Time Machine Terms
June 13, 1975
Dr. Sidney N. Riggs, Artist, Dies at 83
Dr. Sidney Noyes Riggs, educator, writer and artist, died at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital Sunday after a long period of failing health. He was 83 years old. His place in Island life for many years had been one of manifold useful activity and wide friendships.
May 23, 1975
Copter Is Saved: Rescue Craft Itself Is Rescued Thanks to the Harbormaster
This time on purpose, United States Coast Guard officers came to Martha’s Vineyard Wednesday night, to say a fervent thank-you to an Island harbormaster.
He is John M. Edwards of Edgartown, and he earned the citation presented to him at a ceremony in the board room of the Co-operative Bank by delivering a Coast Guard helicopter to safety from a forced landing at night on the rip-swept open sea off the Katama beach.
May 9, 1975
We're Back Home Again, Bigger and Faster and Softer
This morning’s Gazette is the first printed on our new Goss Community offset press. It’s also the first to be printed on the Island in the familiar South Summer street shop since January 31, when we abandoned the hot metal-letterpress printing process in use at the Gazette for half a century. Since then the paper has been printed for us by commercial printers in Arlington.
January 31, 1975
A Technology Is Phased Out
From 1846 when the Vineyard Gazette was founded by Edgar Marchant until 1920 the paper was printed from movable types, first invented in China in some unestablished background of the past, and invented independently by Gutenberg in Europe in the mid-15th Century.
January 31, 1975
Next Week in Your Gazette: New Ways to Do the Old Job
James and Sally Fulton Reston, publishers of the Gazette, have announced plans to replace the paper’s traditional hot metal letterpress printing machinery with modern photocomposition equipment and a web offset press. Next Friday’s Gazette will be typeset and printed by the new method.
December 6, 1974
Gay Head Council Sues to Recover Lands from Town
An action at law to evict the town of Gay Head from 238 acres of lands within the metes - the cranberry bogs, the Herring Creek and its banks, and the colored cliffs that give the place its name - has been filed in United States District Court at Boston by the Wampanoag Tribal Council of Gay Head.
“It is our last hope ever to be able to think the Indians of Gay Head can have a piece of the land that they can call their own,” said Mrs. Beatrice V. Gentry, president of the council.
October 4, 1974
Jaws in Retrospect
In the words of the movies, Jaws has “wrapped,” struck its sets and stolen away in mammoth trucks. Filming of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, Jaws, was started by Universal Studios on the Island May 2, and for the rest of the summer caravans of trucks moved about the Island like nomads, shooting here or there - mostly there - and out at sea where no one could really get a good look at what was happening.
September 6, 1974
Two Sea Giants Swim Silently Northward, Their Species Protected and Their Path Free of Bombs
Nuzzling the shoreline with the curiosity and daring that made its ancestors easy prey for whalers, a young right whale is swimming slowly northward along the East Coast toward Martha’s Vineyard. The 20-ton mammal is keeping odd company with a giant sea turtle, and together the silent mammoths have been snooping lazily around Long Island for about two weeks.
August 16, 1974
Who but the Jaws Company Would Build an Orca Designed Not to Float but to Head for the Bottom?
Boats since the beginning of time have been built to float, or at least that’s the object, but Universal Studios (which of late does the unusual) has built a boat to sink. It sounds a bit odd, and frankly it looks a bit odd.
August 16, 1974
Again An Old-Fashioned Oak Bluffs Illumination
Stars sparkled, pink and gold and orange lanterns bobbed, and a soft wind played among the chimes in the Camp Ground Wednesday night for the 104th annual Illumination Night.
