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Irene M. Metell, 86
Was Former Farm Proprietor
Irene M. Metell of Edgartown died Friday, June 20, at Windemere Nursing Facility in Oak Bluffs. She was 86. She was predeceased on Feb. 17 by her husband, Arthur A. Metell, with whom she had shared 67 years of marriage. Irene was born in New Bedford on Oct. 17, 1916, a daughter of the late Daniel and Henrietta (Amaral) Ferreira. She moved to Martha's Vineyard as a young girl.
She and her husband were proprietors of Metell Vegetable Farm in Edgartown for many years. She was a communicant of St. Elizabeth's Church in Edgartown and president of the St. Elizabeth's Women's Guild in 1962 and 1963. She was an avid reader and enjoyed sewing, knitting and crocheting.
She is survived by her four children, Elaine Dias of Nantucket, Patricia Litchfield of Edgartown, Arthur Metell of Vineyard Haven and Kenneth Metell of Edgartown; 14 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren; a sister in law, Mrs. James D. Ferreira of Oak Bluffs, and several nieces and nephews.
A funeral service was held at the Chapman, Cole and Gleason Funeral Home in Oak Bluffs on Monday, June 23, at 1 p.m. Interment followed in the New Westside cemetery, Edgartown. Donations may be made in Irene's memory to Hospice of Martha's Vineyard, P.O. Box 2549, Oak Bluffs, MA 02557.
Jean C. Godlewski
Was Innkeeper in Falmouth
Jean C. Godlewski of Venice, Fla., died on June 21. She was 80 years old. She had moved to Venice from Falmouth in 2001 to be close to her daughter, Mary.
Jean was born in Duluth, Minn., on Jan.19, 1923. She was married
on June 6, 1943 to Edward E. Godlewski, who was in the Coast Guard. They lived in many places due to his service and Jean had a lifelong love of lighthouses after living at several from the coast of California to the Great Lakes. Together they had six children.
Jean will be best remembered as the proprietress and owner of Oceanside Guesthouse in Falmouth Heights, which she ran from 1965 until she sold it in 1995. She loved meeting people who came to stay there and made friends of her guests, many of whom remained friends for life.
Jean was predeceased by her husband, Ed, and two sons, John and William.
She is survived by her brothers, Don and William Ringsred of Minneapolis, Minn.; her sister, Katherine O'Hara of Duluth, Minn., and several nieces and nephews.
She is also survived by her daughters, Mary Godlewski of Venice, Fla., Ann Chalifoux of Vineyard Haven and Roberta Koffman of Brookline, and her son, James Godlewski of St. Thomas, USVI, as well as six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
A memorial mass and graveside service will take place in Falmouth at a date to be announced later in July.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Jean's name to Hospice of Southwest Florida, 220 Wexford Blvd., Venice, FL 34293.
Marguerite A. Bergstrom
Left Her Mark on Island Hospitality, Housing and Politics
Marguerite A. Bergstrom, a celebrated Island humanitarian, died in her Wing Road home Tuesday at the age of 81.
Better known by those who loved her as Bergie, Ms. Bergstrom was a war veteran, a retired nurse and hospital administrator, former innkeeper, veteran Tisbury official, affordable housing champion and prominent church leader.
Ms. Bergstrom was born on Jan. 4, 1922 in Natick to Eric G. and Alice Isackson Bergstrom. After her mother died during Ms. Bergstrom's infancy, her father married
Alice's sister, Elisabeth, who became surrogate mother to Ms. Bergstrom and her two brothers. Ms. Bergstrom's parents moved to Oak Bluffs in the early 1950s - marking the her first exposure to the Island she would call home for the last 33 years.
As a young girl in Natick, Ms. Bergstrom dreamed of becoming a medical missionary in China.
"We had this fascinating missionary in my home town, who had been to China. He made it sound wonderful, so I wanted to be a medical missionary and go to China. So I went into training, but by the time I got out, Uncle Sam was having a little conflict, so I answered his bugle call," she said in a 1986 interview with the Martha's Vineyard Times.
The call took her all the way to England in 1943 as a first lieutenant in the United States Army Nursing Corps. In 1947, the army shipped Ms. Bergstrom home with a cane, after an injury caused by an ambulance accident she rarely discussed. Ms. Bergstrom tolerated a severe limp from the age of 23.
Back in the United States, the veteran took advantage of the GI Bill, graduating from Boston University in 1952 with a degree in nursing. She went on to earn a master's of science in nursing administration from Boston University in 1955. She worked briefly as a nursing service administrator at New England Medical Center before taking a post as director of nursing service at Morton Hospital in Taunton until 1970.
