Editor, Vineyard Gazette:
Permit me to express my interest in your account of early golfing on Martha’s Vineyard, as described in your issue of August 7th. May I also venture to add an item or two relative to the Edgartown situation.
Golf is such an indispensable part of Island recreation that it seems impossible to imagine the Vineyard without it. However, in the nineties the game was played only by a few ambitious souls who now with excusable pride call themselves the founders of golf here. The various courses on the Island have no very definite dates to make their beginnings, as long before the clubs were officially founded, the game was being played on semi-pastures and fields.
When was the first bath tub brought to Martha’s Vineyard? Nantucket had a bath tub, weighing more than 800 pounds, in 1881. A Nantucketer reports having seen another as early as 1861 on that island. Commenting editorially on the question of bath tub priority, the Boston Herald on Wednesday morning challenged Vineyarders to adduce proof of the earlier existence on this Island of a receptacle designed solely for bathing the human form.
That the world’s lone heath hen, Martha’s Vineyard’s most famous resident, was still alive September 13, is vouched for by Dr. John A. Phillips, president of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Association, who, in a letter sent out to members of the organization last week, told of almost running over a heath hen as he drove Mrs. Phillips along the Dr. Fisher road in West Tisbury, near the fire tower.