1:47 pm, May 13, 2016
Kate Goldsmith of West Tisbury was among the top three scorers in this year’s Falmouth Academy merit scholarship exam.
↧
Top Scorer on Falmouth Academy Exam
↧
April High School Engineering Challenge Results
1:50 pm, May 13, 2016
The final engineering challenge of the school year was a K-Cup composting challenge.
↧
↧
Food Trucks Rolling to Oak Bluffs This Summer
11:03 pm, May 13, 2016
Oak Bluffs selectmen approved permits for two food trucks to operate this summer, the first since the board established a set of regulations governing mobile food establishments.
↧
With New Manager on Board, Airport Sets Fresh Agenda
7:28 am, May 14, 2016
A good report card from a recent federal inspection and a plan by manager Ann Crook to bring in more revenues topped the monthly meeting of the airport commission this week.
↧
All-Island Band Says We Will Rock You and Delivers
7:41 am, May 14, 2016
On Thursday night the All-Island Band, featuring more than 200 students, performed their spring concert. The music ranged from Harlem Nocturn to We Will Rock You by Queen.
↧
↧
Rita Klingensmith, 73
Sunday, May 15, 2016 - 1:19pm
Rita M. (Viggiano) Klingensmith of Edgartown died on Saturday, May 14, at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. She was 73.
She was the wife of John J. Klingensmith Sr. and the mother of John J. Klingensmith Jr. and Mark Klingensmith.
A graveside service for the interment of her cremains will be held on Wednesday, June 22 at 11:30 a.m. at the New Westside Cemetery on Robinson Road in Edgartown, officiated by Rev. Michael Nagle.
Arrangements are under the care of the Chapman, Cole and Gleason Funeral Home in Oak Bluffs. An online guestbook is available at ccgfuneralhome.com.
A complete obituary will appear in a future edition of the Gazette.
↧
Rev. Amy Edwards, Pastor of Federated Church, Followed Lifelong Desire to Serve Others
Sunday, May 15, 2016 - 1:33pm
The Reverend Amelia E. (Amy) Edwards of Westport died on Friday, May 13. She was 55.
She served as pastor of the Federated Church of Edgartown.
Born and raised in Providence, R.I., Amy was a graduate of Wheeler School, Union College and Suffolk University School of Law, where she was elected to the Law Review. Later, she earned her degree in social work from Rhode Island College. She received her Master of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School in 2015.
The course of Amy’s call to ministry was driven by her loving spirit and lifelong desire to serve others. That path led her through the practice of law into counseling and therapy, culminating in the creation of Lotus Rising, a holistic wellness center in Fall River. In August 2015, she was called to serve as pastor of the Federated Church in Edgartown.
She touched the lives of those around her and lived by these words: “Dance, as though no one is watching you. Sing as though no one can hear you. Love as though you have never been hurt before. Live as though heaven is on earth.”
Amy was the beloved wife of the late Michael J. B. Pierce. She was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Beverley (Flather) Edwards and the late Charles G. Edwards Esq. In addition to her mother, Amy is survived by her sister Katherine Edwards Mullen and her husband John; her brother Mark Edwards and his wife Wanda; her stepchildren Brittany and Michael Pierce, and several nieces and nephews.
A celebration of her life will be held on Saturday, May 21 at 11 a.m. at the United Congregational Church, The Commons in Little Compton, R.I. Everyone is invited to wear bright colors, in celebration of her life, and to sing as though no one can hear them.
Memorial contributions in her honor may be made to the outreach ministries of either the United Congregational Church of Little Compton, P.O. Box 506, Little Compton, R.I. , 02837, or the Federated Church, P.O. Box 249, Edgartown, MA 02539.
Arrangements are in the care of the Waring-Sullivan Home of Memorial Tribute at Cherry Place in Fall River, waring-sullivan.com.
↧
Event Puts Spotlight on Heroin Problem
5:45 am, May 16, 2016
A large crowd gathered at the Oak Bluffs School Friday that focused on heroin addiction. The organizer was Billy Pfaff, founder of the Facebook group Heroin Is Killing My Town.
↧
Memorial Service for David O. Douglas
Monday, May 16, 2016 - 2:00pm
A celebration of life for David Douglas will be held on Sunday, June 5 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury. Friends and family are invited to come as you are, bring a dish and share some memories.
Mr. Douglas, who owned Rainbow Farm in West Tisbury and bred prize-winning Charolais cattle, died March 18 at age 75.
↧
↧
Teaching Others to Shine by Being the Brightest Star
4:40 pm, May 16, 2016
Goodbyes are hard and often left unspoken. People avoid the emotions associated with goodbyes: sadness, anxiety, loss, even anger. Our avoidance is perhaps a natural part of the letting go.
↧
Middle Road Paving
4:50 pm, May 16, 2016
Portions of Middle Road will be temporarily closed to traffic over the next week because of paving.
