Posted on 03/27/2004 10:46:55 AM PST by FreeAtlanta
I'm sure Teresa had a pre-nup, along with trust setup even before Senator Heinz's death.
This e-mail that started here has made it onto Snope's Urban Legend site! http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/homes.asp
They are known around here as having a left-wing bias, and they try to apologize for Kerry- candidate of the common man- but, it is weak. Good job fellow freepers! Please keep up the good work!
This e-mail that started here has made it onto Snope's Urban Legend site! http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/homes.asp
They are known around here as having a left-wing bias, and they try to apologize for Kerry- candidate of the common man- but, it is weak. Good job fellow freepers! Please keep up the good work!
ROFLOL!!!
Naushon Island is the largest of the Elizabeth Islands and is the closest to Woods Hole. The military constructed a total of three in-ground observation stations at two sites during WWII which provided observation support for batteries at Fort Rodman and Mishaum Point.
Off the coast of Woods Hole is Naushon Island. Naushon Island is a privately held island
that is managed by a family trust. Naushon island is 7.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. It's about a half mile from Woods Hole. The property is mostly posted no trespassing, with
the exception of a few beaches.
We were lucky in that one of the regular attendees of the gathering is a member of the trust
that owns the island. With him as our guide we were able to stop on the island and enter the posted areas.
We were scheduled to meet at the boat ramp near the aquarium at about 9am. Slack tide
was 9:13. As usual I was later than I expected. I was about to carry my boat down to the
ramp when Alec appeared. Alec rushed to launch and we hit the water at about 9:30. We knew 3 of us were definitely attending, with a possible fourth. I found out the following day that the possible fourth paddler had driven to woods hole, listened to the weather report and
decided fog, rain, wind and possibly challenging tide conditions were more than he was up for with his "new" boat (a clear skinned Disco Bay kayak, that he built last fall).
The tide was just starting to move and there were a couple of entertaining swirls on the
way across the harbor. Entertaining enough to want to go back in a boat I'm more comfortable in (I was in my Dyson designed 5.7 baidarka).
Alec led the way along Nonamesett then Bull Neck Island (open to picnicers) and up into the inner harbor. UNH has old online topos of the area http://docs.unh.edu/MA/wdsh41sw.jpg) We then went around Goat island crossed under one of the bridges between islands. Alec said there was up to an 18" drop going through the bridge when the tide was running. We were there early and the drop increased from about 4 inches to 8 inches in about 15 minutes.
Out the other side of the bridge we paddled past a few houses in the fog along Monohansett Island. We cruised along the southeast side of Naushon and stopped for lunch in Taurpaulin
Cove. Before lunch our guide took us over to the old farm/Inn. He said it was a 1890's vintage Inn and the rooms still had numbers on them. We hung out on the porch as the fog
started to lift greatly enjoying the serenity of the old front porch surrounded by empty fields,
with a lighthouse barely visible over the rise.
While on the porch we were told some of the island history. In the 1930s or 1940s the 5 landowners got together and put the property into a trust. Current members of the trust apply to use a residence during the summer. There are currently 40 houses on the island, 37 on the northeast end 3 elsewhere. The houses all belong to the trust not the individuals. If someone puts up the money to add a house that person has first rights to the house for several years (5?) and then the house is just another part of the trust.
We ate lunch in the dunes and when we returned to our boats the fog had lifted. We had
a great view of Martha's Vineyard across the sound. It's about 4 miles from Taurpaulin cove
to the Vineyard.
After lunch we headed back around Nonamesett Island, taking a break (making full use
of our guide) on a private dock in Nomsod Bay. Then around Mink Point and back into the
harbor. Coming back across Woods Hole passage we had a bit of current but nothing to challenging, since it was almost slack tide again.
Back in Woods Hole we loaded up, stopped for an ice cream, and headed home.
I'll definitely be back to the area, next time with a boat that has a coaming that a sprayskirt will stay on if I play around...
Jim Geraghty
April 01, 2004, 8:35 a.m.
Kerry Island
Jay Gatsby runs for president.
Naushon Island, off the Massachusetts coast, has been known as the home of pirates, who confiscated the hard-earned wealth of merchants and businessmen; sheep, obedient creatures who demonstrate no independence; ticks and flies, droning annoying pests; and is rumored to be haunted by frightening, ghostly pale, gaunt figures. It is also a family home of John Kerry; readers can decide for themselves whether he constitutes a redundant addition to that list.
Seven miles long and about 5,000 acres, Naushon is the largest and most unspoiled in the Elizabeth Islands chain, just northwest of Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquiddick. The only year-round settlement in the chain is the town of Gosnold, on the outermost and lone public island, Cuttyhunk.
In its history, Naushon has been owned by only three families; the family of the first governor of Massachusetts colony, the Winthrops, the Bowdoins, and the Forbeses for the most recent 148 years.
The Forbes family maintains about 30 homes on Naushon, and hundreds of Forbeses and their guests vacation there in the summer. The public can boat near it, but not land. Today, a mounted groundskeeper patrols the shores, and politely asks trespassers to leave — though some trespassers are allowed to finish their walk and urged to get permission before landing again.