That's when Ms. Bergstrom found her way to the Island, ending a relationship with Martha's Vineyard that she described as one similar to a "carpetbagger." She ran the now defunct 28-bed Vineyard Haven Nursing Home, a post she held for just six months before the state closed its doors.
Ms. Bergstrom and her now-deceased partner Lydia Palmer turned their attention to the hospitality business - purchasing the nursing home building, now the Hanover House, and operating what Ms. Bergstrom often jokingly described as the first affordable housing on the Island.
"After the state came and closed it, Mary Cronig asked if we wanted to buy it. We didn't have a nickel to our name, but it was the deal of the century - $38,000," she said in an interview with the Gazette last summer.
Called Aidylberg - a nickname derived from the backward spelling of Ms. Palmer's first name and part of Ms. Bergstrom's last name - the casual bed-and-breakfast hosted young summer workers for $10 a week. Through the 1970s, Ms. Bergstrom could be seen tending rose bushes in front of Aidylberg, while Ms. Palmer, a longtime Edgartown school teacher, prepared pancakes for the guests.
True to her habit of fighting from the front lines, Ms. Bergstrom stepped into Tisbury politics in 1972 - leading the board of health during an era that brought a sewer system to the downtown area, free influenza vaccines and cleanup of the Tisbury landfill. Ms. Bergstrom's friend Arlene Bodge, a retired nurse and minister, remembers the former Navy nurse loading her station wagon with flu vaccines she'd secured through a grant from the state and setting up a portable nursing station near the former West Tisbury town hall. They lined up kids and adults alike to brace them for the winter of 1973 with a flu vaccine. Ms. Bergstom, whose fingers were already crippled with arthritis, took down patient information, while Ms. Bodge, decked in her white nurse's uniform, gave the shots.
Ms. Bergstrom reluctantly stepped down from her post on the board of health for an eight-year period to work as Tisbury's executive secretary. A disciplined and principled public servant, Ms. Bergstrom managed to fit 60 hours worth of work into her 40-hour week. Ms. Bergstom strolled down through the offices of town hall, making suggestions to other town hall staff that, in her no-nonsense tone, sounded more like orders than recommendations. In these moments, say folks who knew her well, it was better to comply than question.
"It's just better to do it than to cross her," said Marcia Cini, a close friend of Ms. Bergstrom.
It was during her town hall tenure that she encountered Carol Lashnits, a young assistant to the Tisbury planning board. Their conversations about housing for the Island's elderly became a crusade of sorts - leading to the creation of a nonprofit organization that has housed more than 300 elderly and disabled Islanders since 1981. Ms. Bergstrom, Ms. Lashnits and the late Margaret Love - a dynamic trio spanning three generations - led Island Elderly Housing, a group that has secured millions of dollars in grants for elderly housing on the Vineyard. Until her death this week, Ms. Bergstrom served as chairman of the board but worked like a full-time staff member.
"Berg and Margaret had so much faith. If you thought about every micromanaging detail, you'd never get started. Instead, we just thought about how to make peoples' lives better," Ms. Lashnits said this week.
To sit on a committee with Ms. Bergstrom, nearly always fierce and blunt, was an experience unto itself.
"Berg was always forceful and in charge, regardless of whether she was in charge or not. She said exactly what was on her mind, which made it a pleasure to serve with her," said John Early, a longtime member of the IEH board.
Ms. Bergstrom's departure comes at a bittersweet moment for Island Elderly Housing. Just last year, she donated her $1 million Wing Road property to the agency for the creation of low-income elderly housing. The project - christened Aidylberg in memory of her and Ms. Palmer's bed-and-breakfast venture - will appear before the Martha's Vineyard Commission in July. Ten units, in two barnlike structures, will be erected on the two acres behind her home.
Last month, Ms. Bergstrom rallied for one last battle - pushing hard for approval of a Hillside Village III building that was stalled in front of the Martha's Vineyard Commission. In a tongue-in-cheek response to an outpouring of neighborhood protest regarding the building, Ms. Bergstrom matter-of-factly announced during the MVC public hearing that she should rename Aidylberg "In My Backyard."
This was Ms. Bergstrom's signature - an edgy humor that pushed the envelope. But because she matched her convictions with action, Ms. Bergstrom managed to convert her opponents more often than alienate them.
Ms. Bergstrom's other legacy lives in the $300,000 renovation of Trinity United Methodist Church of the Camp Ground. As chairman of the church board of trustees, she also appointed herself clerk of the works for the major restoration project a few years ago.
"Berg had a determination to get all things done properly. She was over there day after day. She never got over being a supervisor or a boss. I don't know how to say that with love, but that's all we felt for her. She had a great rapport with the carpenters, but boy, did they fear her," said Albion Hart, Ms. Bergstrom's vice-chairman on the board of trustees.
