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Welcome to the new Tisbury School! It’s 1930. Students, staff, and teachers have moved into the new school on West William Street, to pomp and parades. The deteriorating old Tisbury School on Center Street, together with its overcrowded, two-classroom annex (known as the “portable building” or “portable school”) is abandoned, soon to face the wrecking […]
He was known by everyone as “Charlie Bell” (and in his Vineyard property deeds as “Charles A. Bell”), but that, it turns out, was just his alias. “Charlie was a sight to behold,” recalled the late Stan Lair of Vineyard Haven, “strolling the Main Street with a derby hat and cane, light-colored spats, and a […]
She dressed in men’s clothing. She was openly gay. And she ran this town during the 1930s and ’40s. “Laura Johnson [was] the real, real selectman behind the scenes, out of the express office, with her mannish sweater and her tie, and her hair pulled back, and her swivel chair and all the papers. She […]
Obie Tower liked his toys. Basil Welch reminisced about him in a 1982 conversation with my grandfather, Stan Lair, in a recording made about a year after Obie’s death: “Obie always had a sporty-looking car,” recalled Welch. “He always had a motorcycle, or boats, or something. He thoroughly enjoyed life.” “He also was a musician,” […]
Theophilus Miguel “T. M.” Silvia was born in 1877 on Ilha de São Nicolau, a mountainous island in the Republic of Cabo Verde, the volcanic archipelago nation off the coast of West Africa known to Americans as Cape Verde. Silvia (whose surname many old-timers pronounced “Silvey”) came to the United States as a young man […]