"In order to preserve the owners' privacy and maintain the islands in the face of campers, litterers, thieves, arsonists, hunters, and others, they are all strictly no trespassing," wrote Naushon Shareholder David Gregg in a letter to a kayaker in the mid-1990s. (Arsonists?)
Only caretakers and sheepherders live on the island year-round. Employment with the Forbes does not appear to be a road to wealth: According to 2001 state Division of Employment and Training figures, the entire 2001 total payroll for Gosnard was $782,801 at eight establishments with a total of 51 employees, for an average income of $15,349.
In a policy that would make Al Gore proud, no vehicles are allowed on Naushon, and residents and guests travel by foot or by horseback or via antique horse-drawn carriages.
Periodically, Kerry talks about his ties to the island, his memories of family gatherings during his childhood, more recent experiences windsurfing off its coasts, or asserting his brotherhood with sportsmen by recalling adventures with his cousins shooting deer there. Kerry took Joe Klein for a speedboat ride off the island during the summer of 2002, perhaps the perfect interview backdrop for the senator's glowing profile in The New Yorker.
One can picture the lanky teen Kerry, wandering the steep, grassy hills that observers compare to Scottish highlands, contemplating deep thoughts while standing atop a high cliff overlooking rocky beaches and crashing surf. Between the mansions of wealth and class behind him, and the stark landscape before him, the atmosphere must have felt like a Charlotte Bronte novel.
In Kerry's 1990 Senate campaign, his opponent Jim Rappaport charged that the senator's "family trust" was receiving a tax abatement because the island is used for agricultural purposes, allowing the trust to pay $300 in annual taxes instead of $12,000. Kerry's spokesman responded that the island was owned by a trust set up by distant relatives on the Forbes side of his family, and that the senator is not a beneficiary of that trust. Kerry insisted that the island was just a family vacation home, not a formally owned property.
The Forbes of Naushon made their fortune in transoceanic trade in the 19th-century, including exchanging opium from Turkey for Chinese tea and silk. (The late financier Malcolm Forbes and his son, former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, are not related to this Forbes family.)
Although Kerry and Teresa Heinz enjoy the island privileges, neither he nor many other of the Forbes of his generation inherited vast wealth from their forebears.
Kerry's mother, Rosemary, was one of those Forbes of moderate means; his father Richard was a foreign-service officer stationed in Paris, Oslo, and Berlin. The wealthier relatives helped pay for Kerry's boarding school in Switzerland and later helped the family pay for Kerry's tuition at St. Paul's in New Hampshire, a prestigious classic jacket-and-tie New England private school.
Kerry's ties to the Forbes side of his family make for fascinating speculation. His upbringing was far from impoverished, but he was constantly surrounded by old money and pureblood Brahmin aristocracy. His family had a 52-foot-sailboat; the other kids had yachts. He was a Democratic Catholic; the campus of St. Paul's was almost entirely Republican Episcopalians. Kerry's peers reportedly perceived him as being "too ambitious" for a Forbes.
One wonders how Kerry was affected by being identified as a mere half-Forbes in the part of the country that put the most emphasis on inane aristocratic concepts of 'good breeding.'
"It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know," wrote Cleveland Amory wrote in his 1947 book , The Proper Bostonians. "Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents."
At school, Kerry faced a reception more complicated than racism or snobbery, according to Douglas Brinkley in his gushing review of Kerry's time in Vietnam, Tour of Duty.
"His fate would have been simpler in fact, if he were born an African-American from Atlanta or an Okie from Tulsa," Brinkley wrote. "Such clear anomalies at St. Paul's would have been accepted as legitimate outsiders, intelligent flukes of nature trying against ungodly odds to join the Eastern Establishment."
Rather than living the simple life of a black Atlantan in 1958, Kerry soldiered on as the poor outsider among the Brahmins, eventually dating Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister, Janet Auchincloss. Through her, he was invited to go boating with President and the First Lady in 1962.
"If you look at those pictures of him with JFK on the boat, he looks kind of uncomfortable," says Howie Carr, Boston radio-show host and the Godfather of Bay State Kerry-watchers. "It's not like Clinton shaking hands with Kennedy at the White House, looking like, 'Hey, baby, this is where I belong.'"
Perhaps the weekends spent at Hammersmith Farm in Rhode Island, which was serving as the summer White House, seemed too much like the family gatherings at Naushon — Jay Gatsby, masquerading among the privileged classes.
Regardless, Kerry eventually made peace with the world of wealth and lineage. He hosted two visits by the Clintons to Naushon in 1993 and 1994, with the president contributing a White House baseball cap to the informal "Presidential Hat Museum" that the Forbes family maintains in the main mansion on the island. Local lore claims the mansion is haunted by "ghosts of former Massachusetts governors."
There is no word on whether any of the ghosts have been glimpsed driving a phantom tank in pre-production Kerry for President campaign commercials.
I'm game .. I want to humiliate this man more then Mondale was
I want to win ALL 50 STATES!!!
The Weepecket Islands are an uninhabited nature preserve of theJ.M. Forbes Naushon Island Land Trust.
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