An off-islander by birth, Herb Custer Jr. might as well have been a native. Charter fishing brought him to the Vineyard on a fishing trip. He lived his long life as an islander, fitting the mold perfectly and comfortably, no trimming necessary. Absent a permanent political class, islanders have for centuries found their leaders among the house carpenters, farmers, fishermen, shopkeepers, mechanics, police officers, real estate brokers, innkeepers, the occasional physician, gardeners, and school teachers among us. Herb discovered for himself  that he was a match for this sort of life rhythm, common in Vineyard towns throughout the 20th Century.

Herb, who died on August 17 this year at 90, earned his living as a sailor, shellfisherman, and fishing guide. He served for years on the town planning board, the land bank, and the shellfish advisory council, but also, and especially, as a school teacher and administrator. In that role, Herb left a lasting mark on the school system, and particularly on the students he taught, because he saw when most folks didn’t that life might be lively, productive, and rewarding for young people who learned vocational skills that have come to be prized today in the Vineyard’s roaring 21st Century economy. Such educational goals for Vineyard students under his care made sense to Herb, because they made sense in his own life.

Sometimes I, a newspaper guy, needed to talk with Herb during his four years (1991-1995) as superintendent of Vineyard schools. When scallop season was on in Vineyard Haven, I didn’t bother chasing Herb at his office. I would find him tidying up his boat before selling his day’s catch.

“What do you want?” he’d say. And, then, “Grab the other side of this basket.” And we would talk. Sometimes we talked only about boats and sailing, or shellfishing. But, sometimes he was wrestling with some budget or personnel problem, and one could hear him working through it as he talked. He never complained about school personnel he oversaw. His genial modesty and unflinching resolution discovered solutions to the many thorny issues that arose  during his tenure in what was, and is, a very complicated and very territorial, multi-town  school system. I imagined that whatever he was fishing for after school, and whether it was a good or a bad day, it finished on a soothing note and perhaps the answer he was looking for.

Vineyard life has sped up, become more crowded and more fraught since Herb was teaching and fishing. Still, his steady way of going, his determination and diligence, made a match then and with luck will do so again.

Susie Safford was the engine of The Martha’s Vineyard Times when I joined the newspaper in 1985. She was an indispensable leader in the fledgeling organization that had been created a year earlier to challenge the long-in-the-tooth Vineyard Gazette. Then, and over decades, she carpentered each page of each week’s newspaper and dozens of ancillary publications. In those days it wasn’t laptops and iPhones. It was tediously cutting and pasting long columns of type and photographing the result, page after page. No matter, Susie and the team she led met every deadline. Weekdays, long days, evenings, weekends, as the startup struggled, succeeded, and struggled some more, Susie, always clear and kind and meticulous, made the music happen.

Good newspapers are fractious enterprises. As in the communities they watch over, there is no instinct for like-mindedness, not among the news gatherers, nor the techies, nor the editors, and particularly not among the readers. Egos and interests and opinions flourish. It is a torrent, and the newspaper’s goal must be to live in the middle of it and to reflect it all. Instinctually, Susie understood all that and embraced it. She was a soothing balm that quieted the clamor as she made the very most of her work on behalf of the paper and its staff,  her neighbors, her countless friends, and the broader community of readers among whom she lived. 

Don’t get me wrong, Susie knew when something had gone awry, and she never gave it a pass, though her rebukes were gently framed. She was a quiet, devoted force for good. For instance, whenever I had done or said or written something foolish, she let me have it, guns blazing, but in her muted way. “Oh Doug …..” she would say with a sigh, her despair and profound exasperation unmistakeable.

When I left the paper in 2014 after 30 years with Susie, she remained, still pushing the paper out the door each Thursday, whatever that week’s fresh challenge was. Now life, wretchedly indifferent as always, has retired her. Sooner than it should have. Thankfully, the mark she leaves behind is indelible.

During the summer, over the years, I made a habit of stopping by their Music Street house to visit with David McCullough and Rosalee. Each of them died this summer. 

I am sure I took advantage, but they were always welcoming. Sometimes only Rosalee was at home, which made for a uniquely charming occasion. We sat on the back porch, and she gave me ice tea she had made. She talked about David’s and her long life together, David’s work habits, his writing shack and broad celebrity, her children and mine, and her Vineyard roots. The salient contours of their profoundly entwined lives were distinct. 

Not sure why, but one day I said to her, “Tell me, is David a practically perfect person?” Smiling but unhesitating, Rosalee said, ”Yes,” then, “He could lose some weight.”

Team McCullough reminds me of team Adams – John Adams, the second president of the United States and Abigail, his wife. David’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2001 biography of Adams was enriched and illuminated by his attention to the Adams’s enormous correspondence with one another. 

“During the early years of the Republic, Adams spent long periods away from his beloved wife,” David McCullough has said. “Fortunately for history, they created a body of correspondence which, because of the absolute candor and vitality of their writing, allows us to know them better than any of the others at the time. It is one of the great stories of our history, often reading like something out of Shakespeare,  with a command of language that is enough to humble us all.”

