Dean’s List

Genevieve Flanders, daughter of Joyanne and Steven Flanders in Chilmark, has been named to the dean’s list at Hamilton College for the 2007 fall semester. Ms. Flanders, a graduate of Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, is a junior majoring in neuroscience at Hamilton.

Medication Safety Fair

Martha’s Vineyard Hospital has scheduled a medication safety fair in the hospital’s main lobby on Saturday, Jan. 26 from 9 to 11 a.m.

Community members are encouraged to bring their current medications, including any vitamins, herbs and over-the-counter medications, in a bag to the fair, where hospital workers will be assisted by Island pharmacists.

JOHN S. ALLEY

508-693-2950

(alleys@vineyard.net)

New Chapter Group

The New Chapter Group will be starting again soon at the Tisbury Senior Center with Karen Meeks as facilitator. If you are newly retired, just moved to the Island or experiencing any change in your life, you are invited to join the group, which will meet monthly. More information is available by calling the center at 508-696-4205.

Subprime Lending in West Tisbury

Fallout from the many-headed monster otherwise known as the subprime mortgage crisis certainly seems to have no end, and now the crisis which is national and growing has landed — of all places — in West Tisbury.

A Place for Planning

More than thirty five years ago, an engineering firm looked at the six towns on the Vineyard and envisioned a possible seventh town carved into the Island’s center, around the regional high school and along the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.

The firm, Metcalf and Eddy, saw the area as a social and economic center, a place for larger development not appropriate for the down-Island downtowns or the ecologically sensitive up-Island towns.

He was a first generation Portuguese American who was a member of the Oak Bluffs fire department for more than forty years, a widely loved unsung hero.

FORMULA FAIRNESS

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

The Tisbury lawsuit about the assessment formulas for the high school is just one more attempt to deal with a difficult situation, when the situation itself is based on an antiquated system of paying for the school.

The high school was established through a regional agreement among the six towns of the Island 50 years ago. In retrospect, it seems like a reasonable way to have cooperated toward achieving a valued goal.

One day, when I was bemoaning my quality problem of missing the Vineyard when I went home to Honolulu and missing Honolulu when I returned to my Island home on the Vineyard, a good friend said to me, “Dana, why don’t you look on this as your having two beautiful rooms in a very large house and you are just moving from one room to the other?“ No one ever said a wiser thing to me; no one ever reminded me quite so simply and clearly of how fortunate I am and of the gratitude I should bring to my days.

On Being Black

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of January, 1983: