Vineyard people like to pretend we don’t notice when a celebritywell-known person passes us on Main Street, shows up at the same movie, or is eating two tables over at the same café. We’re sure the ones who gawk and point are all day-trippers or clueless summer people. To some extent this is still true, at least among longtimers.
But it totally went to hell when the First Family first vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard in August 1993.
The back side of Basement Design’s shirt. Doesn’t it look like it could be a tour shirt from your favorite band?
Some of my chronically unimpressed friends who’d lived on MV much longer than I — I was then at the very beginning of my ninth year-round year — were among the crowds at the airport when the Clintons first arrived.
Since I was at the time the features editor for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, I had a front-row seat for some of the crazy. The Times office at Five Corners was easy to find if you’d just got off the boat. Much easier than the Vineyard Gazette office, which is in the heart of Edgartown. The ferry that docks nearby only goes to Chappaquiddick and back, a distance of some 527 feet.1
I hadn’t seen “pack journalism” in action before. Did these reporters have nothing else to do? We in the Times office fielded questions, by phone, fax, or in person (this was a few years before email), many of which were unanswerable. The Clintons stayed at a summer home on the south shore owned by former defense secretary Robert McNamara. It was not readily accessible, and needless to say, the Secret Service and law enforcement were everywhere.
My favorite was the guy who blew in, he said, from London to track down some rumor or another. I can’t remember what the rumor was. I do remember he was wearing what looked like an Australian bush hat. Do journalists routinely jump on planes and cross oceans to track down rumors? It was a glimpse into a whole other world.
The Clintons did show up at the Ag Fair and various other places. The president played golf at Farm Neck. Mostly the family enjoyed their R&R on the south shore. Clearly they enjoyed their stay, because they came back several more summers while Bill was president. Unlike the Obamas, I don’t think they ever bought property here, but I could be wrong about that.
Here’s the front side of the Basement Designs shirt:
The “Ernie” referred to is New England car magnate Ernie Boch, who died in 2003. His huge house on Edgartown harbor was a bit of a scandal when it was built in the early 1980s. He turned out to be a pretty good, philanthropically minded neighbor, and likewise his son, Ernie Jr., who’s still around.
NOTE
That Chappaquiddick story was 24 years old by this point. Passé. Very, very old news. Anyone who showed interest in it was almost certainly a right-wing crank. Then as now right-wing cranks are scarce on Martha’s Vineyard. These days they’re more easily found on Nantucket. ↩︎
Two of the best jobs I’ve ever had fell into my lap. The first was book buyer for Lammas, D.C.’s feminist bookstore. The other was working for the Martha’s Vineyard Times. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to apply for either of them.
As my savings dwindled toward the end of my first year on the Vineyard, I started running a classified ad hiring out as a freelance typist. That got me a few short not-very-interesting gigs. More productive was my connection, through theater, with the Tisbury Printer. This led to several book-length editing jobs and editing and typesetting at least two catalogues for the Nathan Mayhew Seminars, a local nonprofit offering a variety of adult ed courses.
With my PC — Morgana, the first of five desktops that would bear that name — I could do pretty good cut-rate typesetting. I’d do the typing and formatting at home then take the disk (a 5 1/4 inch floppy) down to EduComp,[1] which was renting out time on its laser printers, and print out the copy. My girlfriend at the time, a talented graphic artist, did the paste-up. Before long, EduComp stopped offering this service because too many customers either messed things up or required too much hand-holding, but they made exceptions for me and a couple of others because we knew what we were doing. I was undeniably proud of being an exception.
Word got around that I was a competent typist with editorial capabilities. At a West Tisbury town meeting, the woman in front of me turned around and asked if I did freelance typing. I said I did. She turned out to be Eileen Maley, the Calendar/Community, i.e., features, editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. Their editorial typesetter was scheduled to have surgery soon and would be out for a few weeks. Would I be interested in filling in?
