Fortunate One Chapter 16 — Returning to Nantucket

[This is an excerpt from my memoir “FORTUNATE ONE: From Nantucket to The White House.” which is available for sale at the local Nantucket bookstores. This excerpt addresses my return to Nantucket in the mid-1970’s to run Channel 3, the local cable channel that my parents had bought from Nantucket Cablevision.]

The Nantucket I remembered from visiting my grandparents in the mid-1960s was not the place I found in the winter of 1977, when I took command at Channel 3. Like Brockton, it was caught up in economic and social forces beyond its control, but the island’s increasingly bright trajectory was almost the opposite of the ongoing immiseration of my hometown.

For decades, Nantucket had been a sedate, cash-poor, seaside outpost, living on the memory of its whaling era riches and supported by WASPy summer people who were happy to keep a low profile, quietly sip their gin and tonics at the yacht club, wear shabby clothes around town, and navigate the local waters in unpretentious wooden sailboats. In the summers of the 1960s, you could still drive to the end of Straight Wharf, then little more than a paved parking lot jutting out into the harbor. Once there, you’d buy an ice cream cone at the snack bar and sit in your car to gaze out at the boats hypnotically bobbing at their moorings. The big event of the week was the band concert on Sunday night, when we crowded around a temporary wooden platform erected on Main Street’s cobblestones to listen to an ebullient woman in a man’s white suit and narrow black necktie conduct a program borrowing heavily from the middlebrow Boston Pops repertoire. Those quaint, innocent, small-town pleasures had all vanished when I moved back.

The country’s post-war economic boom created a much larger millionaire class with significantly more time and money to spend on recreation. This was the insight of a rich summer resident, Walter Beinecke, an heir to the S&H Green Stamp fortune and the controlling investor in the “Christmas Club” business. In the late 1960s, he started buying up the town’s waterfront, biggest hotels, and fanciest restaurants. The ancient wharves, home first to whaling ships and later to commercial fishing boats, suddenly sprouted high-end retail stores, art galleries, and a world-class boat basin. It was a Disneyland version of a maritime village but it prevented the island from becoming a ticky-tacky tourist trap like Hyannis or Provincetown.

This strategy worked spectacularly well. Beinecke’s savvy understanding of the new upper crust’s aspirations, combined with the legitimate charm of Nantucket’s historic pre-Civil War mansions and its remote, windswept natural beauty, quickly remade Nantucket into a major East Coast resort and playground for the rich, on par with the Hamptons, Hilton Head, and Palm Beach.

As the money poured into the island, so did a brigade of retirees, lawyers, doctors, artists, real estate agents, general contractors, bartenders, and hair stylists—people who had once enjoyed the island for its summer charms but had decided to make Nantucket their year-round home. From 1970 to 1980, the island’s winter population grew by 50 percent, to more than 5,000 people.

Chief among the new blood that flooded into Nantucket during the 1970s was my Uncle Wayne, my father’s younger brother. He had worked his way through Mercer University in Georgia after graduating as the “most likely to succeed” from Nantucket High School with my parents in the class of 1950. He had subsequently married my Aunt Lee, the daughter of Roy Sanguinetti, Nantucket’s most prominent attorney. Wayne became a lawyer himself, initially slaving away on soulless corporate legal staffs in Pennsylvania and Ohio. After growing tired of the mainland rat race, he moved the family back to the island and took over his retiring father-in-law’s legal practice at a time when there were only three lawyers on the island. Smart and sharp-elbowed, he became the attorney for many of the island’s leading businesses and quickly established himself as one of the town’s most dominant politicians, ultimately serving on almost every important town board.

Until I arrived on Nantucket, I didn’t realize what an important and sometimes polarizing figure Wayne had become. Nor did I understand immediately why people would be wary that he had effectively gained operating control of one of the island’s few news outlets. I quickly intuited that if I ran into people who didn’t like him, which was frequently the case, I should emphasize that I was myself a native and that my parents were the more down-to-earth Quentin Holmes and Jean Harris—remember them? Or maybe I’d mention that I had Nantucket relatives on both sides of the family, including my grandfather Arthur Harris and my other uncle, Arthur “Brother” Harris. In a place like Nantucket where genealogies mattered, I was happy to play the “native” card when I needed to. 

The business we had bought, known as Channel 3 because of its location on the cable line-up, was just a penny-ante operation. Nevertheless, we incorporated the business as the Nantucket Broadcasting Company and created an NBC logo because Wayne thought it would be great publicity if the real NBC sued us for copyright infringement, which alas, they never bothered to do. Located in the narrow basement of a former house on Federal Street, underneath an electronics store called “The Electric Mainsail,” Channel 3’s assets consisted of two video cameras, several monitors, and some aging transmission equipment. The “studio” was located at the far end of the cellar, with a curtain to cover up the stone foundation and a video set that accommodated a two-person plywood desk for newscasts. To be honest, we got ripped off. Cablevision should have paid us to take the operation off their hands, not the other way around. 

