The Vineyard Gazette announced late yesterday the purchase of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine from WEM Publishing Inc. The newspaper will take control of the magazine effective June 1.

 

William E. Marks, publisher and founder of the five-year-old publication, will bring out his last issue of the magazine late this month. The first issue of the magazine under Gazette direction will appear on newsstands and in the mailboxes of subscribers in July.

 

Less than two months after Indian Hill Market came up for sale, Stephen Bernier has signed a purchase and sales agreement with owners Howard and Susan Ulfelder.

 

Mr. Bernier is the owner of Cronig’s State Road Market in Tisbury. Papers for Indian Hill will pass March 31, he says.

 

“We’re not going to turn it into a gourmet food store,” says Mr. Bernier. “Its going to be an Up-Island Cronig’s.” Mr. Bernier is planning to keep it open seven days a week, as his predecessors have.

 

The Dukes County Historical Society has solved the space problem it has been struggling with for most of its 66 years with the purchase of the John Vinson House on School street.

 

Saturday the society will open the property to the public as part of the Christmas in Edgartown celebration with a smattering of exhibits showing the Vineyard’s long and interesting history, as well as the history of the historical society.

 

Nothing was simple about the war in Viet Nam. That era divided our society, and offered no easy answers for those who fought or for those who did not. Now 14 years have passed since the fall of Saigon, and more than 25 years since the war began, though it is even hard to pinpoint the beginning of that conflict.

 

Cronig’s Main Street Market, the 72-year-old grocery business in Vineyard Haven, will close its doors for the final time on Thursday, Oct. 26.

 

Despite the public outcry supporting the traditional market, the Cronig family will convert the building into three smaller retail shops before the 1990 summer season.

 

An agreement was signed Saturday between Carlyle Cronig, whose family owns the land and building, and John F. and John L. Schilling, the father and son who have owned and managed the business for the past six years.

 

Despite a softening of the real estate market and changes in the economy, officials of Vineyard banking institutions remain generally optimistic about local affairs with few reservations.

 

The Island’s oldest resident may well live in the woods of West Tisbury. Her name is Boxer.

 

Two nine-year-old girls have seen her. Lucy Hodgson and Amelia Krales saw the ancient woodland traveler at the start of the summer. The old lady was making her way down a narrow path in dense woods under dappled sunlight.

 

She is a very old box turtle.

 

Tom Hodgson, Lucy’s father, has read in science books that a box turtle can live for 130 years.

 

When Lady Bird Johnson walks among wildflowers at the home of an Island friend near Watcha Pond, she steps lightly and speaks gently. Indeed, the former First Lady is home on the Vineyard or anywhere in the world among these perennials that have touched her life from childhood days in east Texas to White House years in the nation’s capital. Even today, more than 20 years after Mrs. Johnson’s departure from the White House, she devotes a central part of her busy life to the preservation of wildlife and beauty in America.

 

The town of Gay Head signed the deed conveying the ancestral Wampanoag Indian Common Lands to the federal government yesterday, ending a protracted legal struggle for the tribe with quiet agreement.

 

The face of the Gay Head Cliffs, the Herring Creek and the cranberry bogs will be under the control of the Wampanoag Tribal Council of Gay Head Inc. as the representative of the Gay Head Wampanoag Tribe.