The thing about Riggs Parker is that he was relentless.
In a good way.
Indeed, in his service to Chilmark as selectman and to the broader Island community as Vineyard representative to the Steamship Authority, Riggs was an exemplary student of each job, its vital role in the community, and its demand that, discomfiting as it may be, leadership must be forward-looking. He did his homework carefully and extensively, and in each role the positions he took he did not relinquish.
Riggs died at 91 on March 12 in Rhode Island, where he made his home after 50 years in Chilmark. In his public life on the Vineyard, his many contributions avoided the narrow devotion to town affairs favored by local leaders. He sought solutions to difficult but common problems that might span town boundaries, but would reward the Island altogether.
Riggs was a devoted, protective Chilmarker, and beyond that a Menemsha year-rounder, a sailor with hundreds of family sea miles, and a tough, smart Philadelphia lawyer and investment banker. His was a bold stew, rare in the long line of Island officials who preferred to make their magic in familiar, accommodating ways.
When the phone rang and it was Riggs, it was going to be a long conversation. He didn’t call to noodle over an issue. He called to explain what his deep dive into the most timely and prominent issue had revealed. He knew the ins and outs of it, and what the roadmap to a successful outcome, one that he favored, would look like, and what it required of you (often me).
Riggs’s vigorous interest in his new Chilmark home led him to the town planning board and the development of zoning rules. His arrival coincided with the early days of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, so he became instrumental in the planning of the roadside and shoreside districts of planning concern.
For years, the Steamship Authority members did their work with “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” collegiality they found comforting. In the early ’90s, when New Bedford leaders were clamoring for SSA service as part of their plan for a waterfront economic revival, the Dukes County commissioners appointed Riggs to represent the Vineyard to the boatline. Tall, shaved head, in command of the details, and apparently immune to criticism, Riggs introduced a crackling sort of discomfort to Nantucket, Vineyard, and Falmouth leaders. They had been confident that he would crush the rabble they regarded as Whaling City barbarians.
Instead, he turned over every stone. He embraced efforts to modernize the existing fleet of vessels, and argued for the boatline to allow passenger traffic from other mainland harbors, New Bedford in particular.
The turbulence he inspired was unwelcome. Many of his predecessors had held their seats for years, but Riggs lasted a little more than one, undone by his willingness to work with New Bedford and to criticize Nantucket’s effort to undercut SSA planning for a fast ferry passenger service model.
He did get a small part of his agenda accomplished. He secured a fast ferry route between New Bedford and the Vineyard, in the interest of reducing the number of cars coming to the Island. Doing so, he reasoned, would give islanders better access to convenient travel on- and off-Island with their cars. He thought such walk-on passenger traffic from other ports might spare the damage done to Woods Hole by the ever-larger number of cars and trucks on the Woods Hole Road, and in parking lots in Falmouth and elsewhere. His view was that there was more suitable and ample mainland space for parking cars.
In the end, the traction of hostility to change, the preference for inaction, and the clamor of the participating communities to save their settled shares of the action left no place for Riggs.
Perhaps in a metaphor for the penetration he brought to his lawyering and his local and regional political activities, Riggs was a photographer whose work was widely admired by visitors to his gallery shows. His images were evocative, studied, detailed, and exacting, as in his photographic record of Chilmarker Everett Poole, lobsterman and town meeting moderator. Everett designed, built, and fished the pots he made. He fiddled endlessly to make a better one, that is, a pot that would catch more lobsters. Riggs’ study of Everett at work in his Menemsha shop — hundreds of photos, all printed by Riggs in his home darkroom — was in its way one more in-depth analysis of a problem or a possibility that, in the end, left no puzzle unexamined.
Doug Cabral is the former editor of The Martha’s Vineyard Times.