↧
Women Empowered Receives Cape Cod 5 Grant
5:03 pm, May 16, 2016
Cape Cod 5 Charitable Foundation Trust presented a $2,000 grant to Women Empowered.
↧
Emily Lowe Graduates
5:15 pm, May 16, 2016
Emily Lowe of West Tisbury has graduated from Emerson College with a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing communications.
↧
↧
UMass Dartmouth Graduates
5:28 pm, May 16, 2016
Vanessa Jahara of Oak Bluffs, Erica Klyuncheva of Edgartown, and Allyson Syslo of Chilmark have graduated from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
↧
Holly Smith Receives Law Degree
5:32 pm, May 16, 2016
Holly Smith from Vineyard Haven has received a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Massachusetts School of Law — Dartmouth.
↧
Selectmen Explore Buying Generator for New Edgartown Library
5:41 pm, May 16, 2016
Funds for an emergency generator were cut from the Edgartown library budget early in the building process, but now school and library officials say one is needed. Selectmen will explore the idea.
↧
Quiet Ceremony Remembers Viet Nam Veterans
10:30 am, May 17, 2016
The Marthas’s Vineyard Seacoast Defence Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), sponsored the wreath-laying ceremony in front of the Edgartown courthouse Monday.
↧
↧
No New Nitrogen: Tisbury Proposes Bold Regulations to Protect Ponds
11:14 am, May 17, 2016
The Tisbury board of health is considering new rules aimed at protecting the health of Lake Tashmoo and Lagoon Pond. For the first time, the rules would hold property owners accountable for wastewater associated with new development in the two watersheds.
↧
Robert von Mehren, Lawyer in Alger Hiss Trials, Raced His Sailboat on the Vineyard
Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - 1:08pm
Robert B. von Mehren, the last surviving lawyer in the infamous Alger Hiss trials, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause of death was congestive heart failure, according to his wife, Susan Heller Anderson, a writer and former reporter for The New York Times. A longtime seasonal resident of Chilmark, Mr. von Mehren bought his home from James Cagney in 1957.
As a young lawyer for the firm that is now Debevoise & Plimpton, Mr. von Mehren served on the defense counsel team representing Alger Hiss, a highly regarded former government official, during his two trials for perjury in 1949 and 1950. Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and former Communist Party member, had testified before the Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (also known as HUAC) and accused Mr. Hiss, then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of being a Communist Party member and a spy for the Soviet Union while working for the U.S. government. Newspapers labeled The United States of America v. Alger Hiss “the trial of the century.”
“No criminal case had a more far-reaching effect on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case, which held Americans spellbound in the middle of the twentieth century,” wrote Douglas Linder in the University of Missouri School of Law Journal. “The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Communist hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House.”
Richard M. Nixon subsequently became nationally famous for his pursuit of Communists, especially Mr. Hiss, and 20 years later he was elected president. He revealed later, in the Watergate tapes, that he had mounted a systematic campaign of leaking information that would turn opinion against Hiss. “We won the Hiss case in the papers...I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn’t even cooperate. We had to develop a program, a program for leaking out information,” Nixon said on the tapes.
During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage, which both men had denied previously under oath to HUAC. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, as the statute of limitations had expired for the charge of espionage. After a first mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time and, in January 1950, he was found guilty and sentenced to two concurrent five-year prison terms, of which he eventually served three and a half years. Mr. von Mehren, who worked almost exclusively on the Hiss case for nearly three years, attended every day of both trials and maintained contact with Mr. Hiss until the latter’s death in 1996. He believed that the proper decision, had it been possible, would have been the Scottish law verdict of “Not Proved.”
Among the many positions Mr. von Mehren held outside the law firm, those of which he was proudest were as legal counsel to the Preparatory Commission of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which composed the guidelines for the United Nations agency that exist today; consultant to the Rand Corporation on disarmament; consultant to the Hudson Institute on international law, and senior lecturer of law at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Before his retirement as a partner in 1995, he was chairman of Debevoise’s litigation department and served as lead counsel in many landmark arbitrations, including Texaco Overseas Petroleum Company and California Asiatic Oil Company vs. the Government of Libya, protecting overseas assets invested in nationalized foreign governments’ property, a case ongoing today.
An active proselytizer of arbitration in dispute resolutions, Mr. von Mehren taught and lectured frequently all over the world. He pioneered international arbitration among American lawyers, serving in more than four dozen arbitrations after he “retired” from Debevoise. A prolific contributor to legal publications, he was a co-editor of American Arbitration: Principles and Practice (2009).
His pro bono positions included chairman, vice chairman and/or president of the International Law Association, the Practicing Law Institute, the American branch of the International Law Association, several committees of the City Bar Association of New York and the Harvard Law School Association of New York. He was an honorary member of the Commercial Bar of London and the Singapore Bar. He was also on the board of the American Arbitration Association, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the vice-president emeritus of the Axe-Hougton Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Century Association and the University Club.
