Updated Tuesday, 5 pm to include full reporting
The annual two-day Celebration of the Holy Ghost held last weekend in Oak Bluffs is sort of an ethnic event. You get bragging rights if you are of Portuguese descent, but it’s like St. Patrick’s Day in Southie or St. Anthony’s Feast in the North End of Boston. It’s all about people being happy.
There were no Jersey barriers barring entry. There was simply an elderly sawhorse restricting onsite parking at the Portuguese-American Holy Ghost Society headquarters on Vineyard Avenue. No one minded. They parked as they always do, on the side of the roads around the festival site.
Better known here as the P.A. Club, the restaurant, bar, and outbuildings hosted several thousand Island residents and visitors last weekend, as it has for a long, long time. No one is quite sure how long — certainly for 74 years, but probably closer to 90 years, back when it was a Vineyard Haven event.
Against a backdrop of daily mayhem in the world, the Holy Ghost festival this year seemed especially dear to onlookers. First-time visitor Larry Trogdon got it right away. A North Carolinian on the Island doing handyman and contracting jobs, Mr. Trogdon said, “It’s always good to see events where people gather with no divisiveness. I heard the buzz all week about this. I’m glad I came; it’s awesome.”
The festival is also an Island gathering place. Chris Look, a giant Islander from an ancient Island family, happily munched a cheeseburger near where Mr. Trogdon was standing. “How long have I been coming? God, I don’t know … 40, 50 years probably. I see classmates and friends, a lot of people I haven’t seen since last year right here,” he said.
Part of the appeal is the organic nature of the event. The organizers know what they’re doing, but there’s no obsessive-compulsive managing. Now having said that, Society president Gina deBettencourt would not sit still, despite painful bone spurs that would have to await treatment until after the festival. The key to a successful festival? “It’s the volunteers. We all work from our strengths,” she said.
Mike Delis, longtime auctioneer, went with the flow. Mr. Delis’ auction-item-gathering team of Crystal Roy and Annette Moreis had scurried Island-wide to gather well over 100 items, perhaps a record amount, and Mr. Delis couldn’t wait to get started on Saturday afternoon. He quit his pitch after a few minutes. “They’re too busy talking to pay attention now,” he said, laying down his mic with a grin. Mr. Delis, a former Edgartown cop, now proprietor of the Island’s driving school, also knows that Sunday is typically auction day, when people do pay attention, typically helping to generate more than $30,000 in scholarships for Island kids.
P.A. Club members are a fundraising force on this Island. They love it. Larry Gomes and his team won the annual P.A. Club golf tournament back in May at Mink Meadows in Tisbury. They shot a sizzling net 53 in the best ball tournament, and won $500, which they promptly donated to the scholarship fund.
He was thrilled to win, and to donate the winnings. “You’ve got to have one player who can drive, one who can hit irons, and one who’s good around the greens. None of us can putt,” he added from his perch at the reception table under a long white tent where he and a dozen others were selling tickets for the Holy Ghost Portuguese soup, linguica, Portuguese bread, and the burgers favored by Mr. Look.
Conversations and shared stories are the stuff of the festival. One of the best we heard came from Lee Benjamin, a long, lanky Florida resident wearing a Clemson cap and looking for all the world like a visitor. Wrong. His story is like many that link the Island to the larger world.
Turns out Mr. Benjamin was a Marine for 27 years, and more than 40 years ago an Island girl named Susie Peacock rushed down South to talk her friend Robin Rebello from Oak Bluffs out of marrying Danny Meader, a fellow Marine buddy of his.
“Susie didn’t talk her out of that crazy idea. In fact, Robin introduced us and Susie ended up marrying me, a Marine. Stuff like that ‘only happens on this Island,’” Mr. Benjamin said, grinning. The Benjamins, with 41 years of marriage under their belts, now winter in Deltona, Fla., and summer in Oak Bluffs. Mr. Benjamin just retired from a 12-year stint teaching emotionally disturbed youth in a high-charged environment, and he remembers the feelings of oncoming summer. “I’d start thinking about the trip up here, and when we’d get on the ferry, you could feel the stress begin to wash away immediately. Wonderful feeling,” he said.
There were visiting dignitaries from the off-Island Portuguese-American communities of Dartmouth and New Bedford, home to “the largest Portuguese-American festival in the world,” according to Rich Theg, a member of the Madeira Club there. The event happens on the final weekend in August each year.
Traditions are important, some subtle, others more cherished. Kaye Manning, 92, ran the raffle drawing, as she has for decades. “My boyfriend, Joe Nunes, first introduced me to this event, which has grown every year,” she said. What Mrs. Manning didn’t mention was that she and the late Mr. Nunes, a driving force in the P.A. Club, were regarded as the king and queen of the P.A. Club, according to a longtime member.
While the festival does not have the religious tone of its early days, it has retained traditions of remembrance. Woodworker and P.A. Club member Bob Gatchell, for example, creates three-foot scale lighthouses each year to honor members who have died in the prior year. He created 12 lighthouses this year, and has donated 56 in total, which are generally purchased by family and friends of the deceased member.
And the tiny churchlike Crown House, repurposed as festival headquarters last weekend, most often serves as a quiet place for reflection and the lighting of a candle in memory of loved ones.
By 6 pm on Saturday night, young faces had been painted, and darts thrown with great delight at painted balloons for fuzzy prizes. The big people were downing the burgers, linguica sausages, and hot dogs, Holy Ghost soup — sopa — made by Dylan Estrella, and the occasional Budweiser at the Island’s biggest family block party, full of old friends, old stories, and surfing on the community vibe.
DJ Sister Spin, better known as Cheryl Atherton, took center stage after dark, as festivalgoers rocked on under a near full moon.
On Sunday morning, the festivities continued with a perfect parade, eight minutes to pass the Flying Horses from the honor guard to the final fire truck. Stepping off at 11:30 at Oak Bluffs Harbor, the marchers, including three girls in their First Communion dresses holding Queen Isabella’s crown, wound through town to the P.A. Club, a half-hour journey starring the largely Portuguese Bay State Band and dancers from Grupa Folklorico, who charmed onlookers with visual vignettes such as 81-year old Joe Coutinho and 8-year-old Ethan Silva walking side by side strumming mandolins.
Several hundred people were at the P.A. Club at noon, awaiting both the marchers and the second day of the festival, where more sopa, burgers, etc. were consumed. More auction items were purchased, and people danced to authentic Portuguese music, performed by the Bay State Band of New Bedford, to celebrate the Portuguese community’s contributions to the Island over more than two centuries.