Summer traditionally arrives on Cape Cod on Memorial Day Weekend. And so does Grandchildren Season at Southport. It's cheering to see young parents and children on the sidewalks and by the pool; they add a bit of activity to our "active adult" community. They're an affirmation that life is going--not to 'hell in a hand basket'--but rather to new generations that may turn out to be smarter and wiser than we are. One can always hope.

Some Southporters are blessed with scads of grandchildren and great grandchildren (see the story on Ceil Cincotta in this issue), but I've got just one grandchild--and I'm lucky to have him. I could have improved my odds of having more grandkids if I had just been thinking about this in my 20s and 30s and had a few more children of my own, but...

My grandson Tavita is coming from his home in Hawaii to spend July with his grandparents at Southport. And he comes with a special story. He was born in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Hospital on the island of American Samoa. His Samoan grandmother, the daughter of a matai (high chief), arranged for my daughter to adopt him. He arrived in Hilo, Hawaii at the tender age of eight days and was named David Tavita Kapp. (Tavita is Samoan for David.) In one of the earliest pictures we have of him, his happy parents have dressed him up as a chubby little Samoan prince (see above).

Now, Tavita is a big nine-year-old boy and his royal Samoan trappings have been replaced with t-shirts and shorts. He's always been a charming and very responsible kid and a joy to have around. But perhaps the thing that makes us proudest of him is that he regularly wins the pono award at his school.

Pono is one of those Hawaiian concepts that can take a page to explain, but its root meaning is "righteous." In the case of the school award, it goes to a student who acknowledges that he is part of a community and who knows the right thing to do not just for himself but for others as well. And who does the right thing without being told or asked to do it. We could all probably use a little more pono.

David Kapp, Editor 

Ceil Cincotta

Cecelia (Ceil) Cincotta was born at home to immigrant parents in 1924, in the little coalmining town of Avoca, Pennsylvania. "We were very poor," she says, "My mother paid the doctor with pickles and jarred fruit!" Mom was German-Polish and Dad was Polish-Russian. The Great Depression was in full force and her mother would often stand in line for a bag of used clothes or free food.

"Luckily we had a big garden and we canned a lot, so we never went hungry. And we were thrifty, buying chestnut coal instead of pea coal because it was cheaper. I cracked it with a hammer," she says. Ceil's father worked in the mines for 50 years and was grateful for the work; he liked to say, "Pennsylvania took care of me." When Ceil and her husband invited her Dad to move in with them, he refused until quite late in his life-and then insisted that he be buried back home. He lived to be 91 and was buried in Avoca.

"When I graduated from Avoca High School at 17, I wanted a watch," Ceil told me. "Instead, I got a one-way bus ticket to New York City where my sister and two brothers had preceded me." Her mother gave the bus driver all of Ceil's information and told him to be sure that she was picked up by her sister and not by some stranger. "It was so exciting," Ceil says, "Avoca had perhaps 5000 people and here in New York there were PEOPLE!"

It was 1942. Ceil's sister got her a temporary job at Woolworth's. "She gave me two nickels for my subway trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, wrote out the directions and sent me on my way," Ceil said. On her first day, while she worked at the lunch counter, a man offered her a job selling lingerie at a store next door. On her second day, she was assigned to work the steam table, which was not to her liking. She quit Woolworth's, took the job at the lingerie store and worked there for two years until she needed to return to Avoca to care for her mother.

Back home, Ceil met Kenneth Thomas, who was on leave from duty in the Pacific with the Air Force. They married seven months later, in May 1946. After his four years in the service, Ken opted to stay in the Air Force and the itinerant life of a military family began--to North Carolina, Panama, New Rochelle (where Ceil gave birth to sons Jack and Paul in three years), Delaware and finally to Germany, where Ken became quite ill.

Ken was sent to Texas to be diagnosed and the doctors discovered a brain tumor. The Air Force gave Ceil $100 and sent her and her sons back to the States. After a 33-hour trip by plane, train and bus, the small family arrived at Grand Central Station where her sister's husband picked them up in a trailer truck, which thrilled the boys, their mother not so much. Ken was moved to New York where he got much worse and, sadly, died.

Ceil & John Cincotta

Three years later Ceil met John Cincotta. She decided that he would be a good father and in November 1957 she married him. John worked for the NYC Department of Standards and Appeals and later became department commissioner. "He was a great father," Ceil says, "and I had three more children with him. Now I had four boys--Jack, Paul, Christopher and Jimmy--and a girl, Margaret Mary." (One-year-old Jimmy couldn't manage that name and he turned the word "sister" into "Sassy." She liked the name and it seemed to suit her personality, so it stuck.) At the time, Ceil was volunteering at the kids' school library and later worked with children who had special needs. "That was hard," she says, "I admire the teachers who work with such children every day." 

Some years later, Ceil's son Jack was living on the Cape and the family came up from New York to visit. "I told my husband that I'd like a cottage on the Cape where we could take the children in the summer. I asked Jack to look for a place and a few months later he called and suggested we come for Easter and look at some places. Well, the cottages seemed too small for us, so we went to see a house on School Street in Cotuit. It was the right place but it was $45,000 (this was 1973) and I couldn't manage that. Two months later Jack called and said, 'Ma, it's $35,000 now!' I had just inherited an unexpected $10,000 so I said, 'We're on our way.'"

John Cincotta was conservative about money and didn't want to get into debt, so it wasn't easy to get him back to the Cape to look at real estate. But a medical emergency with Jack's son Justin brought them up from New York. Once here, Ceil gave the real estate broker $100 to hold the house for them and finally persuaded John to see it. "We walked around the first floor and then he went outside, lit a cigar and said he didn't care to see the upstairs. 'How are we going to do this Ceil?' he asked. I said, 'Don't worry I'll manage it.' He said, 'You're the boss, it's your house.' I took a mortgage and worked on the side and by July '74 the deal was done."

Ceil took a job caring for children and John would help out. The kids called him Papa and he would sit in a rocking chair on the porch and cradle them. "We got along great and he was wonderful," Ceil says. "When our son Jack was a boy and was accepted to an expensive Jesuit high school, I wondered how we could afford it. But John said, 'He got himself admitted, he's going.' Like me, John hadn't had a great education and wanted his kids to have more."

Ceil with the Cincotta Clan:  daughter Sassy and sons Jack, Paul, Chris, Jim, and their spouses,  seven grandchildren and four great grandchildren

In 2000, the Cincottas signed on at Southport, but three weeks later John died. It was a shock for the family but not entirely unexpected as he had heart problems. Ceil deferred her move to Southport but arrived here in 2002. At Southport, she has participated in just about everything except golf and tennis. She hasn't had time for those two activities because she's been helping out at the Saint Vincent Thrift Shop for 18 years.

"A group of us cleaned, painted and rebuilt the building and I've had charge of linen donations and a lot of the pricing ever since. When my son donated a small barn, I suggested that we turn it into a boutique for some of the more valuable items. I've been running that for five years. The thrift shop makes a lot of money for the church's charities.

I have been retiring for years now and it's become sort of a joke at the shop!"  

who does not belong,

for silent guardians keep watch

even as the night winds shift,    

carrying the scent of a storm;

the knights grow restless
while the princess sleeps

With a vengeance ride the dark horsemen 

thundering down the dusty sinuous path

wielding weapons of steel and wood;
invisible eyes see all

and would warn - if they could.

A forbidden love
caught in the crossfire  

a wall of shadows emerge;

a ring of fire sets the battle field aglow.

How many lie wounded or dead?

Only the guardians know.  

Day breaks  

bathed in dirt and blood,                  

an eerie quiet descends upon the throne,

Nothing is as it seems

when man and sword clash

and flesh meets steel,

leaving behind crimson streams. 

Merging shadows darken the sky

yet the princess seeks revenge;

with death by her own hand
it is she who casts the last stone.     

Bound to the keep

by faithful warriors of long ago
whose battle cries
forever invoke an eternal battle song,

again, guardians welcome one of their own;

for here,

no man travels
who does not belong.  

