Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1991–1994, etc.: ILGA, the Island Lesbian & Gay Association

The early ’90s get slippery for dates especially where the lesbian and gay awakening on Martha’s Vineyard is concerned. Complicating the chronology is that no one seems to have kept copies of Stone Walls, the handsome newsletter put out by Dan Waters and Hal Garneau for the fledgling Island Lesbian & Gay Association. I need to pay a visit to the Vineyard Gazette’s archives and also to find out what the Martha’s Vineyard Museum has in its files, but these things aren’t likely to happen till the worst of summer is over.

In late 2014, I was reminded of the importance of getting this history down where other people can find it. That summer, The Yard, a seasonal dance colony in Chilmark, claimed to have held the first public gay pride event on Martha’s Vineyard. I heard nothing about it through the usual channels, which is to say Facebook, word-of-mouth, or the bulletin board at up-island Cronig’s. No one else I know did either.

This was not surprising. A strange barrier stands between the summer island and the year-round island. It’s porous enough to see through, but only in one direction: we can see it, but it can’t see us. In June 2015 I blogged “Gay on MV” to get some of the history out there. Exactly seven years later, I had an opportunity to do it again, at the ceremonial raising of the “Progress Pride” flag in Ocean Park. “Pride Flag Flying,” another blog post, includes the remarks I prepared for that event.

So please consider this a work in progress.

When I moved back to D.C. in the spring of 1977, I knew where to find the lesbians and the feminists: through Lammas, the feminist bookstore, and through the Washington Area Women’s Center, then housed in the basement of the abandoned-and-falling-into-disrepair Sumner School at 17th and M Streets N.W.

Moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985 — for a year, mind you, just for a year — it was a different story. Where were the lesbians? I read every poster on every bulletin board and telephone pole and skimmed every story in both newspapers, looking for signs of lesbian, gay, and/or feminist activity. Nothing. Most startling was that no one seemed to be talking about AIDS, which by 1985 was a huge issue in D.C.

As recounted in “1985–86 (etc.): Adult Child of Theater,” it was much easier to find a 12-step program for adult children of alcoholics. And through that I found lesbians, gay men, and the island’s vibrant theater scene. As I wrote in “Gay on MV,” the Vineyard’s theater community was “like theater in most other places: a veritable hotbed of misfits and nonconformists, gay, lesbian, straight, both/and, and neither/nor. My people.”

But no one said “gay” or “lesbian” out loud in public. Oh no! If you did, it was assumed you were one, and that was risky. So we said “the L-word” (almost two decades later this commonly used closet phrase was appropriated for a TV series) or used the ASL sign for “L” or (gods help us) substituted “Lebanese” for “lesbian.” The island was just discovering AIDS, but to hear health-care professionals talk, you’d have assumed that HIV could only be contracted from dirty needles and blood transfusions.

The island’s lesbians and gay men knew better. Nancy Luedeman (1920–2010), theater mainstay and recovering alcoholic, created a panel for the AIDS Quilt that was included in the Quilt’s first national display in October 1987. Two of the four Vineyard men it memorialized were identified only by first name and last initial, the other two by initials only.

Around 1990 that began to change. See “Visiting the AIDS Quilt with My Mother” for what I currently recall (and have to further research) about this period. Many island gay men and lesbians realized that the time had come to go public, in part to help clear up the widespread misconceptions about gay people but also so we could find and support each other.

Me and the more discreet of ILGA’s two T-shirts in July 2014. In the early ’90s you could wear this one anywhere and hardly anyone knew what it meant.

The first meeting of what became ILGA, the Island Lesbian and Gay Association, took place in the big room at the Wooden Tent on State Road, Vineyard Haven, which was then owned by Edie Yoder and Kathy Rose. I was there, along with some 25 other Vineyarders, about half of them women and half of them men, nearly all of whom I knew at least by sight. Sitting in a big circle, we went round and introduced ourselves. When the third Kathy introduced herself, people were starting to chuckle, then when Lansing Bailey — a burly gent who was older than most of us — introduced himself as Kathy, we all lost it completely. No one there will ever forget it.

What neither I nor anyone I’ve spoken with so far can remember is exactly when this meeting took place. My best guess is 1991, either spring or fall (because no one has time for organizational meetings in the summer, and what’s more, that was the summer of Hurricane Bob).[2] Fairly early in 1992 I moved into the guest house at the Wooden Tent, and I’m 99% sure that at the time of that meeting I was still living up-island.

You could only wear this one out in public if you were willing to stop people in their tracks. Photo from July 2014.

