Every Thursday night when the Vineyard Gazette’s printing press gears up for its weekly performance, the low rumble and shake reaches the newsroom upstairs like an approaching squall.
Sporting a baseball cap still, the 85-year-old guy recalled the progression of his fielding positions over five decades of summer games on the Chilmark diamond.
“I played third up until I got too old, then I went to short, then to second as my arm gave out, but that took 50 years,” he says.
The Vineyard Gazette, the family-owned weekly newspaper that has been a prominent, much-decorated and enduring chronicle of Island life for 164 years, will be sold to new owners, the newspaper’s publisher Richard Reston announced today.
The buyers are Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg, longtime seasonal residents of the Island who live in and operate businesses from Mount Kisco, N.Y. The Kohlbergs have been quiet philanthropists on the Vineyard for many decades, especially in the areas of conservation and education.