Original Illustration by Sheila Foley 

John Howitt

I'll bet you didn't know that one of your new neighbors played an important role in the development of a product most of us use every day.  Many years before he and his wife Pat moved to Southport last November, John Howitt worked for Corning Glass Works, now Corning, Inc. The "honeycomb ceramic substrate" that forms the heart of most automotive catalytic converters-the device that makes car emissions cleaner--was invented and commercialized at Corning in the 1970s while John was technical manager of the Ceramic Products Division; he holds two of the original patents.

"Our product was a major technical and financial success, capturing 60% of the world's automotive market," John said.  "Inventing it was one thing; persuading the big American car companies to use it was something else. That required a lot of lobbying." John did his share as the president of the Manufacturers of Emissions Control Association, a worldwide trade association of 30 companies. Car manufacturers finally complied when forced to do so by the Clean Air Act. So when you meet him, you might want to thank him for his efforts to improve our air quality.

The Howitts lived in the Corning, NY area for 25 years and for many of those years, Pat was the director of a private agency that developed residences and day treatment programs for about 200 developmentally disabled adults. "In the 1970s when New York State began its de-institutionalization program, Pathways, the agency for which I worked, brought adults into Corning and surrounding towns to live. Many clients had been institutionalized from childhood due to uncontrollable seizures."

Pat Howitt

 Pat and John grew up and were educated in the Boston area schools, she in Braintree and he in Mattapan. John earned his BS in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University, and Pat got her business degree at Chandler College. They met at Marianna's, a local well known dance hall in Braintree, "while doing the cha-cha," Pat adds. Their son and two daughters-"strivers" according to John-live in Seattle, Nyack, NY, and Canton, and all work for major corporations.

During their 51 years of marriage, John's work after Corning brought them to live in Hendersonville, NC, for five years and to Tulsa, OK, for another five years.  But when it finally came time to retire-and after considering most of the desirable retirement areas in the US--they decided to come home to Massachusetts and bought a house in Marstons Mills.

On the Cape, the Howitts found ways to share their interests and talents.  With his life-long interest in sports, John served for ten years as general manager of the Hyannis Mets, one of the teams in the Cape Cod Baseball League, reputedly the best summer league in the country. One of every five MLB players has played in the CCBL, and over 40 of those have played for Hyannis during John's tenure. John also leads a popular course at the Academy for Lifelong Learning (A.L.L.) at Cape Cod Community College, where participants discuss the major sports issues of the day. For ten years Pat has offered a course at A.L.L., "Loving the Short Story," which typically attracts about 35 students who want to read and discuss a wide variety of short stories, a few classics to the latest young writers.

Both John and Pat love Cape Cod, so when their Marstons Mills property became a bit more than they wanted to deal with, they followed Horace Greeley's advice and went "west," but not very far west, just to Southport.

Here, John has continued his 15-year association with SCORE, a national non-profit organization whose volunteers provide free business mentoring services to entrepreneurs. Currently, he spends three mornings each month advising people in how to successfully market their products and services.  Pat is enthusiastic about tennis, golf, bridge and both like to attend social functions in the village.

After looking at other adult living options on the Cape, the Howitts found nothing else that compares to the kind of community that Southport offers and-along with their nine-year-old Pomeranian Kate-they have settled happily into their new home on Chippers Lane. 

Some of my articles have caught the attention of Southporters who are interested in history, and they've asked me to identify the best sources for reading about Mashpee's history. A major difficulty in trying to get an accurate picture of relations between Native Americans and early settlers can be found in the difference between oral history versus written history.

Was the Old Indian Meeting House originally built on Santuit Pond in 1684 and subsequently moved to Meeting House Road, as Wampanoag tradition claims? Or was it built in 1758 on Meeting House Road as the Reverend Gideon Hawley's contemporaneous papers state?

