On the off chance that you ignored the cover of this month’s issue and flipped feverishly to this page in order to see what pearls of insight might await you at the editor’s letter, I would like to remind you that this year is Martha’s Vineyard Magazine’s thirtieth year of publication. And that while we will be marking the anniversary in various ways over the course of the year, in this issue we devoted most of the feature well to looking back fondly. Looking back fondly, of course, is a Vineyard pastime that is even more venerable, not to mention a lot more fun, than looking forward with alarm – though naturally, we do a bit of that, too.
Few people in the history of the Island could conjure up the impending horror as eloquently as the longtime editor of the Vineyard Gazette, Henry Beetle Hough, who incidentally died in 1985 shortly after being interviewed for the inaugural issue of this magazine. “It’s a symbol of the asphalt and chrome culture that we do not have here, and its coming means that we will have succumbed at last to the megalopolis which we have dreaded,” Hough told The New York Times in 1979. “It is the most real and symbolic threat we face.”
The “it,” in that case, was a potential McDonald’s franchise on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven. The thought of a strip of neon golden arches, green mermaids, ogling owls, and God knows what else along the harborfront – for you know they would have followed – is as horrifying today as it ever was. But it’s good to remember that it was never a foregone conclusion that Hough and his equally indignant allies, a group that seemed to include virtually the entire Island at the time, would ultimately win. Quite the opposite, in fact, which is why when they did defeat Goliath The New York Times took note. That article also noted that “Similar anti-modernist sentiments have in the past fought off traffic lights, neon signs, billboards, parking lots and parking meters, highways, shopping center, and jet airplanes, leaving this Island happily adrift somewhere in the mid-1940s.”
If my math is correct, that would put us now happily adrift somewhere in the mid-1980s. Having personally spent a few years happily adrift in the mid-1980s, that’s not an entirely bad concept, presidential politics aside. The math does not hold, however, mostly because the good fight against both real and symbolic threats to the heart and soul of the Island never stopped.
Nor, really, does The New York Times’ amusing description stand up to scrutiny. “Adrift,” as it turns out, is not at all what the Island was. Or, one hopes, is. Looking back over the past thirty years, the adjective “adrift” looks to me far more like a description of the indistinguishable groundhog-day strip developments that so many off-Island towns have talked themselves into swallowing. Adrift is the opposite of the Vineyard way, where no community decision is seemingly too small for prolonged gnashing and wailing. Or at least a bumper sticker.
So, while we had a lot of fun with this issue, we came not to bury Vineyard outrage, but to praise it.
