From the Vineyard Gazette editions of July, 1958:

Certainly worth a first page position is the fact that James Thurber, the American humorist, whom the Vineyard proudly stakes a proprietary claim to because of his visits here, lunched in London with the editors of Punch.

The significance of this event can be understood from the facts as set down in a Reuters dispatch as follows:

HEART RENDING

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Deacon Perrotta, the water superintendent for Tisbury and Oak Bluffs who has come under scrutiny the past two years for an unusual contractual agreement with both towns, unexpectedly resigned from his job in both towns last month.

Mr. Perrotta first announced his plans to step down in early June, and his last day on the job was last Wednesday. He resigned after negotiating an agreement with the Tisbury Water Works and Oak Bluffs Water District stipulating that each town pay him a severance package of $45,000 plus unused vacation time.

A Vineyard Haven man was charged with felony assault and battery with a deadly weapon on Sunday after he allegedly tried to steal an item from an Edgartown store and then hit one of the store’s employees with his car in the parking lot.

The board of the directors for the Martha’s Vineyard Boys’ and Girls’ Club abruptly closed the popular Second Hand Store on North Summer street in Edgartown yesterday, first firing the store’s two full-time employees and its entire staff of volunteers.

Peter Lambos, executive director for the boys’ and girls’ club, said the board of directors held a special meeting on Sunday and made the decision to fire manager Darlene Kelly and assistant manager Penny Townes, who are co-managers and a well-known presence in the store.

They are their own Jewish farm parable of sorts — one cast in the role of Moses, the youngest brother and prophet, the other cast as Aaron, the elder brother who speaks for them both. Rob Goldfarb, development director for the Farm Institute in Edgartown, is the older brother. Matthew Goldfarb, executive director, is the younger one. The Goldfarb brothers came to the Vineyard in 2005 sight unseen and took the reins at the fledgling Farm Institute, an educational, working farm in the rich Great Plains of Edgartown.

Reno herself was born Socialist. “It happened to me as I entered the birth canal and entered the world,” she suspects. “Because it’s how I’ve always felt, that there is something fishy about Wall Street.” She has no checking account. Certainly no investments. “I’ve just avoided anything about finance.”

It all started with a message on the bird hot line which I received on July 2. A Chappaquiddick summer resident called to say that she had a pair of merlins that appeared to be nesting on her property. Hmm, said I. I was pretty sure there were no records of merlins nesting in Massachusetts, but I checked the Birds of Massachusetts, by R. Veit and W. Petersen before I called. I was right.

Comics About You

Children’s author and illustrator Katie Davis will be visiting two of the Island libraries in the week ahead, leading a free program in which kids will be encouraged to work on journal entries in the comic book format which the author calls “autobiogra-strips.”

In Ms. Davis’s novel for middle-grade readers, The Curse of Addy McMahon, the title character keeps her diary in comic-strip format.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after many years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe has an intense loathing of Richard Moby, the CEO of Broadway, an off-Island landscaping business. He is irrationally convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, as well as all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses in general. Abe is now obsessed with “taking down” Moby before Moby can hurt him.