Native Americans pass on their history to the next generation by telling stories, drawing pictures or describing an event through dances and songs. From the white man's perspective, history is transmitted primarily with written documents aided by images. Neither approach guarantees objectivity in reporting events, particularly those that involve strong emotions, such as King Phillip's War. The conflicting versions surrounding the construction date and site of the Old Indian Meeting House on Meeting House Road offer a good example of the problem

Wampanoag oral tradition holds that the Old Indian Meeting House was built in 1684 near Santuit Pond and was moved to its present location on Meeting House Road in 1717. This version of events is presented on the Tribe's website, where the building is claimed to be the oldest Native American church in the United States. On the other hand, the Mashpee town historian states that although there are written references to a church building in 1684 at Santuit Pond, there is no written documentation to support the claim that this building was ever moved. There is, however, a statement in the Reverend Gideon Hawley's papers that the Old Indian Meeting House was built on its current site when he became a missionary to the natives in 1758.

I have compiled the list of suggested sources below for those who would like to learn more about Mashpee's history. The list is rather long, so I recommend starting with the Burns and Hutchins books and then the three Native American authors, and finally Campisi's book about the Indian land suit. Both Hutchins and Campisi were expert witnesses in that trial, Hutchins for the Indians and Campisi for the Town of Mashpee. All of these books should be available in the Mashpee Public Library.

The Native American Point Of View

• Apess, William, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writing of William Apess, 1992, edited by Barry O'Connell, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA
• Bingham, Amelia G., Mashpee 1870-1970, 1970, Mashpee Centennial Committee, MA  
• Mills, Earl, Sr. and Mann, Alicja, Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag, 2006, Word Studio, Falmouth, MA 

Specifically About The Mashpee Wampanoags

• Burns, Rosemary, 1870 Mashpee 1995: 125^th Anniversary, Town of Mashpee, MA
• Campisi, Jack, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial, 1992,
  Syracuse University Press, NY  
• Hutchins, Francis G., Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod's Indian Town, 1979, Amarata Press, Franklin, NH
• Nielsen, Donald M., "The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833," New England Quarterly, September 1985
• The Mashpee Wampanoag, Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribe, Mashpee, MA 

General Histories With References To Mashpee Wampanoags

• Freeman, Frederick, The History of Cape Cod: Annals of the Thirteen Towns of Barnstable County, 1869, W.H Piper & Co., Boston, MA
• Mandell, Darnel R., Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 2007, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, MD
• ___ Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth Century Eastern Massachusetts,
• Russell, Howard S., Indian New England Before the Mayflower, 1980, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH
• Simmons, William S., Spirit of the New England Tribes Indian History and FoIklore, 1620- 1984, 1986, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH
• Strahler, Arthur N., A Geologists View of Cape Cod, 1966, Natural History Press, NY
•  Vuelleunier, Marion, Indians on Olde Cape Cod, 1970, Sullwold Publishing,
  Taunton, MA
• Wilson, James, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, 1999, The Atlantic Monthly Press, NY

Martha's Vineyard is a great place for a summer day trip.  Getting to the Vineyard is easy and, once there, everyone will find enough to do to make the day enjoyable. 

Two ferry companies make the eight-mile, 35-minute run from Falmouth to the Vineyard.  Steamship Authority ferries operate year-round between Woods Hole and Vineyard Haven.  During the summer they also make some stops at Oak Bluffs. Adult round-trip fare is $16 plus $10 to park in their Palmer Avenue or Gifford Street lots. Free shuttle buses run from the lots to the docks. Visit their website at  www.steamshipauthority.com for schedules and to find out which parking lot is open on the day of your trip, or call 508-457-7275. 

The Island Queen makes seasonal trips (Memorial Day through Columbus Day) between Falmouth Harbor (75 Falmouth Heights Road) and Oak Bluffs. Adult round trip fare is $20 (cash only). Parking is $15 at their nearby lots. Another parking option is the Christmas Tree Plaza lot on the Staples side.  If you park far enough away from the stores the police won't bother you. From there it's a five-minute walk down Falmouth Heights Road to the dock. For schedules go to www.islandqueen.com. I prefer the Island Queen; it's more convenient and always goes to Oak Bluffs.

You can get an overview of the island on a 2.5-hour bus ride.