ILGA’s primary purpose was social — our potlucks were amazing! — but it had a powerful impact on gay and lesbian visibility on Martha’s Vineyard. In the early ’90s you could wear the pink triangle shirt down Main Street, Vineyard Haven, without getting any double-takes or snotty remarks: the only people who recognized the pink triangle were friendly and everyone else thought it was just another Vineyard T-shirt. It took considerably more chutzpah to sport the “No Man Is an Island Lesbian” shirt in mixed company.

For the first time a newcomer or someone just coming out could find the words “Lesbian” and “Gay” in the organizations listing of the Vineyard phone book. Two of us, Robert Cropper and me, were out enough to have our names and phone numbers listed. (I don’t recall ever getting a crank call from that listing.)

Around this time — 1992 and ’93 — a homophobic politician, Ron Beaty Jr.[3] by name, on the Cape took to writing nasty letters to the editor equating gay people with immorality and AIDS, and pushing Gay Rights, Special Rights (1993), a video promoted by the Traditional Values Coalition.[4] A lesbian couple wrote a letter to the Martha’s Vineyard Times rebutting such fallacious fear-mongering. The editor said he’d publish it but only if their names were included. Since this couple had several kids in the school system, this was outrageous and several of us (I was the Times features editor at this point) said so, but it was the editor’s wife who got through to him: “Of course you should withhold their names,” she said, and that was that. The letter was published with the writers’ names withheld.

In the fall of 1993 two Oak Bluffs town fathers tried to get two of the earliest kids’ books about gay/lesbian families pulled from the Oak Bluffs School library: Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay? (1991). This spawned several contentious meetings and letters to the editor. I remember one meeting in particular where the town fathers were joined by a fundamentalist minister and a former marine known for striding around town in his red satin Marine Corps jacket. At one point the minister claimed that AIDS was God’s scourge of the homosexuals (IIRC he used that exact phrase), to which ILGA regular Michele Lazerow pointed out that lesbians had the lowest incidence of HIV/AIDS of any group. This was greeted with much laughter and applause, so I don’t know whether the minister responded.

The heroes of the meeting were the school librarian, Jan Buhrman, and the eighth-grade member of the school committee, Jay Borselle.[5] Their eloquence helped turn the tide, and it reassured me and others that we had allies willing to step up. At the same time, the Martha’s Vineyard Library Association was the only organization that spoke out against the attempted book banning. As a former bookseller, I expected no less — librarians are the best! — but the silence in other quarters was disappointing.

In response I took the lead in organizing a Banned Books reading at Wintertide Coffeehouse in January 1994. I read from Heather Has Two Mommies, Robert read from How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay?, and 18 or so volunteers picked a book from the American Library Association’s Banned Books list and read a short excerpt from it. The Rev. Ken Miner (d. 1997), pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Oak Bluffs, read the David and Jonathan story from the Bible. The place was packed, and we all went home invigorated.

That spring, the short-play festival at the Vineyard Playhouse included Susan Miller’s “It’s Our Town Too,” a poignant riff on Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town in which the parents of the young people who grow up to marry are a gay couple and a lesbian couple.

Several ILGA members marched in Boston’s Gay and Lesbian Pride parade that June, behind a banner created by signmaker (and musician) Tom Hodgson. I don’t remember why I didn’t join them, maybe because I’d ODed on Gay Pride in my D.C. days, but I did get to a “Celebrate Gay Cod” event on the Cape that month. That’s where the button at the beginning of this piece comes from.

NOTES

[1] The AIDS Alliance sponsored the first Crossover Ball on New Year’s Eve 1994. Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and everyone had a blast. These continued more or less biennially till 2005. Can you imagine such a thing happening on Martha’s Vineyard in the ’80s? I can’t either.

[2] Late October of that year brought the equally memorable No-Name Nor’easter, known elsewhere as the Perfect Storm. It delayed the move of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, whose features editor I then was, from Woodland Market to Five Corners. This makes me think that the first ILGA meeting happened earlier in the year, but we shall see!

[3] Gadfly Beaty is nothing if not persistent. For a summary of his antics, see this 2018 call for his removal from his seat on the Barnstable County Council. He wasn’t removed then — the BCC doesn’t have a removal mechanism — but he was eventually defeated for re-election. Now in 2024 he seems to be running again. He has referred to himself as the “Donald Trump of Cape Cod” and once referred to activist David Hogg as a “self-promoting opportunistic rat.”

[4] I procured a copy of this so several of us could see it firsthand. This got me on some pretty disgusting right-wing mailing lists, but eventually the appeals and alerts stopped coming.

