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"A Personal Plea to the Investing Public" — Nantucket's David-and-Goliath Fight, 1968 An original archive of the episode Nantucketers argued about all through 1968: the fight between Walter Beinecke Jr. — the S&H Green Stamps heir whose Sherburne Associates was remaking the island's waterfront in an $8,000,000 restoration — and A. Preston Manchester, 30-year owner of the Upper Deck Restaurant on Main Street, whose mortgage Beinecke bought and moved to foreclose. The centerpiece: Manchester's legendary advertisement clipped from the front page of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror — "A PERSONAL PLEA TO THE INVESTING PUBLIC — To Save My Livelihood, My Business and My Property" — begging any wealthy summer resident to take his mortgage rather than let the island's most powerful man take his building. With it, substantial New Bedford Standard-Times coverage: "Nantucket Businessmen Battle Beinecke" (3/28/1968, with photo), the "Poor Man's Howard Hughes" profile, a foreclosure report listing creditors, and the resolution — "Multimillionaire Buys Restaurant For $100,000; Auction Canceled" (June 1968), Beinecke's eleventh-hour "Good Samaritan" turn. Plus the original 1968 airmail transmittal envelope, docketed "Preston." A ready-made research file on a pivotal moment in Nantucket's transformation. From a Alabama family estate w/ Massachusetts roots. Condition: clippings toned, brittle at edges, with folds; the Plea ad with old repairs at margins; envelope worn. See photos.