To the Editor:

Your obituary of Bob Carroll, unsigned, contained a brief but tendentious account of Mr. Carroll’s feud with Henry Beetle Hough, who was my great-uncle. It went like this:

“The Harbor View Hotel also figured large in Bob’s long-running fight with Henry Beetle Hough, the publisher and editor of the Vineyard Gazette, over Mr. Carroll’s interest in developing his property. Bob just did not like Mr. Hough, a college-educated off-Islander who received the newspaper as a wedding gift, telling him what he should and should not do.”

These two sentences are remarkable less for what they say than for what they omit.

Mr. Carroll’s “interest in developing his property” was a resolute desire to fill in wetland between the Harbor View and the Edgartown Lighthouse and construct a tennis court. This plan, it seems to me, speaks for itself, and Henry Hough was far from alone in opposing it. It was the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, in the end, which said no to Bob Carroll.

It is true, but only in the narrowest sense, that Mr. Hough was an off-Islander. He was born in New Bedford, but from his earliest childhood he spent his summers at the family house, called Fish Hook, in the hills of North Tisbury. Henry’s mother was the daughter of a Holmes Hole whaling captain, and his father had relatives in Oak Bluffs. By the time he fell out with Bob Carroll, Henry had been on the Island, publishing the Gazette, for 50 years.

It is also true that the Gazette was a wedding present from Henry’s father — this was in 1922 — but the relevance of this to Henry’s dispute with Mr. Carroll seems murky to me. Wedding gift or not, the Gazette won renown in the world of journalism, and beyond, under Henry Hough’s stewardship, as even Mr. Carroll would have conceded.

Your obituary writer seems to hold Mr. Hough’s college education against him. I’m not sure why that should have disqualified him from publishing a newspaper on the Vineyard, or from opposing the destruction of Vineyard wetlands, but it might help readers to know that the college was the Columbia School of Journalism, where Henry won a special Pulitzer Prize for historical research.

Henry’s father was a New Bedford newspaper editor, and his brother was editor and publisher of the Falmouth Enterprise. It was, and still is, a newspaper family, and we are all, for the record, college-educated.

John Hough

West Tisbury