In 1946 I had never heard of Martha’s Vineyard. I was a suburban girl from outside New York City, and a college student at Brown University (the woman’s school was called Pembroke College). In the second semester of my sophomore year, completely bogged down in a chemistry course called Semi-Micro Analysis, and not doing too well in any of the required courses, I requested a switch from chemistry to a class in English literature. I did not have a calling and decided to major in English literature merely because I liked to read. And so the powers that controlled such changes put me in a class of English poetry, and by doing so, mapped out the rest of my life.

I remember studying William Yeats and having almost as little understanding of his poetry as I had had of semi-micro analysis, but I labored on. At least it didn’t involve a three-hour lab period every week during the approaching spring weather, when it was nicer to be outside where the air smelled sweeter than the chemicals I had worked with.

When I began my college career in the fall of 1944, there were few male students at Brown, and the ones who were there seemed very young, too young for the draft, which was dwindling down as the end of the war approached. Early in 1946, however, there began a new surge of men – mature figures starting or returning to college under the GI Bill – closer to twenty-five years of age than seventeen. Pembrokers began to sit up and notice.

In late April of that year, we girls started looking for summer jobs. My friend Debby and I interviewed for waitress jobs and were hired by a hotel on Cape Cod. Ruth and Bonnie snagged jobs at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown, and we settled back into our schoolwork to await the summer. In the meantime, gatherings – called “mixers” – were being organized to help the veterans meet girls, but I wasn’t interested in going to any of them because I was pretty inept in social gatherings where I didn’t know people. But my friend Claire begged me to go with her because she didn’t want to go alone. I resisted at first, but she was so desperate to meet a man that I finally gave in and decided I would stay just long enough to see her launched into a new relationship.

So off we went to the rather informal gathering, which was already crowded when we arrived. There was punch and cookies, swing music playing on a turntable, and small tables and chairs set up around an improvised dance floor. Claire walked right in and joined a mixed group of giggly girls and eager young men, while I pressed myself against the wall near the door, waiting for the right moment to slip out and return to my dorm. But wait – I actually saw a face I recognized. A boy – or rather, a man – in my English poetry class was sitting at a table and there was an empty chair beside him. Swallowing my apprehension, I approached and sat down next to him. I remember discussing some of Yeats’s poetry as if I knew what I was talking about. Johnny Mayhew was polite, and asked me to dance when the subject of Yeats was exhausted. After a while he suggested we walk down into Providence and get a beer at the Old France, a local watering place popular with the students on the hill.

I was glad to leave the mixer and relaxed as we walked and talked of things not poetic. He had been a Navy fighter pilot during the war, and during the hour or so at the Old France he told me about his girlfriend at Mount Holyoke, to whom he had given his fraternity pin. Oh – so he was already taken. Well, I gradually morphed from being an insecure young woman, trying hard to make an impression, into my own self, and by the time we got back onto the campus I was chatting easily about my own dreams and future. We got along, but I had no expectations of seeing him again. Lying in my bed later, I wondered why he even went to the mixer if he already had a girlfriend.

Late in the spring, my two friends with the jobs at the Harbor View made other plans, and Debby and I decided to give up Cape Cod and take their jobs on Martha’s Vineyard. When I told my new friend in my poetry class I planned to spend the summer on his Island, he brought in several issues of the Vineyard Gazette for me to read. It became a source of conversation, an easy way to chat with him. At the last minute my friend Debby backed out, and I was left to go alone to this unknown island off the coast of Cape Cod.

Fifty-seven years ago the Harbor View Hotel was anything but what it is today. I remember when I got the tour through the rooms – no fire escapes, but in every room, tied firmly next to one of the windows, there was a thick rope with knots tied at one-foot intervals. In case of fire, a small sign instructed, the guest was to throw the rope out the window and climb down. Since many of the residents were elderly – and since some of them stayed one or two months – I prayed that there would be no fires.

As a lunch and dinner waitress I received $30 a month, plus room and board. The room was decent enough but the food was sometimes several days old, leftovers left uneaten by the residents. We never got an egg for breakfast, and I wasn’t able to face string beans again until my middle age. After a couple weeks we threatened a strike if they didn’t improve our meals. Management didn’t believe we would do it, but one day none of us turned up to serve lunch. Later the busboys told us with great glee about the elderly patrons scrounging around the kitchen searching for food. Our meals improved the next day.
Many of the residents who stayed for long periods would tip us at the end of each week. I had a party of one who left $1.00 on his table every Saturday, and another party of four who gave me $5.00 a week. My college fund wasn’t adding up very fast.

After three weeks working at the Harbor View, I decided to call Johnny Mayhew, as I knew no one else on the Island but the kids I worked with. That summer he was working on a boat owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but in between trips, we saw each other. He took me to a party deep in the Quansoo woods, which scared me because I knew, if I had to, I would never be able to find my way back to civilization. He took me to see the Gay Head Cliffs – at night – a place besieged by poison ivy and ticks. But the moonlight made it magical.

At the end of August I gave up on the Harbor View and walked into a job at the Edgartown Café, run by Ralph Levinson and his wife. I rented a room in the yellow house on the corner of Main and School streets for $10 a week. But Ralph paid me $25 a week and gave me dinner before I began work each evening – anything on the menu but lobster or steak. Once again I began to enjoy my meals. Each night, just before midnight, I would walk up the street to my room, happily jingling $40 to $50 in tips in the pocket of my apron. On one of my days off, Johnny invited me to his house to cook a roast chicken dinner, but I didn’t have a clue how to cook, so he cooked it – very successfully.

That fall I was anxious to get back to college, but as yet didn’t realize why. In the war years, the semesters had been changed around to allow the men to accelerate their education, and the fall semester didn’t begin until late October. My younger sister fell ill, and I caught what she had and was further delayed in getting back to Providence. By the time I did, half the furniture had been removed from my room because no one knew where I was or whether I would be returning to college, and I was not told of phone calls for me. It was a week before I happened to run into Johnny, and when I did, he asked me out on a date. He had been looking for me – did he himself realize why he was anxious to get back to school? A few weeks later he invited me to the Vineyard for Thanksgiving and we had dinner with his mother and two sisters. Early one morning he took me duck hunting with his cousins Everett and John Whiting and his friend Willy Huntington, and as we sat quietly in the duck blind together, bundled up in parkas and waders, he said to me, “You wouldn’t marry me, would you?” I muttered, “Sure,” and that was that. No ring, no engagement announcement, but by March he finally retrieved his fraternity pin from Mount Holyoke and gave it to me, thus making it official, at least among the academic community.

We were married in September 1947 – I never gave a thought to going back to Pembroke for my senior year – and now it is fifty-seven years later and we have entered our golden years, which are more rusty than golden, but nevertheless, still good. We limp around on our replaced knees and hips, yell at each other because he is going deaf, and feel blessed at the lives we have led in this wonderful community known as West Tisbury.