Car fares to Martha's Vineyard are very expensive and reservations sometimes have to be made months in advance. The Vineyard has an excellent public transportation system with buses running every 5 to 10 minutes between Oak Bluffs, Edgartown and Vineyard Haven. Buses also go to Aquinnah, Chilmark and West Tisbury on a less frequent schedule. Fares are $1 per town each way, including the town of origin (e.g., a bus ride from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown is $2).  Seniors receive a 50% discount if they ask for it.  Another way to get around the Vineyard is by bicycle. Several bike rental shops are located near the docks. 

If you or your guests are first time visitors to the Vineyard, the best way to get an overview of the island is to take a 2.5-hour narrated bus tour. Tickets are $33 and reservations are not necessary. Tickets can be purchased on the boat or from the bus driver. Buses leave from the docks and departures are timed to coincide with ferry arrivals. The bus driver will educate and amuse you with stories about the island and the characteristics of each of the six towns; he'll also point out the summer homes of some of the celebrities who live there. 

The Cliffs at Aquinnah (Gay Head) are one of the island's most dramatic sights.

All three "up-island" towns are small and mostly rural. Aquinnah is the smallest. The bus stops for 30 minutes at the Cliffs of Aquinnah (Gay Head Cliffs), where you can view the striking red clay cliffs and the lighthouse, grab a quick snack and/or browse through the few tiny shops on the path up to the cliffs.  About a third of Aquinnah's population is Wampanoag.  

Chilmark includes the fishing village of Menemsha and is noted for its beautiful sunsets and as the backdrop for several scenes in the movie Jaws. It's the summer home for many celebrities, including Caroline Kennedy; in 2005 it had the highest property values of any city or town in Massachusetts. West Tisbury is the agricultural heart of the island. Besides farms, a state forest covers part of the area. 

The bus tour also takes you through the "down-island" towns of Oak Bluffs, Vineyard Haven and Edgartown. It makes another 30-minute stop in Edgartown. You'll probably want to go back to these towns later and explore them in more depth on foot. 

If you take the Island Queen ferry, Oak Bluffs is the starting and ending point of your day.  The three top things to do in Oak Bluffs are: walk through the Methodist campground to see the charming gingerbread cottages, ride the carousel and try to grab the brass ring, and take in the commercial ambience of Circuit Avenue.   

The circle of cottages at Oak Bluffs evolved from tents that were originally set up around an open-air camp meeting tabernacle, where services are still held on summer Sundays.

Formerly a part of Edgartown, Oak Bluffs was incorporated as Cottage City in 1880 and reincorporated as Oak Bluffs in 1907.  Some of the earliest visitors were Methodists who gathered in the oak grove each summer for religious camp meetings. Tents pitched on the ground gave way to tents pitched on wooded platforms and finally to more than a hundred tiny wooden cottages, all packed closely together. They look like brightly painted dollhouses decorated with hanging flower baskets and lovely small gardens. Their Carpenter Gothic architecture is marked by elaborate wooden scrollwork on eaves and porches. The Tabernacle, a circular open-sided pavilion where religious services are held on Sundays in July and August, is sited in the center of the campground. 

In August each year, residents hang brightly colored Chinese and Japanese lanterns on their cottages, lighting them at dusk in an annual celebration called "The Grand Illumination." Unfortunately, the ferry stops running too early for day-trippers to see the campground all lit up. You'll find the Flying Horse Carousel inside a building at the foot of Circuit Avenue where it meets Lake Avenue. It is the nation's oldest operating platform carousel. In my opinion, you're never too young or too old to take a ride on it. 

Circuit Avenue is the main shopping street. It's fun to wander in and out of the shops (some touristy and some funky) and sample ice cream from Mad Martha's, the trademark Vineyard brand ice cream. You can enter the campground from a number of little alleyways off to the right of the avenue. 

On to Vineyard Haven! The best reason to go there is to eat lunch at the Black Dog Tavern.  Although obviously a tourist attraction, the food (burgers, etc.) is surprisingly good and the prices are reasonable. Try not to arrive at the height of the lunch hour, but if you have to wait for a table you can always shop at the Black Dog general store, the Black Dog kids store or the Black Dog casual wear store.   