[5] By the end of the decade, Jan Buhrman had begun an ever expanding and deepening career as a cook and advocate for locally sourced ingredients: https://www.janbuhrman.com/. Jay Borselle became a journalist and is now the news director for WBZ NewsRadio in Boston.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 1 Comment

1987?–1993: Martha’s Vineyard Times

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.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1986–1994: Wintertide Coffeehouse

Being new on the island and knowing almost no one, I obsessively read posters on telephone poles, devoured the Martha’s Vineyard Times front to back,[i] and studied everything on every bulletin board I came across. Surely there had to be some feminist activity somewhere, and if there was, surely a lesbian or two would be involved?

Well, no. As noted in Adult Child of Theater, my first connection with Vineyard lesbians (and gay men) was through theater. I did, however, find feminism on a bulletin board: several women were organizing a panel discussion on women’s issues for the local League of Women Voters. Contacting them, I learned that not only were they League members, they made up an informal women’s group that had been meeting for several years. I helped organize the panel, and after the project came off successfully I was invited (along with the other drop-in organizer) to join the group. This was my “girl gang” for about 10 years. Would I have stayed on the Vineyard without it? Quite possibly not, but unfortunately I have no T-shirt to show for it.

My early searching also led to the Flip Side, an itinerant performance venue that, as I recall, happened in a tent outside what was then the Ocean Club, an upscale seasonal restaurant, and later became home to the year-round Wintertide. I don’t remember which musicians I first heard there, but it was definitely my introduction to the literary trio known variously as the Poetry Construction Company (because if you weren’t in construction on Martha’s Vineyard, you weren’t taken seriously) or the Savage Poets of Martha’s Vineyard: George Mills, Lee McCormack, and Michelle Gerhard (now Jasny; a veterinarian whose clients have included my three dogs, she’s been writing the Visiting Veterinarian column for the Times for about three decades).

That led me to Wintertide Coffeehouse in the winter of 1986. Back then it was then a weekend thing from January through March, usually one weekend night a week, sometimes two. When I joined the all-volunteer crew, it was held at the Youth Hostel. Donna Bouchard, an experienced concert promoter, was then the coordinator. Not being a techie, I gravitated to the food operation: along with coffee and tea, we offered snack plates with crackers, cheese, salsa, and veggies.

Anyone familiar with Washington Ledesma’s art will recognize this as his work. His Five Corners studio was right around the corner when Wintertide moved into its year-round location.

By this point, Wintertide’s origins were already murky: ask three old hands how it started and you’d get three different origin stories. A few years later, for a 1991 Martha’s Vineyard Times story, I traced a credible line of descent back to 1979. This roughly coincides with a 2021 M.V. Times story (not by me) which located Wintertide’s origin in 1978 as part of Project, a program of M.V. Community Services aimed at giving young people off-season recreational options other than bars. Wintertide’s antecedents were more diverse than the Times article suggests: read the comments for a fuller story. Vineyarders have a long history of entertaining each other after the tourists and summer folk go home, and Wintertide was part of that tradition.

From the Youth Hostel, Wintertide moved to the basement of the Stone Church in Vineyard Haven, where it remained for the rest of the 1980s.

Wintertide performers included local musicians, the occasional touring singer-songwriter, and even musicians with national reputations and recording contracts. I heard jazz musician Stan Strickland at Wintertide when it was at the Youth Hostel, playing with Barbara Dacey, who along with being a musician was also a mainstay for decades at WMVY radio. Among the performers I heard for the first time at the Stone Church were Cheryl Wheeler and Bill Morrissey.

There was no shortage of island-grown talent either: Maynard Silva, Nancy Jephcote, Tristan Israel, Jimmy Burgoff, and many more. It was an ideal place to develop and perfect performance skills.

In a 2010 letter to the Times, I wrote: “The Wintertide I remember was a place where Vineyarders of all ages, old-timers and recent arrivals, came together to entertain ourselves. In the process we learned how to manage the kitchen, run the soundboard, or even perform onstage, whatever needed to be done.”

Inspired by the Savage Poets, I read poems at Wintertide’s regular open mics, and each winter I organized a “Word Wizardry” night featuring Vineyard poets and prose writers. Reading poetry before audiences primed for music taught me the importance of performance. In general I wasn’t a fan of poetry readings, but the likes of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Marge Piercy, and Audre Lorde had shown me that readings can be riveting.

Mary Payne of Island Theatre Workshop coached me in reading my own work: “The first rule,” she told me, “is to forget that you wrote it.” Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you can communicate it effectively to a live audience. In fact, it can make it harder. You know what thoughts and feelings inspired the poem. When performing, you have to get your listeners to feel them too.

Tony Lombardi, the sound tech when Wintertide was at the Stone Church, had a vision of Wintertide as a year-round chem-free multigenerational hangout and performance space. He, with much help from others, made it happen: Wintertide opened year-round at Five Corners in January 1991. This momentous move looked like the dawn of a new age for Wintertide, but it turned out to be not just the end of the beginning — the years of being a peripatetic off-season venue — but also the beginning of the end. It was glorious while it lasted.