Channel 3 had one full-time employee, Jason, a sullen tech guy a couple years older than me who was rightfully wary about my qualifications to run a TV station. Before I arrived, Wayne recruited two local women to be the TV news anchors—Lillian Waine, the 60-something wife of a local electrician and a homespun, amateur winter thespian, and Nancy Burns, a late-20s, big blonde personality from the Boston suburbs, who was socially connected to the arty and moneyed summer crowd.

The idea was that I would report and write the news for a 15-minute Monday through Friday news broadcast at 5:30pm. I’d type the stories on my typewriter and hand them to Nancy and Lilian at 5:00pm for a quick read-through before going live. We’d try to break up the verbal narration with video segments recorded earlier in the day on three quarter inch tape—it was usually an interview I’d conducted but it could also be music from a kids’ concert, a scene from a school play, or a birthday party from the nursing home. There was frequent tension on the set because Nancy aspired to be a polished, Leslie-Stahl-like newscaster and she chafed at Lilian’s folksy, grandmotherly delivery, with its touches of Minnie Pearl. 

After the news, we offered a series of 15-minute shows that Jason would produce: a man-in-the-street interview segment (On the Street Where You Live with Al Fee, whose day job was an assistant manager at the local First National supermarket), a program on local architecture, or a public affairs interview show that Wayne hosted. Jason would also be responsible for live broadcasting local high school football and basketball games (boys only, since the sponsoring booster club was only interested in one gender), as well as the annual town meeting and other important civic events.

Most of these shows were marginally supported by advertising, but to cover all the bills, we had to figure out how to squeeze more ad dollars out of the local merchants. Considering how much money was floating around town, this should have been easy, but I was from the “You don’t want to buy an ad, do you?” school of salesmanship. For a while, Lilian tried to sell ads and then we hired other sales people, but since there were no TV ratings, most of the local businesses didn’t see the value. Some of them would throw us a few crumbs from their leftover marketing dollars as a civic goodwill gesture, not unlike their sponsorship of a local Little League team, but we never cracked the big ad budgets. 

Despite having never previously written one line of news copy, I became a decent reporter. In the very early days, I got a lot of tips from Wayne, who knew all the town government gossip. In fact, thanks to him, I broke major news on our very first broadcast—that the disgruntled members of the police department were unionizing and joining the Teamsters. That was a classic small town news story, growing out of years of petty grievances, hurt feelings, and personal conflict. The selectman had recently recruited as their new police chief a well-credentialed but decidedly off-island law enforcement officer who ended a two century-long string of homegrown, good old boy top guns. The new guy was not popular with the dozen or so officers serving under him. They didn’t like it that he and the captain wore professional-looking white shirts instead of the gray uniforms that were good enough for the rest of them. Nor did they like it that he was recruiting new officers from off-island. And there were conflicts over shift assignments and a general feeling of disrespect. There were also nasty rumors, almost certainly unsubstantiated, that his wife was seen alone at the Chicken Box, the town’s ill-reputationed dive bar.

In a small town, the cops are celebrities, and the activities of the police department were a major focus of the island’s attention in those days. With only three national channels to watch on broadcast television, the police scanner was one of the island’s most important sources of entertainment, especially on long winter nights. Everyone had an opinion on what the cops did. In the end, the anti-chief turmoil was like almost everything else I covered as a local reporter: there was the surface news and the more interesting story-behind-the-story. For example, three meter maids (all sisters nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels” because of their father’s given name) were having affairs with three members of the force. Even though these were local women stepping out with local men married to local wives, somehow the outsider chief got blamed for letting his department become a little Peyton Place. But obviously none of this ever made it into print or on the air.

I tried to ingratiate myself with my new sources in the town building, the selectmen, the school committee, the police and fire departments, and the business community. Sometimes, I’d pick up some interesting historical tidbits. This is the kind of ancient anecdote you’d hear: the Chairman of the Planning Board was nicknamed “Hosey,” which I thought was a play on the name José; but no, he got his nickname in the high school locker room because his male member was alleged to be as long as a hose. 

Some sources became friends, particularly Madelyne Perry, the town clerk. Her son, slightly older than I was, had recently died in a car crash and she treated me as a surrogate son. She knew generations of island gossip and I’d hang out in her office to learn not only how the town actually worked, but also what children had been fathered by someone other than the men raising them, or which local officials had been enemies since birth. There’s a game Nantucketers play: “Who are their people?” If I asked about a woman on the planning board, Madelyne would say, “Well, she was a Holdgate,” and tell me who her parents and grandparents were and which of her multiple Holdgate brothers and sisters still lived on Nantucket and who they dated in high school. And I ate it up.