Handsome 19th century architecture and upscale shopping are the main attractions in the beautiful community of Edgartown.

Edgartown is the Vineyard's most historical and genteel town. Upscale boutiques line Main Street and the buildings are stately. You will recognize some of them from the movie Jaws. Most of the homes in the historic district were built in the 1800's by whaling captains. Many of these elegant white clapboard mansions are crowned with a widow's walk. The popular myth is that a wife would climb to the top of her house to watch for the return of her husband's ship. In reality these were platforms from which residents could pour sand down chimneys in the event of a chimney fire. 

The small, laid-back island of Chappaquiddick is part of Edgartown.  You can get there on the "on-time" ferry--so called because it's never late and makes the short trip across the harbor and back continuously.  But if you don't have a car there's no reason for you to go because the only public transportation is by taxicab.  

Some of the island's better known summer visitors

Visiting all three "down-island" towns in one day is next to impossible.  It's best to choose two towns to explore or to take the sightseeing bus and then spend time in Oak Bluffs.  Of course, you can always bag the sightseeing and shopping and just go to the beach. Joseph Silvia State Beach, a three-mile barrier beach that straddles Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, is easily accessible via the bus that runs between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown. Whatever you choose to do, you should have a great day on the Vineyard and come home with lots of ideas for things to do on your next trip!  

Sandy Bernstein is a freelance writer and web designer. Her poetry, articles, and fiction have appeared in such publications as The Writer Magazine, Writers' Journal, Poetic Voices, Flashquake Magazine, Mind Fire, and many other print and web publications. She is a long time member of the Stoneham Writers Group. Currently she is working on a novel, an excerpt appears on her website www.sandybernstein.net. 

If you have a Kindle, you can access her short story "Creepies"on Amazon for $.99.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00BKMXDDS

Karlyn Curran moved to Southport from New Jersey in 2003. She has a daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren in Falmouth and two sons, their wives and another grandchild near Hanover NH. After her husband passed away and she retired from her teaching career, she moved to New England to be closer to her children. She loves Southport and Cape Cod.  Even more than that, she loves being a "hands-on" grandma. She caught the travel bug from her husband and this has resulted in a chronic condition.   

 

David Kapp, with his wife Billie, moved from Connecticut to Southport in 2009. David retired from a career as a university library administrator, after working in the libraries at Brandeis, Harvard and the University of Connecticut. He was a building consultant for the planning of a number of major university libraries and was, for many years, the editor of Connecticut Libraries. Billie enjoyed a career as an educator and social sciences consultant. The Kapps are frequent visitors to Hawaii where their son, daughter, grandson and other family members live.   

Bob Mendes began his career as an advertising copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York before becoming senior vice president of marketing for a west coast department store chain. He left that position to start Pacific Sports, a sports and general marketing agency. There he developed "The Reading Team," a children's literacy program sponsored by the National Football League and the American Library Association, which used NFL players as literacy role models. Bob is the author of "A Twentieth Century Odyssey, the Bob Mathias Story." After retiring, he served as executive director of the Glendora (CA) Chamber of Commerce. When grandson Adam was born, Bob and Bette moved to Cape Cod, where they recently celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary. Neither retires well. He's had a number of part-time jobs, has written two more books, and volunteers; Bette serves on committees at Southport and at the Falmouth Jewish Congregation. Their son Steve is a pediatrician and lives in Marion with his wife Sarah and their children, and a second son, Jeff, practices law in Indianapolis.

Ernest Ruber and his wife of 55 years, Natalie, came to Southport in 2002 and enjoyed their life together here until her death in 2011. Ernie retired from Northeastern University where he was Professor of Biology and Ecology. He designed the interpretive nature trail at Southport and has written many nature/science articles for Southport Village Voices. He reports for Southport News on pool tournaments, in which he usually plays and frequently wins. Ernie has two adult children and a grandchild.