Her tough exterior - with white hair slicked straight back and the blue seersucker blazer she reserved for nice occasions - often gave way to a soft heart. She read every piece of mail solicitation word for word - making her way onto enough political and nonprofit group mailing lists that she needed two post office boxes.
"She got mail from everyone - from Kerry and Clinton to funds for Native American children. They knew she was a softie. She couldn't not put a check in their return envelopes," Ms. Lashnits said, noting that until the day she died, Ms. Bergstrom remembered to mark the graduation of all her friends' and IEH staff members' children with a check.
It's these small gestures of unsolicited kindness that friends say they'll remember. Every Christmas, Ms. Bergstrom and Ms. Palmer delivered shoe boxes full of craft supplies to the children of friends. Ms. Bodge remembers gifts of tools when she tried to landscape the former Webb Campground she owned. Every return trip from off-Island, Ms. Bergstrom would bring a trunk full of potatoes for the soup suppers at the Old Whaling Church. She and Ms. Palmer prepared meals every Sunday for a table full of elderly women.
Ms. Bergstrom is predeceased by her partner of 40 years, Lydia Palmer; her parents Eric and Elisabeth Bergstrom. She had two brothers, Edward and Frederic Bergstrom. She is survived by several nieces and nephews, including Elizabeth Stoker of Morris, Conn., Daniel Bergstrom and Kurt Bergstrom of Southington, Conn., Frederic Bergstrom Jr. of Middletown, Conn., and Stephen Bergstrom of Westerly, R.I.
Funeral services are being held today at 10 a.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church. Interment will follow at the Oak Grove cemetery. Friends are then invited to a reception at the Hillside Village community room following the ceremony.
Memorial gifts may be made to Island Elderly Housing, Trinity United Methodist Church or a charity of choice.
Richard Pough
Conservation Pioneer
Passionate Advocate for Wild Places Is Dead at 99
Richard H. Pough, the groundbreaking conservationist who died Tuesday, summered near Abel's Hill for 40 years. Quietly and surely, over decades, he helped frame the discussion of conservation on the Vineyard just as dramatically as he inflenced that debate nationally.
His scholar's knowledge helped Islanders understand that a portion of the Vineyard is geologically important as sandplain habitat. And he was an early voice in the quarter that said, "Enough tourists already; stop promoting the Vineyard."
Death came in early evening at his Chilmark home; he was 99.
Audubon magazine described Mr. Pough - it rhymes with "though" - as the man who "practically invented the land conservation business in this country." He was the author of the famous Audubon bird guides.
Sports Illustrated called him "the most effective and least publicized conservationist in the U.S."
Richard Goodwin, who followed Mr. Pough as president of The Nature Conservancy in the mid-1950s, once said: "He was a bloodhound. He sniffed out opportunities and ways of preserving our natural landscape."
Robert Woodruff, executive director of the Great Pond Foundation and former executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, said yesterday, "He had knowledge, perspective, and vision - extraordinary in one person. He always had sound advice, and a wonderful sense of humor."
And the Vineyard's Polly Hill, speaking of him in the present tense, said his passions were "birds and food - he'll eat anything with great enjoyment." You could always find him, Mrs. Hill said, "down around the marshy places, where the birds are."
Mr. Pough had visited the Island for years before purchasing the Chilmark property, overlooking South Beach, in 1961; he and his wife, Moira, bought three-plus acres of a former sheep pasture. "We mow the grass to keep the meadow," he once said. "It's our attempt to preserve the great views."
He served as an unofficial consultant to the Martha's Vineyard Garden Club, and as an adviser to the Vineyard Conservation Society, and he supported the Vineyard Open Land Foundation.
"I started the conservation society," he said in an interview in 1987, "because there needed to be somebody or some group that was concerned with what was happening here and see where land could be left undisturbed or have an easement put on it, to prevent it from ever being subdivided."
Sometimes he sounded pessimistic about the Vineyard's future.
In 1971 he and Moira wrote a letter to the Gazette marking the tenth anniversary of their Chilmark purchase.
"Recently," they wrote, "we stood on our porch and surveyed the local change in terms of the telephone and utility poles we can see. We are privileged to record no fewer than 78. The little lane by which we approach our cottage had but seven houses and there now are 15 poles with three more sites about to be built upon. Some of the families have three cars."
They went on to say: "This multiplication of pressures and loss of serenity and peace is to be found everywhere throughout the Vineyard. The all too ephemeral quality and charm that once gave us all respite from the city is fast fading away."
Years later, he said: "I'm not terribly hopeful for the Vineyard. This Island is going to get chopped up into sized units that the zoning allows. And then with the tax pressures and inheritance and all the rest, I don't see anything we can do to prevent it."