McCullough is often referred to – for instance, in the New York Times this week on the occasion of his death – as a “best selling” historian. It was a measured slight, wholly undeserved of course. 

McCullough was a historian in the purest sense of the term, and a storyteller whose great gift was that he enriched the tale he was telling and rewarded his readers with a penetrating and intimate acquaintance with history’s actors, not simply in the glare of their public lives. As often as possible his subjects told the story in their own voices. It is flesh-and-blood history, not merely observational but deeply and broadly personal. The reader knows Adams, in part because he comes to know Adams and Abigail; to know Harry, Bess, and Margaret; T.R. and the teddy bear;  the architects and builders of the bridge; and the engineers who carved the canal. 

Today, we know America  better than we might have without his loving attention to his subjects and their stories as David McCullough told them.

Curiously, the ministry of a small town newspaper to its readers is not so very unlike the ministry of a small, like minded congregation united in need. Bear with me on this. In each case, the goal is a broad and profound devotion to and understanding of the members’ lives and their relationships, earthly or transcendent. When Don Lyons was unwisely separated from his ministry of the Grace Episcopal Church on Martha’s Vineyard, he began a new, but to him unexpectedly familiar, role at the Martha’s Vineyard Times. From his pastoral role to his newspaper job, Don brought a keen and sympathetic understanding of his neighbors and colleagues, of their travails and peculiarities.  

Don was not a newspaper reporter, the name once given to an admired, even hallowed, occupation in the mid-1980s when he came to us. He certainly might have been, but he took a job as an advertising salesman for The Times, and he was a good one. Instinctively, he knew that he was required to be a guide and advocate for his customers, to learn what their needs were and how those needs might be economically and successfully fulfilled. Advertisers found in Don a scrupulous, dependable adviser and friend, and they trusted him.

Often, the death of a great salesman will be recognized thankfully at the fringe of the limelight by the company’s chief financial officer and the ambitious youth of the sales staff. For me and for other Martha’s Vineyard Times-folk Don will be celebrated for his warm, amused, encouraging but always light, touch, and his fellowship. A good and decent man, he went about his business life as he had his ecclesiastical life, not merely working with his colleagues and customers but partnering with each of us. 

Don liked baseball, and he liked children. He called balls and strikes for little leaguers and sometimes softball games. Oh, and I’m afraid I spoke too soon earlier when I said Don was not a reporter. He was that too, reporting on games of all sports, even games he had called, an unforgivable lapse of course, but only in the tortured world of the nitpickers. “Don’t be silly,” he said, “they’re just little kids.” Besides, Don was incapable of bias, except perhaps toward cruelty, stupidity, callousness, and pretension. Sometimes he wrote short news stories when, without his help, we couldn’t have gotten to something he knew was important and should not be left uncovered. And he proofread and copyedited when it was needed. He was a learned, meticulous, and playful writer, never an online guy slavering for clicks and likes.

Don liked rocks, and he liked to make something of them. It was in him to make something new and useful out of something unremarkable. He built stone walls at the house where he and his wife Joanie lived, improving the soil, imposing some order, guarding against the weedy injustice of a life or a thing uncared for. 

He was an actor and a debater. In him, the two merged. In daily office life he was a storyteller, and on stage he invaded, never clumsily or abruptly, the parts he played, as he did the lives of those who might benefit from a encouraging word. 

Right and wrong mattered hugely to him, and he often chose to play the villain, the most ornery or least admirable of the characters — the least like himself — in a production. He liked meaningful parts that touched on difficult subjects, for instance “The Laramie Project” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” A particularly resonant example was the staging of Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” at the Katharine Cornell Theater. Don played old Nat Moyer, a cross, generally disappointed, opinionated socialist Jew alongside his friend Jamie Harris as Midge Carter, a Black super in a New York apartment building where one tenant is trying to force him to retire. They cross paths daily in a park, spin yarns, and rehearse their grievances over aging, their children, the good old days, and remembered sweethearts. Don inhabited convincingly the characters he played as he had done throughout his life as the priest, the umpire, the advertising salesman, the friend, and the newspaper colleague over nearly three decades. He knew us all. 

Doug Cabral is the former owner and editor of The Martha’s Vineyard Times.

Sal, a friend of ours for decades, died this week. She was 95 years old, godmother to our youngest daughter, and only briefly ill and infirm before the end. By itself that detail limns her story. Her life was rich, busy, lived eagerly, and flush with friends for each of whom she was remarkable in their lives, a centerpiece. She was up and doing almost till the very moment time ran out.

The most fortunate of us have a Sal, maybe more than one if life is especially generous, to enjoy, to marvel at, and then to remember, someone unusual, surprising, unique. Not a scientist, a statesman, an artist, not a politician for damn sure, not remarkable or renowned in the worldly sense, but absolutely not like the others. She was at the heart of things in her company and alive and ready to hand in recollection.