When I said yes, I probably sounded self-assured and confident. I wasn’t. Other than Eileen, whom I’d just met, I didn’t know anyone who worked at the Times or anything about their typesetting software. True to form, my imagination conjured a scenario where I’d be out of my depth and make a fool of myself. However, I’d made a similar leap of faith when I ventured into Katharine Cornell Theatre that first time, and that had turned out well. Maybe this would too?
The Times at that point was the upstart paper, having been founded in 1984 by five Vineyard businessmen as an alternative to the venerable (established in 1846) Vineyard Gazette. Reading only the Gazette, one might conclude that the year-round working island barely existed and that bad things never happened on Martha’s Vineyard; its subscriber base was mostly off-island from Labor Day to Memorial Day. Its coverage was so focused on its home base in Edgartown that Times people took to calling it “an Edgartown weekly.” Gazette staffers got back by referring to the Times as “the other paper.”
This not-always-good-natured rivalry went on for years. The Times was delivered free to every island post office or mailbox, a huge attraction for advertisers targeting a year-round audience. Naturally the Gazette retaliated with a full-page house ad featuring a trash can overflowing with discarded copies of the Times.
The Times office was nowhere near as elegant as the wood-shingled building that still houses the Gazette. When I first showed up to work, it was located behind Woodland Market on State Road in Vineyard Haven, in a long, low building that no longer exists. It once housed the Spaghetti Pot restaurant. The Spaghetti Pot was before my time, but rumor had it that the astonishingly red-orange carpeting in the newsroom was part of its legacy: had it perhaps been dyed with, or to resemble, spaghetti sauce?
Sorry about the stains. If I ever learn to use bleach, I could probably make them go away, but that hasn’t happened yet.
The building’s midsection was the newsroom, with reporters’ and editors’ desks lined up along the windows, which commanded a view of the dusty parking lot. Eileen’s desk was at the front of the row, and mine, as the pinch-hit typesetter and eventually the on-staff proofreader, was at the end. The three desks between us were occupied by all but one of the reporters. The exception was Gerry Kelly, who held court in an executive-type chair at an oversize desk next to the wall at one end of the newsroom.
Dubbed by a journalist admirer “the greatest one-man band in the history of journalism,” Gerry was the Times’ lead reporter and also a mainstay of the Calendar section: every week he wrote the food column, often featuring island restaurants, plus a book review, plus, from Memorial Day till well into the fall, a couple of art gallery reviews. He turned out copy like yard goods — a wonder to me because I’m on the slow side: I can’t turn the internal editor off when I’m writing. My only way around this is to write in longhand. This works because my handwriting is so hard to read that the internal editor gives up and goes along for the ride.
Times baseball cap, front . . .
Sure, Gerry’s copy invariably needed at least some editing and/or fact-checking, but that was a small price to pay. When an ad was cancelled at the last minute, he could fill the hole. When an ad came in late, he could cut two or three or four inches out of a story that was already pasted up. He’d head into Production, non-repro-blue pen in hand, swearing “Not one word!” and do what had to be done.
. . . and back. I’ve never been a baseball cap wearer, but I’ve still got mine.
A few years later, when I left the Times (for the first time) in the fall of 1993, Gerry paid me the supreme compliment: on my staff farewell card, he wrote “You saved me a year’s wear and tear on my dictionary.”
I customarily worked with my own copy of the American Heritage Dictionary open in my lap. The office Merriam-Webster’s was readily accessible on top of the long bookshelf in the middle of the newsroom but it was rarely consulted. Instead staffers would call out “Susanna, how do you spell . . . ?” or “What’s another word for . . . ?” and I would answer, usually without looking it up. Over the years more than one person remarked that I always had the dictionary open although I was the only person on staff who didn’t need one. My response: “That’s why I don’t need one.”
