This issue marks the beginning of the thirtieth year of publication of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, which first went on the stands in the summer of 1985. Thirty years is a long time when looked at forward. If I’m still editing this magazine in 2045, I’ll not just be lucky to have a great job, I’ll be lucky to be breathing.
Looking at thirty years in the other direction, however, back to 1985, is like turning a telescope around and peering at something as familiar as your front door through the wrong end. Events and memories from those days seem unnaturally far away, distant and tiny, even though it’s hard to believe that so much time has actually passed. Places and people that should be right there in front of you, within easy reach, are instead halfway across Nantucket Sound. Without belaboring the obvious, anyone old enough to remember the mid-1980s must wonder, as I do, where the rest of that century and the first fifteen years of this one have gone.
In 1985 there was no shortage of celebrities on the Island in summer, but the Vineyard had not been the scene of a full-on presidential visit since Ulysses S. Grant came to Oak Bluffs in 1874. The Clintons were still in Arkansas, the Obamas were in graduate school, and the Vineyard was famous off-Island mostly as the location for the shooting of the movie Jaws. (Which, incidentally, turns forty this year.) On Island, the ferry terminal in Vineyard Haven was old and funky. The terminal in Oak Bluffs was old and funky. The airport was old and funky. The hospital was old and positively scary funky. It was all pretty funky, but that didn’t stop almost anyone who had already been here for ten or thirty years from reminding the newly arrived that “you should have been here back when it was all simple, and funky.”
They were no doubt right about that, though I wouldn’t know: I didn’t get to the Island with any regularity until the mid-eighties. It used to rub me the wrong way, the subtly possessive and relentless nostalgia among the Island “regulars.” Thirty years on, I confess I can now appreciate that old-time Kool-Aid a little. It’s an acquired taste, like moldy cheese. For what it’s worth, however, this island has changed less dramatically in the last three decades than the “happy valley” in western Massachusetts where I grew up. Or than downtown Manhattan, where I was living before coming here. Or, I suppose, than my waistline.
Over the next year we will occasionally pat ourselves on the back for our thirty years of publication. Magazines notoriously come and go, and it’s a testament to all the past and current editors, publishers and contributors that we are still here and going strong. And also to our advertisers, who make it all possible year after year. But we’ll spend more time looking forward and around than looking back. There’s a lot to pay attention to on Martha’s Vineyard, some of it worrisome, some of it beautiful, some of it inspiring, and some of it just plain funky.
Change occasionally seems to roll over this part of the world like a storm tide, but by some combination of vigilance and good luck, much also manages to endure. We’re happy to be here.
