The Vineyard - 1960

Our last summer on the Vineyard more than made up for the boredom of Block Island. The summer started out much differently than other Vineyard summers because the Massachusetts ferries were on strike. Some entrepreneurial fishermen chartered out their trawlers to take cars across to the island. One car could fit on each boat. A crane would pick up the car and set it down cross-ways on the deck. My grandmother's station wagon barely fit due to its length. The weight of the car made the trawler top-heavy. Luckily, the seas were calm or the car might easily have caused the boat to capsize. My grandmother would have been happy if it had. The car was a Studebaker Lark and was always in the repair shop. There was a reason Studebakers were affectionately known as "steadybreakers."

Nootka and Bjarni at the Norton House 1960 - Mr. B is gnawing on a baseball

Janice and Ricky Norton 1960

We rented a house on a working farm, Buttonwood Farm, in Tisbury. It was a strange set-up. The driveway to the house was more than a half-mile long through the woods. The farm owner's original house was another half-mile farther up the driveway. It had partially burned down so he built another house on the same property and hadn't even moved his family into the new house before renting it out for the summer. The farm owner, Robert Norton, and his son Ricky still lived in the partially burned-down house. Mable, his wife, lived in the back room of a bakery stand located on State Road at the entrance to the farm. She sold home-made pies from there. The two daughters, Joyce and Janice, lived in a small shed across from the cow barn. They were identical twins and their father truly could not tell them apart. It took a while for John and I to figure out which girl was which but we were finally able to do so. Like the Block Island rental house the year before, the Norton house was in the middle of nowhere, not close to the beach or town, but unlike Block Island, this summer was far from boring. Being on a farm was fun. John and I got to milk cows and ride horses. Joyce and Janice were tomboys, just our age, and we hung out together most days. John and I lived upstairs in the house, everyone else was on the first floor. We would blast our radio and sing along to Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" and the Safari's "Image of a Girl." Straw hats were in vogue that summer. The ones we wore were outrageous.

John and Rob 1960

Some of the farm animals had cool, alliterative names such as Buttonwood Booted Bettina and Buttonwood Bewitching Belle. The horses we rode were named Cadet and Bucky. We used to ride bareback, double, John with Joyce and me with Janice. We rode all over the place, through the fields and woods, sometimes pretty fast. One time Janice and I galloped around the barn too fast and came upon an unsuspecting calf. The horse jumped over the calf, I fell off and the calf landed on top of me. Janice thought it was hilarious. I didn't think so at the time but do now. Another thing we liked to do was ride over to Rozie Thaxter's, one of the neighbors. She had several peacocks and we liked to go there to collect feathers. I learned not to get too close to them; peacocks are noisy and have a mean streak.

We didn't spend 24-7 on the farm. John and I managed to get in plenty of fishing trips. We liked to take the party-fishing boats out of Oak Bluffs. One day we were out with maybe 10 other fishermen. I was fishing off the stern with everyone except John and nobody was catching much. John, thinking the stern was too crowded, was by himself up by the bow. I went up to see how he was doing and he was catching fish like crazy. Naturally, I stayed with him. Together we filled a large garbage can. The two of us caught more than everyone else combined. I think it had to do with the way we were drifting. The bait from the fishermen on the stern was acting like chum and attracting the fish but they found our hooks first.

We didn't go to the beach daily as had been our summer habit for years; the beaches closest to the house faced Vineyard Sound and weren't that good. But when my older brothers came to visit, they would take John and I to Barnhouse Beach. You won't find Barnhouse Beach on any map of the Vineyard. It was a well-kept secret of the surfing crowd. Barnhouse Beach was on the south shore of the island near Chilmark. You had to park on the shoulder of South Road and walk about a half mile through the dunes to get to the beach. The waves were awesome, many too big to ride. We'd often get bounced off the bottom when the waves broke. It was probably dangerous but I was 13 and didn't know any better.

I was sorry to see the summer end. We did not summer on the Vineyard again, opting instead for its sister island, Nantucket, a new frontier.