Behind me at the old office, in a rectangular room barely large enough for a desk and file cabinets, dwelt editor in chief Doug Cabral. A perk of this mini-office was that it had a door to the outside. Its door into the newsroom, which was almost always open, was barely an arm’s length away from where I sat. Since Doug could and did slip in and out with no one but me the wiser, one of my unofficial tasks was to relay news of his arrivals and departures to the rest of the staff.
Doug had his own wastebasket, of course, but he often dropped his candy wrappers in mine so his wife, who was monitoring his diet, wouldn’t see them.
After the Times moved to its current quarters at Five Corners in the fall of 1991, Doug’s office was on the second floor. He could leave the building through a rear door without passing through the large front room that housed the editorial, production, and advertising staff. So we rarely knew whether he was in the building or not, what he was doing when he was upstairs or where he went when he left.
At both the old building and the new, Wednesday was all-hands-on-deck deadline day. For many years, Joni Merry, a production staffer and also the West Tisbury town news columnist, would make lunch — all takers chipped in to pay for the groceries (usually $2 each) — then we’d all gather to eat around tables set up in the middle of the newsroom.[2]
At one of these sit-down lunches in the late ’80s, Don Lyons, former minister, current ad sales rep, sports editor, and by then Joni’s husband, leaned back in his chair and asked “Does anyone know the five rarest license plates on Martha’s Vineyard?” I can’t remember what five we came up with, or what Don’s five actually were. Now I could hazard you a good guess about Don’s five — they almost certainly included Hawaii, Nebraska, and North Dakota — because his question turned me into a license plate spotter. I’ve been playing ever since and have the annotated U.S. maps to prove it.
I’ve spotted North Dakota three years running at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital Don would be amazed.
For many years, Don and I traded sightings. One summer we tag-teamed to track down a tour bus bearing a North Dakota plate that Joni had seen headed this way on the ferry: North Dakota was the rarest of the rare.[3] We figured it would be leaving by the end of the afternoon, but we couldn’t find out if it would be from Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs. So we stalked both docks whenever a boat would start loading for departure. Don finally spotted the bus in Vineyard Haven. By the time I arrived, Don had spoken with the bus driver — and learned that though the bus was registered in North Dakota, the tour group was from New Jersey. It counted nonetheless.[4]
Unlike the Gazette, the Times was printed off-island. Until digital transmission became possible toward the end of the ’90s, this meant that “the boards” — the pasted-up pages — had to be on the 5 o’clock ferry from Vineyard Haven. Since the Steamship dock was literally around the corner from the Times office, Doug was often out the door with barely minutes to spare, the big black portfolio case under his arm.[5]
This is from my last day of my first stint at the Times, in October 1993. It’ll give you an idea of what “the boards” looked like before the paper went completely digital by the end of the decade. (P.S. I did not usually wear dangly earrings to work.)
1991 was a big year for the Vineyard, the Times, and me. In the spring, Eileen Maley retired as the paper’s first Calendar/Community editor. Having been her unofficial apprentice and understudy for almost three years, I put in for the job. I’d been doing it for more than a week before Doug confirmed that I was now indeed the Calendar/Community editor and put my name on the masthead. He never put me on salary, however: I continued to submit a time sheet every week and get paid by the hour. Since I wasn’t full-time, I got no benefits. The upside was that when I was ready to move on, I didn’t have to worry about losing health insurance because I was already paying for my own major medical policy.
To be fair, the Times in those days was operating on something not much wider than a shoestring. Each Thursday morning the staff would meet to postmortem the issue just published and start planning the next week’s. At the end of the meeting, Doug would pass out paychecks, whereupon we’d extricate ourselves as gracefully as possible from whatever we were doing and race to our respective banks to deposit our checks. Not infrequently the late arrivals would learn that there were insufficient funds in the Times account to cover the checks. They were always covered eventually, but if you were on the brink of overdrawn yourself, the suspense was real.
Hurricane Bob arrived on August 19 of that year, and despite the many impressive storms that have followed, more than 32 years later it remains the last full-fledged hurricane to hit New England. Unlike most big tropical storms, Bob arrived at the height of “the season,” on Monday, August 19. The annual Agricultural Fair had just finished its three-day run at the old Ag Hall.[6] The summer hordes were still here.