Born in Albert Lea, Minn., he won a national scholarship to Yale University and graduated summa cum laude, then magna cum laude from the Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the law review in 1946. Upon graduation he became associated with Debevoise, where he spent most of his career until he became an international arbitrator. He clerked for Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Learned Hand, whose bawdy limericks he delighted in reciting from memory, and Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed. He retired from arbitrating in 2013.
An avid sailor, Mr. von Mehren raced his beloved sailboat, the Mariner Phalarope, on Martha’s Vineyard, where he owned a home on North Road in Chilmark that he bought from the actor James Cagney in 1957.
In addition to his wife, Mr. von Mehren is survived by his loving children: a son, Carl; three daughters, Katharine, Jane and Margaret; and Philip D. Anderson, his stepson. He was predeceased by his first wife, Mary Katharine, his younger son, John, and his identical twin, Arthur T. von Mehren.
In lieu of flowers contributions may be made in his name to the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, 57 David avenue, Vineyard Haven MA 02568. A private interment will be held in October at Abel’s Hill Cemetery, following which the family will receive friends at an address to be announced.
↧
Barbara Walker Summered in Menemsha for Half a Century
Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - 1:58pm
Barbara Martin Walker died suddenly from a stroke at her home in New Jersey on March 25. She was 92 and won’t be on the Island this summer for the first time in almost 50 years.
She was born in Manhattan and attended the Putney School and Wellesley College. She married Robert Gill Walker of Meadville, Pa. They settled in Newtown Conn., then in Pittsburgh, where their first three children were born.
World War II must have changed their expectations. She could not settle for life as housewife and mother and he was not happy with the practice of law. They headed for post-War Washington D.C., a job for Bob in State Department intelligence, and two more children. Still not satisfied, Barbara encouraged Bob to join the newly-expanded U.S. Foreign Service.
Their first assignment was Brazil. She travelled alone, pregnant, on PanAm, with five young children. She loved the change, the challenge and the country. She enthusiastically engaged in the unpaid job of Foreign Service spouse, honed her skills as organizer, hostess and volunteer at a medical clinic. Nearly three years later, they transferred to Buenos Aires. There, good fortune brought Norma Aranguiz Baez to be housekeeper, cook and nanny. A native of Chile, she moved in with her two children, and stayed for 30 years.
The next stop for the family, with little notice, was Chile. A crowded VW van drove across the Andes and a new house and dogs were identified; younger children distributed among different schools, older ones flown to boarding school in the States, until 1966, when the family returned to D.C.
Barbara returned to school for a master’s degree in teaching. Censured during her first public school teaching job for taking black high school students to a civil rights demonstration, she joined the Washington International School and the World Federalist Movement.
During their pre-travel years, Barbara and Bob explored Martha’s Vineyard at the behest of friends. Taken by the sunset from a hill overlooking Menemsha Pond, they purchased a lot in an area known as Red Ground. Later, they hired Chia-Ming Sze to design a modern house for large numbers of children. They furnished it sparsely, preserving a camp-like atmosphere. Their devotion to international government was displayed every July 4th when the United Nations flag flew next to the Stars and Stripes from the deck. They welcomed members of their own and extended families and friends. Barbara’s younger brother, Sandy, an avid fisherman, and his wife, Peg, were yearly visitors, adding their four children to the flock.
By 1985, they downsized to Princeton. Norma stayed in Maryland with her son, except in summer when she joined them on the Island until her retirement. Barbara was now editing books about World Federalism and planning conferences for a newly-formed committee on teaching About the U.N. She and Bob played tennis and gardened. They filled their house with the work of Vineyard artists, Stan Murphy, Albert Alcalay, Marsha Winsyrg. She was regularly at the West Tisbury Farmer’s Market. The two sailed on Menemsha Pond and frequented the Menemsha Store, Larsen’s Fish Market and Our Market in Oak Bluffs.
As children and grandchildren grew up and married, Barbara and Bob embraced partners and spouses, grandchildren, step, adopted and biological, of whatever race, faith or gender orientation. The children had the run of Menemsha, formed friendships at the Chilmark Community Center and became close to their progressive grandparents.
The Vineyard also became the place for important celebrations: their 50th anniversary, the weddings of their youngest daughter and oldest grandson. As Bob’s health declined, doctors urged him to find drier air for his lungs. By August 2008, he was hospitalized, remained on the Island until his usual October departure and died in New Jersey on Nov. 5 that year.
Barbara returned the next summer, to host the wedding of one granddaughter and the following summer for the wedding of another granddaughter. She continued to gather family groups and do water aerobics and Pilates. She was forgetting things and needed help, but by March of this year she already was asking: “When are we going to the Vineyard? Have you made the ferry reservations?”
Her work as an internationalist was remembered May 13 at a service across the street from the UN.
She will be interred next to Bob on Abel’s Hill in Chilmark. Donations in her honor can be made to Committee on Teaching About the UN or the World Federalist Movement.
↧