Watch on the Vineyard

Every salaried newsman, they say, dreams of some day buying his own little newspaper. For New York Times Columnist James Reston, the dream has come true. Last week he announced that he had purchased the Vineyard Gazette (average circ. 5,900), the 122-year-old weekly that serves the resort island of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. If Reston ever gives up his Washington beat to ruminate for the Gazette, it will not be all that much of a comedown. For the Gazette is one of the most colorful and quoted of U.S. weeklies.

It is as much a part of the Vineyard scenery as colored clay cliffs and salt marshes. Its present editor, Henry Hough, 71, who bought it in 1920, is a regional novelist (Lament for a City) and folklorist (Thoreau of Walden). And he has never ceased to celebrate the charms of the Vineyard in his paper. "It ought to be the function of the newspaper," wrote Hough, who will continue as editor, "to keep guard and watch over the singularities of environment, heritage, custom, and response to challenges."

Not that the Gazette watches only over its own citizenry. In summer, the population swells from 6,000 to some 50,000, and the paper views the comings and goings of these fair-weather residents with a wry Yankee eye. Max Eastman, Saul Bellow, Thomas Hart Benton, James Cagney, Leonard Bernstein are the stuff of summer gossip. Such is its relish for celebrities that the Gazette mixes fact' with fantasy in breezy abandon. One memorable item revealed that "Truman Capote and Geraldine Chaplin have checked into the bridal suite of the Menemsha Inn."

Sooner or later, Reston will add his own thoughts to the weekly. He is not sure what he will say but it will not be what his current readers are used to. "It will be interesting to report life," he says, "instead of politics."

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