Bob was a huge deal. Hurricane winds took out trees that hadn’t been seriously challenged since the nameless hurricane of 1938. The sound of chainsaws was heard throughout the land. Living up-island on a dirt road back in the woods, I was lucky: a nurse at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital lived nearby, so volunteer EMTs and firefighters came to clear the road so she could get to work.
The flip side was that our little area didn’t get its power back for almost 10 days. The Times office, however, was on a major trunk line and got its power back within hours. Those of us without power at home brought our perishables to work and we feasted for a couple of days. I washed my hair in the office sink more than once. Bees whose hives had been destroyed were everywhere. Outdoor cafés hung improvised bee catchers from hooks on the wall: plastic soft drink containers with sweet stuff inside. Buzzing bees sounded a lot like distant chainsaws.
Labor Day came and went, life returned to more-or-less normal, but 1991 wasn’t done with us yet: the No-Name Nor’easter[7] arrived at the end of October. The Times was just about to move into its new office at Five Corners, but Five Corners flooded even worse than usual and the just-laid floor of the newsroom was underwater and had to be replaced. Fortunately, the electric sockets and wiring had all been installed a foot above the floor so they weren’t affected. My main memory of the move: I was helping move a desk into place when Trip Barnes, whose trucking company was handling the Times relocation, apparently decided that women couldn’t hold up half a desk and tried to wrest my end away from me. The result was that it fell on my foot. No lasting harm was done to my foot, but my opinion of Trip took a hit.
The Times move to Five Corners put it right around the corner from Wintertide Coffeehouse, which had moved into its year-round home the previous January. The traffic back and forth was non-stop: Wintertide manager Tony Lombardi was in the Times office almost as often as I was at Wintertide. Wintertide had no advertising budget to speak of; I could put pretty much anything I wanted in the Calendar section, and assign freelancers to write profiles, previews, and reviews that I couldn’t do myself. I saw advocating for the island’s grassroots music, theater, and general creative scene as part of my job.
The high point of my Times career was almost certainly the Martha’s Vineyard Singer-Songwriter Retreats of 1992 and 1993, masterminded by Christine Lavin and brought to life by a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The resulting recordings — Big Times in a Small Town from ’92 and Follow That Road from ’93 — are still available and still wonderful.
I resigned as Calendar editor in the fall of 1993, mainly due to burnout: after I left, what I’d been doing was divvied up two and a half ways. I’d never entirely stopped being the lead proofreader or a pinch-hit typesetter either. But it was still one of the best jobs I ever had.
. . . . .
Postscript: I returned to the Times toward the end of 1996 as a one-woman copy desk. I pitched the job — something I’d never done before and haven’t done since — because (1) they needed the help, and (2) the freelance book packager who had been responsible for about 3/4 of my income decided to pack it in and move to New Hampshire. I was slowly building up my freelance client base, but I couldn’t live on that income yet. I left again in mid-1999, having established enough publisher connections to have a reasonably steady income. I had also, however, bought myself a horse, which wouldn’t have been in anyone’s How to Make Ends Meet on Martha’s Vineyard guide. Much more about that later.
NOTES
[1] EduComp, the indispensable art and office supply and computer store at the head of Main Street, Vineyard Haven, closed for good in the fall of 2020. Sales had been declining thanks to online competition, and the onset of COVID-19 finished it off. Founder and proprietor Pat Gregory was murdered while hiking in California in 2014, but his family carried on in the years following.
[2] After the move to Five Corners, we actually had a lunch/break room, but it wasn’t big enough to hold everybody. The lunch custom continued, but more of us ate at our desks.
[3] In my first 30+ years of the game, I spotted North Dakota maybe twice, including that tour bus. It’s now showed up three years running, 2022, 2023, and 2024, always in the same place — behind the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital — and for several months in a row. Evidently a North Dakota resident is a travel nurse or doctor at MVH.
