Vineyard Gazette - News -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 12/24/2003
Last Visited: 12/24/2003
Gayle and Bob Mone were founding participants in the 1980s when the Martha's Vineyard Arena was still a Currier and Ives print, an outdoor sheet of ice on 3.2 acres of land donated by the high school; a place where a few men formed a hockey team, families bonded, and toddlers like Jonathan and Ryan Mone, who went on to become varsity hockey players, both wearing number 23, wobbled and giggled and learned to glide.
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Robert and Tara Levine contributed $350,000 to the fundraiser, later pledging over $100,000 more.
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Bob Mone of Mone, Lawrence & Carlin Insurance Agency, Inc., is one of eight children, the son of the late William Mone, a Massachusetts Superior Court Judge, who'd spent summers on the Vineyard.He met Mrs. Mone, a college student from North Carolina, in 1972 in an Oak Bluffs bar on her first day of work as a waitress."Love at first sight."She smiles a fragile smile.They married six months after the summer's end and moved to the Vineyard.
Mr. Mone worked as a fish broker.Mrs. Mone worked for a bank, then for their friend, the late attorney Ed Coogan, the Edgartown School and, for the past two years, as assistant to author David McCullough, who attests, "I can tell you that she likes things done right."
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Mrs. Mone adds, "It's not just the facility, it's not the material things, it's what's inside it.So even though when there was nothing in there, the boys were what's important.I mean they gathered together cold and wet and smelly and it was the camaraderie and they were fine with that."
"It's been said that when you have such a loss you can't keep in the same direction," Mrs. Mone says.
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Mrs. Mone pauses to look at a display of hockey sticks from the high school's varsity teams mounted on the arena wall just off the lobby.Each stick has been signed by all the members of the team.Standing still, she peers closer at the team signatures from the 1995-1996 season.