A Martha’s Vineyard Tactical Response Team training exercise Thursday at the Edgartown Cinema offered both a somber reminder of recent terrorism and a reassuring sense that Island law enforcement is as prepared as possible for such events.
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As the North Bluff restoration project in Oak Bluffs comes under fresh public scrutiny, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission asked for more information and better drawings at a public hearing Thursday night.
The Aquinnah tribe on Friday asked a federal judge to reconsider his decision to reject its bid to build a gambling hall on tribal land. Attorneys for the tribe are seeking oral arguments and asked U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor 4th to take note of new developments.
Well more than 100 people gathered for the festive annual Hanukkah party at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Friday, the sixth night of Hanukkah and the eve of the new month in the Hebrew calendar.
When the bells of the Old Whaling Church clock chimed 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, anticipation was high in downtown Edgartown for the 34th annual Christmas parade, one of the marquee events of Christmas in Edgartown weekend.
Elizabeth Francis and Ramon Espino of Edgartown announce the birth of a daughter, Isabella Suarez Francis-Espino, born Dec. 11.
The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank reported revenues of $233,921.12 for the business week ending on Friday, Dec. 11, 2015.
The sixth annual Brazilian-American Friendship lunch turned the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School culinary arts dining room into an international cafe Friday afternoon.
The town capital programs committee recommended $1.7 million worth of projects to selectmen Monday, including a new ambulance, street paving and highway equipment.
Charles W. Tilton Jr., a longtime resident of Cuttyhunk, died in Greenville, S.C., on Sunday, Dec. 6. He was 83.
The Tilton family came over to Cuttyhunk from the Vineyard in the mid 1800s. Charles W. Tilton Sr. married Sarah J. Clark, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter in the early 1920s and had three children. Charlie was born on Cuttyhunk where he grew up with his two sisters, Doris and Sally.
He is one of the few people to attend the one-room school house on Cuttyhunk, until he went to the mainland for high school. At age 12, he was given the opportunity to begin fishing as a bass guide and it served him well his entire life. He earned enough money during the summers on the Island as a bass fishing guide and doing other related waterman work to pay for college at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he majored in civil engineering. Charlie spent a little time in the U.S. Army, then worked for various companies. He retired after many years working for General Dynamics in Groton, Conn., but frequently returned to fish and enjoy Cuttyhunk. After his retirement, he lived on the island most of the year and plied his trade as a fishing guide, operated a water taxi service, and just enjoyed being on Cuttyhunk.
His life was featured in a Cape Cod Life article in 2013.
Charlie will be missed by many, on-Island and off. A life lived as a bass guide and operating a water taxi service brought him in contact with many people over decades. He will be remembered fondly as a warm, knowledgeable, and talented fisherman, guide and friend.
He is survived by his loving wife, Betty C. Tilton; daughter Kathy Tilton; son Charles W. Tilton 3rd and his wife Jennifer; step-daughters Stephanie Smith and her husband Stuart, and Lydia Combs and her husband Robert; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held next year on Cuttyhunk.
Barbara Ivry died quietly on Dec. 3, two days after her family and friends raised a toast and ate icebox cake in honor of her 90th birthday.
Bobby, as all knew her, was born in New York city on Dec. 1, 1925, the first child of Herman and Bertha Herskowitz. A proud product of New York’s public school system, Bobby graduated from Hunter College with a degree in journalism and English literature. After graduation, she worked for the city of New York while contemplating a move to California to attend journalism school, with thoughts of becoming a beat writer for her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. However, Cupid’s arrow intervened when her parents arranged, in a not-so-subtle way, a meeting with David Ivry, the son of a friend. Bobby loved to recount their first date, listening to a Dodgers game on the radio with her parents hovering in the background.
Married in 1948, Bobby and Dave moved to Storrs, Conn., where Dave had been appointed as a professor at the University of Connecticut. They shared 50 wonderful years on Westwood Road, raising their four children and becoming pillars of the community. Among her many activities, Bobby organized the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, spearheaded local campaigns in support of Democratic candidates, and was the first instructor at the UConn chapter of Hillel. In 1970, Bobby returned to school, earning a master of social work degree in 1974. After graduation, she worked as a psychiatric social worker at the Community Child Guidance Clinic in Manchester, taking tremendous pleasure in working with local families until her retirement in 1990. In retirement, Bobby continued with her volunteer work, nurtured her azaleas and dogwoods, and indulged in her great passion for travel. Following Dave’s death in 2000, she made her way back to New York city and loved rediscovering the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side. Always the “wandering Jew,” Bobby spent much of her last years on the road, treasuring time with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in New York, New Mexico, and California.
Bobby lived life curiously. To her, the world was an open classroom, a place to wonder about the mysteries of biology, geology and climatology. Her curiosity was best reflected in her favorite word of the past few years, “delicious.” The California sun? Delicious. New York foliage? Delicious. The sand under her toes as she trudged over the dunes to Philbin Beach? Delicious. She held court from behind her New York Times every morning, armed with coffee, cheese and toast. Nothing made her happier than the family’s yearly pilgrimages to Martha’s Vineyard, a tradition that started in 1966 and continues to this day; just three months ago, Bobby yet again impressed the crowd with her most unique backstroke. She had an uncanny ability to win every game of Scrabble or bridge, and usually finished in the money in the family Hold ‘Em tournaments. Whether sampling swordfish at a beach barbecue, reciting a snippet of a Coleridge poem, or ripping the bark from an unsuspecting oak, Bobby read the world as a place of mystery and pleasure. That excitement, that freshness, that love, is something that each of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as countless friends, will always attempt to emulate.