[4] Don passed in August 2021, age 94. His obituary doesn’t mention the license plate game, but it’s still a fascinating picture of a remarkable man.
[5] Infrequently the boards would travel by air instead of sea. Doug usually made the drive to the airport, but I remember pinch-hitting once or twice. The airport was six miles from the office, so we couldn’t be quite so last-minute about finishing the last page or two.
[6] In 1991, the fair was still three days long, Thursday through Saturday, and took place at the “old Ag Hall,” now known at the Grange. It moved to the brand-new Ag Hall in 1995. In 1997 the first day of the Fair was drowned out by torrential rain, so Sunday was added to compensate. Sunday at the Fair proved so popular that the Fair has been a four-day affair ever since.
[7] The No-Name Nor’easter is better known as the Perfect Storm, after Sebastian Junger’s book of that title. The Perfect Storm (W. W. Norton, 1997) focused on the loss of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat out of Gloucester, with all six hands during the storm.
This version is unusual for its blue edging at sleeves and neckline. I have no other Ts of this style.
In late spring or early summer of 1976 I started volunteering for the campaign to ratify the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment. I’ve got three T-shirts from it. The one with the white background didn’t circulate widely; it was an early draft, and the limited stock probably got handed out free to volunteers. The other two are the final version, with the text of the amendment on the front and “Vote Yes on #1” on the back. The text, now part of the state constitution, part 1, article 1: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.”
Bus and trolley drivers often leaned in to read the text.
The green and the black ones got worn a lot. The paint splatters on the black one came from helping paint a friend’s guest bedroom in West Tisbury more than 10 years later. The only downside was that the large number of words in relatively small type gave bus and trolley drivers an excuse to stare at your boobs and pretend to be reading the text.
Although I’d encountered blatant sexism as a Georgetown University undergrad, I was still shocked by how controversial the ERA was, and how blatant the fear-mongering against it. A New York Times story from November 1, 1976, noted “rumors and feelings, vociferously denied by the supporters of the measure but nevertheless in wide currency, that the amendment will result in things like unisex public toilets, homosexual marriages and female draftees.”
Massachusetts did lead the country in legalizing same-sex marriage, but that wasn’t till 2004, a full generation after the ERA was added to the state constitution.
Then, as now, the news media routinely fell back on phrases like “vociferously denied by supporters of the measure,” but rarely refuted the antis’ claims with expert legal or historical opinion.
Massachusetts ERA campaign headquarters was on the walk-up second floor of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union on Boylston Street, not far from the Public Garden and Boston Common. It was at least 75% workspace and at most 25% office: a desk for the campaign president and one for the one-woman clerical staff.
In memory, the workspace was dominated by a huge table (it might have been a humongous piece of plywood resting on several sawhorses), on which were spread out the raw materials for statewide mailings. These days massive mailing lists are saved out of sight on computers. Sorting by zip code -‑ necessary to qualify for the bulk-mail rate if you’re using the U.S. Postal Service — can be done in seconds. Not so in 1976. In 1976 the mailing list had to be typed on letter-size paper and formatted so it could be photocopied onto mailing labels. Each sheet of paper contained addresses from the same zip code, and the most common zip codes each had their own folder.
Think about it. New names coming in — and they were coming in all the time, especially after an event was held or an ad appeared in the paper — couldn’t be seamlessly added to the existing list. The only way to recognize duplicates, or obvious errors, was by eyeball.
By election day I knew most of the zip codes in Massachusetts by heart. If a label said “Boston, MA 01108” I knew at once that something was wrong. (01108 is in Springfield. 02108 is in Boston — Beacon Hill, to be precise.) Most often it was the zip.
