Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Jaws returns. Celebrate the film’s fiftieth anniversary with events on the Island, including Amity Homecoming Weekend at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Vineyard Haven from June 19 to 23. The Vineyard Gazette Media Group (VGMG) will cohost a day-long event at the museum on June 22 called Jaws 50th: The Reunion. Expect meet-and-greets with Islanders who participated in the movie and get a copy of the VGMG’s specialty publication, Jaws 50 Martha’s Vineyard: Commemorative Anniversary Edition, which includes rarely seen photos, firsthand accounts from Islanders involved in the film, a map of filming locations, and more.
What to Do
Honor the 160th anniversary of the formal end to slavery in the United States with a Juneteenth panel discussion at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Vineyard Haven. On June 19, from 5 to 6 p.m., Bow Van Riper, research librarian at the museum, and Dani Monroe, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, will discuss the history and future of the holiday.
Head to the Gospel Brunch on June 22, from noon to 2 p.m., at the Edgartown Yacht Club for live gospel music and great food.
What to Watch
Filmmaker and part-time Vineyard resident Mara Brock Akil has been coming to the Island since 1996. As a kid, she roamed freely with friends. “It was just beautiful,” she told the Vineyard Gazette in an interview last spring. She reconnected with those memories last May while filming an episode of Forever – an adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel of the same name about young love – on the Island.
The series premieres on Netflix on May 8. Stream it to spot Island locations and locals as extras.
What’s Up and What’s Down
Forget about the New York Stock Exchange. We’ll tell you what’s up and what’s down on the Island, what’s rising and what’s falling. Remember: buy low, sell high.
Up:
Temperatures in Mill Pond have risen to dangerous levels, according to a multi-year study by West Tisbury’s Mill Brook watershed management committee. During the summer of 2023, water temperatures at the pond regularly exceeded 68 degrees, the upper limit for cold-water fisheries, with temps peaking at 84 degrees. This increase “has a clear negative impact on temperature-sensitive species of macroinvertebrates,” entomologist Greg Whitmore told the Gazette in February of this year.
Down:
About 175 acres of white pines and other trees in the southeast corner of the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest could come down if a proposal supported by Vineyard ecologists, fire chiefs, and other groups moves forward. The plan is to remove an area of non-native pines in an attempt to restore part of the forest into a sandplain grassland. Why? The State Forest Task Force said that bringing the trees down would improve fire safety, help preserve biodiversity, and cultivate one of the world’s last sandplains.
Numerology
400 – The length, in feet, of a section of Stonewall Beach in Chilmark that several homeowners have proposed bolstering in an attempt to save their houses, which are perilously close to cliff and bluff edges.
2 – The rate, in feet, that Stonewall Beach has been eroding per year.
1 – The distance, in feet, that the house at 18 Greenhouse Lane is from the edge of the bluff.
“It’s been a long and winding road.”
– Brad Woodger reminisced in the Gazette in March after the Royal and Ancient Chappaquiddick Links, the golf course built by his great-grandfather Frank Marshall in 1887, sold to Doug Halbert for over $1 million. Halbert said his plan for the course is to “do no harm.”
What to Read
From Founder to Future: A Business Road Map to Impact, Longevity, and Employee Ownership by John Abrams (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, June 2025)
Thinking of starting a business? To get the beginning right, start with the end. That’s what John Abrams, the now-retired president and cofounder of South Mountain Company, an Island-based worker-owned architecture, building, interiors, and energy technology firm, advises in his new book about creating a small business.
To get off on the right foot, consider the path you want to take, all the way to your succession plan, Abrams recommends. And, if that path involves doing good in addition to doing well, consider a cooperative model. “Small businesses can be living systems that work for all the right reasons: to make people’s lives more meaningful and satisfying, to spread wealth more equitably, to enhance democracy, to treat the planet and each other better, and to protect mission and purpose,” writes Abrams in the book’s introduction. Learn from his ups and downs and take the success of South Mountain Company as proof of concept.