She is survived by her brother Elliot Herskowitz, sisters in law Lita Herskowitz and Lillian Libertoff, and her four devoted children, Rob, Judy, Bill, and Rich. Her children, together with their spouses Patti Ivry, Phil Block, the late Joan Gallini, and Ann Lacey, produced the greatest treasure of Bobby’s life: eight grandchildren, Lizzie, Greg, Seth, Asa, Ani, Henry, Sam, and Juli Rou, and five great-grandchildren, Dylan, Josh, Hudson, Tate, and Grace.
Donations in Bobby’s memory may be made to Planned Parenthood, plannedparenthood.org, or the Vineyard Conservation Society.
Dr. Belinda Crompton Straight, 95, a longtime summer resident of Chilmark, died Dec. 5 at her assisted living home in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was pneumonia. She also had dementia.
From the 1940s until 2007, Dr. Straight visited the Vineyard almost every summer. After renting several different properties in Chilmark and Menemsha in the 1950s, she and her husband Michael Whitney Straight knew they wanted to own property and build a house in Chilmark. They bought land overlooking Quitsa Pond, and helped with the design and building of the house which was completed in 1963. In summers, the house was almost always filled with their children and other relatives and friends. Following her divorce from Michael Straight in 1969, Dr. Straight rented other Chilmark houses for summer vacations, and for a few years in the 1980s she owned a house near the town landing on Quitsa Pond.
Beginning in the 1950s, Chilmark became the place for Dr. Straight’s special friendships. Her close friends included Roger and Evelyn Baldwin, Gilbert and Nancy Harrison, Stan and Polly Murphy, Milton and Virginia Mazer, Louise Bowie Graves, Helen Manning and Trudy Taylor, to name a few.
She was a prominent psychiatrist in the Washington, D.C., area from 1952 until her retirement in 2007 at age 87.
She served on a small team of physicians who traveled to Selma, Ala., in 1965 to provide emergency first aid and triage to civil rights marchers. Six hundred marchers were preparing to walk from Selma to Montgomery to support voting rights for blacks and to protest the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a local civil right leader who had been murdered by an Alabama state trooper. The first Selma march was held on March 7, which became known as Bloody Sunday, when police used billy clubs and tear gas to attack and injure scores of marchers.
The (Washington) Evening Star of March 12, 1965, reported that Dr. Straight said the medical team was ready with four ambulances including two hearses on March 7. “We made splints out of rolled-up newspapers. We sent boys to different homes to get sheets for slings and converted a minister’s house into a first aid station. Children brought blankets to put on the floor, since we had only one table,” she told the newspaper.
In an article in the April 9, 1965, Vineyard Gazette, Dr. Straight described what she saw and did on Bloody Sunday. “The injured began to pour into the kitchen. The little house rocked with cries of anguish. Stumbling, limping, bleeding, retching — more and more staggered in. Some were blinded, others could scarcely breathe, some in terror did not know who or where they were. Over the choking fumes rose the sobs and cries of horror of the relatives,” she told the Gazette.
One of the injured marchers Dr. Straight assisted was John Lewis, who had a fractured skull. At the time, as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, he was a principal organizer of the Selma marches. Later as a congressman from Georgia, he met Dr. Straight in his Washington office in 2007 for the first time since she treated him in 1965.
Dr. Straight and the medical team were prepared for more violence during the second Selma march on Tuesday March 9, 1965. John Lewis left the hospital and joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma with several thousand supporters. Among the marchers that day was Dr. Straight’s 78-year-old mother, Lillian Tobey, who was the widow of U.S. Sen. Charles Tobey. Mrs. Tobey went to Selma to march alongside former Congresswoman Emily Douglas (wife of U.S. Senator Paul H. Douglas) and Jane Ickes (widow of Interior Secretary and New Deal architect Harold Ickes). That march ended after organizers voluntarily turned the marchers around after crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Dr. Straight returned to Washington, D.C., after the second march. The third march started in Selma on March 12 and ended when marchers reached Montgomery on March 24, escorted by U.S. Army soldiers and federalized Alabama National Guardsmen.
Dr. Straight was born Belinda Booth Crompton in Port Chester, N.Y. in 1920. She married Michael Whitney Straight in 1939. She attended Vassar College and George Washington University. After having four children, she received her M.D. from New York University in 1952, at a time when there were few women physicians.
Dr. Straight had numerous clinical and academic appointments, and from 1960 until 2007 she had a private practice specializing in child and adult psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. During that time, she became a nationally-recognized expert in therapy for child and adult sex abuse victims.
For the past five years she lived at Brighton Gardens of Friendship Heights, an assisted living community in Chevy Chase, Md.
She is survived by her five children, David Straight of Knoxville, Tenn., Michael Straight of Rockville, Md., Susan Straight of Trumansburg, N.Y. and Chilmark, Dinah Straight Krosnick of New York city, and Dorothy Elmhirst Straight of Newbury; and by four grandchildren, Noah Rindos, Willow Rindos, Gwendolyn Krosnick and Joshua Krosnick; two step-grandchildren, Jessica Miller of West Tisbury and David Burt of Dover and West Tisbury; and four step great-grandchildren, Marissa D’Antonio of West Tisbury, Isis Burt of West Tisbury and Aurora and Graydon Burt of Dover and West Tisbury.
