To the Editor:

Thanks for the MV Times’ good reporting on the terrible fire that destroyed the Vineyard Haven home at 319 Main St. The photos show the many Island firemen who valiantly rushed to the scene and fought the fire, including the fire tower fighting against the huge central flame.

Our hearts go out to the resident, Elizabeth (Hackney) McBride and her family, who lost everything, and to Fain Hackney, who watched the house burn and who’d also grown up in the house.

For many of us, Islanders and those of us fortunate enough to spend time in the summer on the Vineyard, that house was more than a house. Rich Salzberg’s online addition to the article reporting the fire describes more of the history. I was touched by his ending, that the house was “since the ’70s always the Hackney house.”

Who doesn’t remember Lucy and Sheldon’s indomitable, differently abled daughter Virginia biking around town, cheerily greeting everyone, and the family’s great support of Camp Jabberwocky? Historian Sheldon was instrumental in the expansion of the Island History Museum.

The birthday parties for Lucy’s mother, Virginia Durr, were more than a celebration of her longevity. They were a tribute to Virginia as a steadfast 1960s activist for civil rights at their home in Montgomery, Ala. Among other bold acts, Virginia raised the funds for her friend Rosa Parks to attend the Highlander School for training in protest for racial justice. When Medgar Evers was shot in his home driveway, my brother, recruited for Freedom Summer at Oberlin to register Black voters in the South, was instead given the contact name of Virginia Durr, who housed, fed, and inspired young college students during that dangerous period. As a result of Virginia’s commitment, my brother became head of the JFK-initiated Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Jackson, Miss.

Hospitality was inbred in the family. Lucy’s gracious hospitality led her to expand their house’s large deck, and plant wisteria — a Southern bloom, and because she loved flowers — for shade for the revolving door of guests who would stop over at that deck, always welcome. We see the last of that deck in the photos as the flame engulfs it.

One day as I walked down Owen Little Way, I saw Sheldon, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, slowly walk up from the beach toward the house wearing only his bathing suit, head down, lost in thought. It was the always too brief Vineyard escape that helped him with the controversies inherent in a large university. 

Today Lucy and Sheldon’s grandchildren of course are involved with helping the Island with the COVID pandemic, with Elizabeth’s son Declan McBride helping with COVID testing and Fain’s daughter Lucy Hackney heading up the effort. This spirit of giving to the community is very much a Vineyard spirit, and an inheritance of the Durr-Hackney altruistic family spirit.

 

Kay Scheidler
Vineyard Haven

Scheidler is an educator and author of “Standards Matter,” NewSouth Books, and a summer resident of Vineyard Haven.  –Ed.