On Wednesday, August 7, the 18th Camp Ground Cottage tour takes place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The tour this year consists of six cottages, two just 500-square-feet, and one in the initial stages of renovation. Four cottages are owned by second or third generation Camp Ground residents.

Five of the cottages are located around Victorian Park — 6, 19, 24, 27, 30. The sixth home is at 3 Butler avenue.

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The 911 call came at about 6:45 p.m. that a person was in the water off Great Rock Bight and in distress. Chilmark and Aquinnah police, Coast Guard station Menemsha and Massachusetts Environmental Police all responded. Two people were pulled from the water and transported to Menemsha to waiting EMS.

John Abrams came down from the mountains. It was 1975 and he had arrived on the Island from a commune in Vermont with his friend Mitchell Posin, his wife Chris, and his five-year-old son Pinto. They’d come to build a house in Chilmark.

The federal government formally declared the Gay Head Light surplus property Thursday, clearing the way for the town of Aquinnah to take ownership of the lighthouse which is now critically endangered due to erosion.

The General Services Administration posted the notice Thursday, making the lighthouse surplus property. Aquinnah voters have already agreed that the town will apply to take ownership.

A second public hearing was set for Thursday night before the Martha’s Vineyard Commission on expansion plans for the Stop & Shop grocery store in Vineyard Haven. As the commission begins an exhaustive review of one of the largest and most complicated commercial development projects in recent memory on the Island, public opinion and institutional knowledge about the commission is mixed.

In the summer of 1971 Michael Pollan’s pig Kosher won first prize at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair. But her glory was short-lived.

Folksinger James Taylor had also entered his pig, Mona, at the fair. She, too, won a blue ribbon. Mona, a very large pig, was made famous by a celebrated photograph of Mr. Taylor and the pig walking on his property in West Tisbury.

Some four decades ago, the Massachusetts legislature recognized Martha’s Vineyard as one of the state’s crown jewels by creating an agency with special powers to protect the Island’s unique ecological, archeological, historical and human resources. That body, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, has distinguished itself over nearly forty years as the Vineyard’s sole regional planning agency, sitting in the often-uncomfortable role of arbiter of Island values.

There was a time when if someone said you don’t look Jewish, I took it as a compliment. It was the 1950s and our parents spent every ounce of their energy working to assimilate, to get a teeny corner of the American dream.