Robert S. Douglas, renowned designer and captain of the topsail schooner Shenandoah — as well as a teacher and mentor and businessman who founded the Black Dog apparel company — died early Wednesday at the family home at Arrowhead Farm in West Tisbury. He was 93.

“The preservation of the road, its bordering hedgerows and walls, its overhanging limbs, its vistas of rolling countryside, is a matter of dollars and cents. Visitors come to the Vineyard for just such enjoyments as this noble old road offers....What it represents is what we need to keep and cherish, and when we are troubled we may well drive up and down the Middle Road and clear our thoughts to the proper order of the natural world.”

More than anything else, a revolution in technology made the Tuesday edition of the Vineyard Gazette possible back in the summer of 1929. Ironically enough, it was another revolution in technology that rendered it more or less obsolete 84 years later.