I did most of my volunteering in the office, but I also ran occasional errands, like driving to New Hampshire to pick up a print job. Because my family had a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard, I helped out at an ERA fundraiser at the Field Gallery in West Tisbury; somewhere lost in my boxes of stuff may still be a photo I took of singer-songwriter James Taylor sitting on the stone step at the back of the gallery. On Election Day 1976 I was passing out “Vote Yes on Question #1” literature at a polling place in the Back Bay, where I got to meet both Elaine Noble, who was running for re-election as the first out lesbian or gay member of any state legislature in the country, and Barney Frank, who then represented a neighboring district in the state House of Representatives -‑ and was not yet out.[1]
That fall I started working part-time as a proofreader for the Town Crier Company: my first paid gig in the editorial field. The company, which published my hometown newspaper, the Town Crier, also did contract work. I was hired to work on a weekly newspaper they were publishing for Massachusetts law professionals.[2] This was an evening job. When I arrived for my shift, the newsroom and the offices in general were dark and deserted. It was just me; the typesetter, Jessie from Maynard; and Dave the production manager, who was occupied elsewhere in the building unless the hardware needed attention.
It’s the hardware that fascinates me most these days. (If you’re similarly intrigued, check out this site when you’ve got an hour or two to kill.) The technical side of publishing has evolved a lot in my lifetime, and I’ve had plenty of hands-on experience, especially with the shoestring-budget side of it. I’m old enough to have wrestled with mimeograph machines, been splattered with ink by a run-amok Gestetner, and laid out flyers with Formaline and presstype. So here’s what I remember of how I did my job in 1976–77.
Jessie the typesetter sat in the far corner of the large, utilitarian production room. I think the copy she relayed to me for proofreading was printed on plain paper. I fed the sheets into a phototypesetting computer. It had some OCR (optical character recognition — a term I learned later) capability, but it wasn’t hyper-precise so part of my job was to clean up the mess. My workstation had a video display screen, a QWERTY keyboard, and the characteristic IBM Selectric “golf ball” but one that produced what looked like an extended barcode under the letters. After I’d made my corrections, I hit a key, which produced a long tape with many holes punched in it. Each pattern represented a specific letter, punctuation mark, or other typographical instruction. Like this:
I then took the tape and threaded it through the CompuGraphic photocompositor, which was massive and gray and dominated its corner of the room. It produced film in a sealed container. This I took over to the developer, which looked like a big white washboard or sloping easel. What eventually came over the top of the easel/washboard was, voilà! a galley proof.
At this stage I sometimes spotted errors that had escaped my not-yet-eagle eye. I was learning, on the fly and without a supervisor, how to read like a proofreader: letter for letter, not word for word. As you might guess, the procedure just described was way too complicated and time-consuming to be repeated just to correct transposed words or letters, which is what nearly all of these errors were. So I’d go to the light table and with straight edge, X-acto knife, and Scotch tape correct the goof manually. I was pretty good at this, and the ability stood me in good stead through the coming years of laying out flyers with Formaline and presstype.
Correcting typos got much easier when I got my first PC in 1985, but CTRL-X,C,V and all the rest of it did not make my manual dexterity entirely obsolete. It wasn’t till the mid to late 1990s that desktop publishing technology made Formaline, presstype, and proportional scales largely obsolete (but as you can see, I’ve still got mine).
Notes
[1] Both were re-elected that year. In 1978, the house was shrunk from 240 members to 160, and the resulting redistricting threw them into the same district. Noble decided not to run again. She had taken a lot of heat not only as an out lesbian but as a staunch supporter of school desegregation, a very hot issue in Boston during the 1970s. By the way, the resizing of the Massachusetts House of Representatives cost both Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket their seats in the legislature. This prompted a “Secede Now” movement, and I have a T-shirt to prove it. I’m wearing it in my profile pic. More about it by and by.
[2] This might have been the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, which still exists but which was founded in 1972. My recollection is that this was a startup modeled on something similar being published in New York. The Weston Town Crier, along with its siblings in Wayland and Sudbury, still exists in some form, but it seems to be published in Framingham and owned by Gannett.
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The T-Shirt Chronicles 