Community service is an admirable endeavor as it allows you to work for something you believe in and give back to the community. By participating in community service, you can feel connected to your community. While some students at Marta’s Vineyard Regional High School do community service because it looks good on a college transcript or meets a requirement, other students intrinsically want to help their community. Regardless of their motive, many students at the high school are often confused as to how they can actually get involved and what types of things they can do.

Board President Responds

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Last Monday, July 14 the board of directors of the Martha’s Vineyard Boys’ and Girls’ Club decided, after considerable deliberation, to dismiss the employees of our Second Hand Store and close the store temporarily pending reorganization and re-staffing. Since the store is an important fixture on the Island and our action has evoked a storm of discussion, we feel we owe the community some explanation.

Robynn Murray stood alone in the kitchen. Bread in the toaster, she twirled a butter knife in a tub of Nutella and looked out across the brown Chilmark fields of North Road. She spread the warm bread thick; stuck the knife back in the jar. “I got these when I got back from Iraq,” she said. She licked a crumb of toast from the corner of her mouth and pointed to the two guns tattooed on her chest, their barrels facing each other.

Despite the rising price of aviation fuel, Angel Flight pilots continue to shuttle Vineyarders back and forth to Hyannis, Boston and afar for necessary medical appointments.

The price of fuel comes out of the pilots’ pockets, but still they are flying. Island pilot Mike Shabazian said: “You can’t whine about gas prices. If you do, you don’t fly.”

After an emotional response from the community, leaders at the Martha’s Vineyard Boys & Girls Club this week defended their recent decision to abruptly fire two longtime employees of the Edgartown Second Hand Store and dismiss the store’s staff of volunteers.

In keeping with the theme, a conflict between police and demonstrators over a planned protest against the war in Iraq at the Vineyard Haven post office was resolved peacefully on Wednesday.

The Rev. Alden Besse and Sarah Nevin, co-chairmen of the Vineyard Peace Council, planned the display as part of a national campaign against the war titled Eyes Wide Open. The display features combat boots and professionally made banners that list the number of men and women who have been injured or killed in Iraq.

It’s been called the biggest event on the Vineyard social calendar, and the Possible Dreams Auction organizers found how to count just how big it had grown when a storm hovered over the lawns of Edgartown’s Harborside Inn on the first Monday in August last year.

Why does food cost so much on this Island?

Coming from Steve Bernier, owner of Cronig’s Market, the answer is part career grocer’s insider view, part disaster warning.

“There’s a flood coming,” said Mr. Bernier, sitting in a cocoon-like office space above the Cronig’s main store in Vineyard Haven. “The rise now is exponential, dynamic. We’re at the end game of what goes around comes around.”

West Tisbury selectmen on Wednesday swiftly voted to remove several No Parking signs recently placed across the road from the Lambert’s Cove beach parking lot after complaints came in from people who had paid $50 for a resident beach sticker and were worried they would have nowhere to park.

Wins Literary Award

Kelly Easton of Chilmark has won the Asian Pacific American Literature Award for her book Hiroshima Dreams. The book, set in Providence, was also the recipient of the ASTAL Rhode Island Middle School Book of the Year, and is a New York Public Library Book for the teen age group.