And he said: "There are too many people, too much money, too much publicity for the Vineyard. If I had my wishes, there's nothing I would wish for more than they'd stop advertising the Vineyard. They're crazy. They're going to ruin the place and ruin their own business. There should be absolutely no advertising of the Vineyard on the radio or on anything else. There are too many people coming already."
Still, he saw hope in such organizations as the Sheriff's Meadow Foundation and the land bank, and "thank goodness for the state forest."
Mr. Pough said of such efforts: "If we keep working parcel by parcel, we'll tie up the land so that it will remain open."
Mr. Woodruff said Mr. Pough always kept a perspective on this place.
He knew that "sweeping preservation" here was impossible, because the Island was under such pressure to develop. On the other hand, "He thought we could do what we have tried to do - preserve 20 per cent of the land mass through varied means … and focus on the fragile habitats."
Mr. Woodruff remembers walking with Mr. Pough through the sandplain - "we didn't call it that then" - and "I remember him pointing out plants, and showing that this was part of a continuous prairie, one vast prairie that extended from Chesapeake Bay and way seaward to Georges Bank."
Brendan O'Neill, executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, said such conversations helped in "creating the vocabulary" for Island conservation as we know it today. Crinkled onion-skin copies of 50-year-old letters written by Mr. Pough, Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough and others, in which they discussed legal methods of preserving land, reside in the conservancy's files. Ultimately, Mr. O'Neill said, Mr. Pough believed that for conservation to work you "put responsibility for protection of a place where the control lies, in the combined action of the landowners." And he trusted Vineyarders "to do the right thing."
Born in Brooklyn on April 19, 1904, Dick Pough spent summers as a child on Block Island, and he credited his mother, an MIT graduate in biology and public health, with interesting him in Gray's Botany and the living world. His father was a geologist and mineralogist. The family moved to St. Louis when he was 15, and he spent summers driving around the West, camping and hiking and occasionally putting up at the Harvey Houses, then just beginning to draw tourists west.
He followed his mother to MIT, graduating in 1926; he pursued a year of graduate study at Harvard in fine arts. Then he went off to work as an engineer at a sulfuric acid plant in Port Arthur, Tex.; he chose the night shift so he could spend days watching the bird migrations along the Gulf Coast.
Later, in Philadelphia, at a bankruptcy sale he bought a chain of camera stores and nursed them back to health: "That was my undoing. I had no one to answer for my time, so I began to get involved in trying to save endangered wildlife and especially critical habitats."
His first strong environmental activism involved fighting for hawks, and against the killing of them for sport.
The first land he fought to preserve was a 1,200-acre site atop a ridge in Pennsylvania, an area now called Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
That led to him joining the staff of the National Audubon Society.
After World War II, he became curator of conservation at the American Museum of Natural History. It was in these years that he wrote the famous bird guides.
Eventually his work led him to join the Ecologists Union, which in 1950 was transformed into The Nature Conservancy, a land acquisition organization. Today the Conservancy with its many state chapters has built the country's largest privately-owned sanctuary system.
"He had a wonderful manner," his Chilmark neighbor, Barbara Pesch, recalled. "He could talk anybody out of their land. He put it in such a plausible way that you couldn't not do it. You'd walk away with your pockets empty." And then she said: "He was a living legend."
Mr. Pough knew Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Prince Philip, Lady Bird Johnson, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Charles Lindbergh. And though he was somewhat shy in initial conversation, he'd generally open up and become garrulous - "the world according to Pough," his friends called it.
"One of my favorite mottoes," he once said, "is, ‘Are you man or are you mouse?' Stop talking and do something! I'm pretty action minded."
And on another occasion: "I couldn't have had a more satisfying life."
As for the Vineyard, there is poignancy in the letter the Poughs wrote the Gazette back in 1971.
"Are we leaving our two sons the heritage we had hoped, or will we bequeath them merely a forest of poles obscuring the polluted beaches, our roadside vegetation dying from diesel fumes and nerves jangling from the deafening roar of buses, planes and motorcycles? Having devoted 35 years to the cause of conservation, can it be that the Vineyard has been our most heartbreaking and frustrating effort, the one project in which we, ourselves, have such an immense, personal involvement?"
Mr. Pough was preceded in death by his wife, who died in 1986; son Edward W. (Wren), and granddaughter Juliette Pough. He is survived by brothers Frederick, of Reno, Nev., and Harold, of Wynnewood, Pa.; son Tristram H.; daughter in law Victoria G.; granddaughter Louisa and grandson Graham of Larchmont, N.Y., and daughter in law Marguerite, of Seattle, Wash.
A memorial service on the Vineyard will be held this fall at a date to be announced. His son, Tristram, said those wishing to contribute or donate in memory of his father should simply "plant a tree."
