Celebrating our 40th Anniversary!
Island Memories
This season is Yesterday’s Island’s 40th year publishing on Nantucket. We’ve seen many changes on the island in those four decades, and over the years we’ve made many changes to our newsmagazine.
As part of our anniversary celebration, we’re printing memories of the island in 1970 that have been shared with us by readers. Jo Ann Hubbard saw our request on the Yesterday’s Island Facebook page and was the very first to respond. We’d like to thank her for sending in her story, and we hope that it jogs some memories of others on-island 40 years ago.
If you have a memory of Nantucket Island in 1970 that you’d like to share with us and our readers, please email it to yi@nantucket.net or mail it to us at P.O. Box 626, Nantucket, MA 02554.
Summer Storm of 1970
It was a no-name tropical storm in August of 1970 that I recall vividly and fondly, surprisingly enough. It was an adventure! I lived and worked that summer at the Sea Cliff Inn. My room, on the second floor of the main hotel building faced the Jetties. As the storm blew in I could not see out of the window—the rain came down hard in horizontal sheets. It rained so hard that the water came through the plaster wall of my room (and through other walls and ceilings in that old structure.) Touching the wall caused water to drip down the wall paper and onto the wooden floor. There were buckets catching water all over the dining room which jutted out of the back of the main hotel building with windows facing toward the harbor. Towels lined the window sills and had to be wrung out often; the water just seemed to come straight through the old windows.
Just as quickly as it started raining, it stopped and the sun came out. I walked down Cliff Road, heading toward the Boat Basin wanting to see how boats had weathered the storm. When I stepped off the curb at the bottom of Cliff Road water rushed up to my knees—Cliff Road had become a stream. In the Boat Basin people were walking along the docks looking at debris and creatures in the water—eels were visible in the murky water and some teenagers were attempting to catch them.
— shared by Jo Ann Hubbard of Canaan, NH
