - the Linden Tree is dead. While some sprouts still appear from its trunk, its vast summer canopy is lost. Now stark branches cast long shadows over Main street shops.
“It really looks like it reached the point of no return,” said Connie Leonard, a Tisbury resident. “It was just a part of Main street. It was the accepted spot to meet someone. I wish I had a nickel for every bake sale under that tree.”
June 28, 1996
Noman’s Land is Free at Last
The bombing of Noman’s Land has ended. Plans are underway to transfer the small island from the U.S. Defense Department to the Department of Interior. By Sept. 1, the Navy will turn the property over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will manage it as a wildlife sanctuary.
June 28, 1996
Activist Group in Oak Bluffs Works for Holiday Harmony
The Fourth of July weekend in Oak Bluffs was a big mess last year, everyone said.
There was too much traffic. An ambulance couldn’t get through a street crowded with people. There were clashes between cultures and, when people talked about the weekend later, blatant racism.
Bob Holland of Oak Bluffs stayed home, but he heard all about it. And he sees no reason why all these people shouldn’t enjoy Oak Bluffs on its biggest holiday weekend.
So this year, he will be there to help with other members of the new Martha’s Vineyard Million Man Association.