My story about Wintertide’s big move appeared in the Martha’s Vineyard Times on Jan. 10, 1991.

In my capacity as Martha’s Vineyard Times proofreader and frequent features stringer, I wrote the story about Wintertide’s big move. Later that year I succeeded Eileen Maley as the Times features editor. As I wrote in a 2018 blog post: “Not only was I a Wintertide board member, regular volunteer, and occasional performer, I was the Times features editor. To put it mildly, the roles got blurred. Wintertide had very little money for advertising; I could put whatever I wanted in the paper’s Calendar (arts & entertainment) section.” Once the Times moved to Five Corners that fall, it was right around the corner from Wintertide. That blurred the roles even further.

Backside of the Wintertide shirt

I’ve come to think of year-round Wintertide as, like Camelot, a “brief, shining moment.” The shining was real. I think especially of the 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 think also of WIMP, the Wintertide Improv group, a troupe of Vineyard actors whose performances usually included a new installment of Troubled Shores, a serial soap opera about island life. WIMP continued after Wintertide’s demise in various locations. Troupe member Donna Swift started a long-running improv program for young people called, you guessed it, Troubled Shores. (See this 2008 Vineyard Gazette story for some of the details.)

But the brevity was also real, and probably inevitable given the place and the personnel. That prime, central, highly visible location was high rent for the time, which meant attention had to be paid to the bottom line, i.e., income. A local restaurateur was willing and able to take charge of the kitchen, which could have put Wintertide on a firmer financial footing without changing its mission or its vibe. This not only clashed with Tony’s vision of an all-volunteer operation, but it would have put a second person, the restaurateur, at the heart of it. Tony couldn’t have that. He wouldn’t compromise with Christine Lavin either, so after those two glorious years the Singer-Songwriter Retreat dwindled into a strictly local affair.

It was not a good sign that, long before that, I and a few other longtime volunteers had taken to calling the coffeehouse “Tonytide,”[ii] which pretty much sums up the problem.

Then Tony decided (for reasons I don’t know, because I and quite a few others had either left or backed off by then) to move on, and Wintertide began its fast slide into history. Tony’s subsequent projects, usually aimed at young people, happened under the aegis of the then new Vineyard YMCA, which meant access to both space and revenue that didn’t have to be raised through operations. He could have his cake and eat it too: run an all-volunteer operation without having to worry about the bottom line.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, on Daggett Ave. . . .

Daggett Ave. Cafe, another grassroots creative effort, started around 1990 — on, you guessed it, Daggett Ave. in Vineyard Haven, where a friend of musician/artist/eventual web designer Heather Goff was living at the time. As a single mom with a very young child, Heather usually couldn’t go out at night, so she invited creative friends over to entertain each other. By the time I learned of it, it had outgrown the friend’s living room. Most of the ones I attended took place downstairs at the Vineyard Playhouse, emceed by Helen Stratford, but before it moved to the Playhouse at least one Daggett Ave., maybe more, happened in the amazing great hall at Fourway on Franklin Street. It included not only poetry and music but dance and video — I distinctly remember Michael Johnson wheeling in a TV on a cart to show video.

Not all is lost (but things have changed)

Despite the devastation wrought by astronomical real estate prices, the consequent exodus of so many younger people from the Vineyard, and the fact that those who remain are often working two or three jobs and have little time to volunteer, there are signs that the grassroots music and arts scene is reviving, thanks in significant measure to nonprofit support and private funding. Circuit Arts, based at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury, is the relatively new umbrella organization drawing together several arts groups, including the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, the M.V. Children’s Theater Camp (a direct descendant of the Children’s Theatre started by Mary Payne), and Circuit Films.

Another new nonprofit, Stillpoint, got the go-ahead earlier this year to convert a West Tisbury barn into a multi-purpose community gathering place.

Wintertide never seriously sought foundation or corporate funding. It might have survived if it had, but for Tony that was out of the question: it would have meant giving up too much control. It’s just about impossible to imagine a seat-of-the-pants operation like Wintertide getting off the ground today, funded entirely by “sweat equity” and with none of the financial kind. But sweat equity magnified by generous donors and professional know-how? It seems to be having an effect.

Notes

[i] The fledgling Martha’s Vineyard Times, about which more later, was free, which the island’s other weekly, the Vineyard Gazette, was not. Everyone agreed that the Gazette had better photographs, but it was also Edgartown-centric and oriented to “the summer people,” neither of which applied to me, and besides, I was looking for island news, not pictures.

[ii] An infuriatingly inaccurate Martha’s Vineyard Patch story from 2012 suggests that we weren’t the only ones who conflated Tony and Wintertide: Tony did too.