Life is change. Nothing stays the same. Still, there are people who put up a good fight, and doing so, leave a mark.
Virginia (“Ginny”) Jones, a never-give-an-inch Islander, was one of them. For years, Ginny attempted — or tried her dead-level best — to infiltrate some businesslike orderliness into what has become the successful and long-lived wooden boatbuilding enterprise that became Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway on the Vineyard Haven waterfront. Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin, two devoted wooden boat sailors who washed up on the Vineyard in the late 1970s, went into business because they needed a place to look after their own boats. So they figured they would create a boatyard to serve their needs, and the needs of like-minded Vineyarders. Ginny ultimately ran the office. She called Ross and Nat “the Bearded Ones,” over whom she had a somewhat limited authority, but became a commanding figure for the boatyard’s customers.
Ginny got out of the office from time to time to join “the Bearded Ones” on sailing trips. Indeed, on one family sailing trip to Maine with my own family, we came across Ginny aboard the celebrated schooner When and If, at anchor in Blue Hill. She and my youngest son were rowing around the harbor in their skiffs when a seal slithered aboard my son’s boat. Ginny hollered sensible advice to him about how to manage the boarder.
Ginny’s devotion to sailing, wooden ships, and maritime history, and to the Mystic Seaport Museum, was unqualified. Her tiny, cramped, overstocked, exhaustive collection of marine books and marine paintings in her Menemsha seasonal shop — called the Fo’c’sle Locker — was no offhand affair. She was intimate with the pedigree of every offering, and she had generous willingness to enlarge upon each one to assist her customer’s appreciation of his purchase. It was shopping as education to visit her shop.
Apart from her waterfront life, Ginny extended her vigorous attention to the preservation of the best parts of Vineyard, as growth and thoughtless change overwhelmed what had been better and simpler before the Island became a shiny trinket for growth-minded development. Serving on West Tisbury town health and planning authorities, she added her assertive presence and clear thinking to municipal efforts to improve rather than detract from the endearing quality of Vineyard life.
Doug Cabral is a former co-owner of The MV Times.