Sally Mesta Reed was an athlete, an equestrian, a tennis player and fan, a golfer, and a dog lover. She was a crazed Yankees fan, wore Giants gear on Sundays, could not bear the Patriots. She traveled the world and lived widely in it. She was beloved by the owners and servers of every restaurant she dined at and made it her business to know them all. She concerned herself with the lives of her friends, and she laughed and laughed when she and we made fools of ourselves. She was a good egg, as the British say, a toff by birth perhaps, but she got over it.

With luck we’ll run across another like Sal, and if not, well, we’ve had our share.

“Let me now … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally,” George Washington, first president of the newborn country he had led to victory over the oppressor British, and after rejecting pleas that he allow himself be named president for life or even emperor, wrote in his farewell address to the nation.

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

“The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty …

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions … “

Washington understood that joining up is a common human impulse toward strength in numbers, companionship, and an allegiance to a pre-defined understanding of dense and plaguey contradictory political issues. It may be “inseparable from our nature, ” to offer oneself to an embracing, and like minded cohort promising to advance one’s own cherished ambitions. But, there are worthier groups to join and contribute to, hundreds of them, with objectives more narrowly defined and comprehensible, all of them more local than a sprawling, grasping national political party.

We suffer today with the several political parties Washington had in mind, each decidedly perilous and destructive to our national well being, not always certainly, but often enough to prompt caution on the part of every thoughtful one of us.

Washington’s warning, as he ended his second term as president 224 years ago, bears remembering today.

In my town there is a young woman standing on a busy corner by herself. She carries a Black Lives Matter placard. Hundreds of passing drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, rollerbladers, and joggers pass through this intersection. Because this is a resort town, her message confronts visitors from all over the country. She is brave and determined to have that message and her determination touch people and mean something to them. She walks to the intersection each morning with her sign, which is almost big enough to obscure her tiny self completely. She stands there as if it were her job. 

She is not part of a protest ensemble, even though this particular corner attracts small protesting collections of neighbors holding handmade posters, waving at people they recognize as they go by, urging them to care about what it is the protesters are touting. Sometimes these small assemblies hear cheers, sometimes jeers. 

The lone woman appears not to be bothered that she has no reinforcements. She is not part of a crowd, not enfolded in a movement or a parade of marchers. She is certainly not a looter or a vandal, not a police antagonist or an arsonist. She speaks with her sign as people have for decades, for centuries, waving their hand lettered posters or shouting and arguing, sometimes with amplification, on street corners and in town squares. She is in the admirable line of the legions of soapboxers who have been trying to set things right, to improve their lot or the lot of their communities. 

In her modest way she is Frederick Douglass, the Maryland slave who emancipated himself and became a public speaker, whenever an occasion offered itself, on behalf of abolition, and also education. He settled in welcoming  Quaker New Bedford in the mid-19th century, and in his writing and his speeches he called education “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” As a child and a slave, white women taught him and nurtured his inborn commitment to learning. If he were alive today he would not say “Twitter is the pathway from slavery to freedom.” I think he would say that Twitter, Facebook, and the rest are hateful echo chambers from which there is no path out or up.

Anyhow, we free speech purists can be an incoherent bunch because, after all, if I open my mouth and utter, or if you do something similar, or worse if some politician does, aren’t we all speaking? All children of the First Amendment. All speaking at once.

It’s worth considering what’s free and what’s not in matters of speech, and critically, what’s hallowed by the First Amendment and what pretends to be but is not. What did the Founders have in mind when they put the right to speak freely first among all the rights born in each and every human? 

The goal was an untended national garden of ideas. They expected some to be good, some not so good, some dreadful, all freely spoken or written. Those wily old white guys reckoned that the bad ideas would be weeded out over time and composted, and that good ones would appeal to more people and be cultivated for the benefit of one and all. Frederick Douglass thought so too. But, none of that can happen if my thoughts – hobbled as they may be  by timidity, stupidity, impenetrable hardheadedness, or stubbornness –  or yours – doubtless each one a gem –  are not freely expressed.

Those imperfect Founders with their powdered wigs and knee-high socks wanted all the ideas in the arena, and they wanted discussion, debate, and communication to decide winners and losers. We weren’t supposed to quash the other guy’s idea, but to confront and defeat it. They certainly did not want us to cancel it, abuse its author, and enlist others to pile on..

So today, there are uncounted thousands of newspapers, journals, fan magazines, Hollywood tell-alls, National Enquirers, online, on glossy paper or newsprint, social media outlets (really earth’s own Black Holes). Each is convinced and trying to convince you that what it has to say is the truest, the most indispensable information you can get your hands on. Of course, that’s preening nonsense.

What is indispensable to all of us is the freedom to see it all, to hear it all, to consider it all, and to decide, each of us, like the woman alone on the corner, what makes sense. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.