A front-page photo in the 22 March 1973 issue of the Cayman Compass depicted the first-ever landing in Cayman of an Eastern Airlines passenger jet. The chartered flight, which originated in Atlanta, Georgia, carried 98 passengers, 56 of them doctors, “who enjoyed their stay at various hotels on the Island”.
Inside the newspaper, the article, ‘First Hearing in New Law Courts Building’, described the appeal of Dorothy May Griffiths, who had been sentenced to 18 months of hard labour, after pleading guilty to being in possession of ganja, after “a quantity [was found] concealed in her brassiere”, by customs. The Court of Appeal felt the sentence “was not manifestly excessive” and dismissed the application.
Another first was recognised in ‘Cayman’s First Carpet Centre’, which chronicled Kent Rankin opening Paramount Carpeting. While working as a foreman mason at La Fontaine Hotel in 1967, he asked to help when carpet was being installed. When he was congratulated for “doing a good job”, he was encouraged to learn all he could about the carpet business. Eventually he set up his own showroom, noting, “At first, I made a lot of mistakes, which I corrected as I went along.”
A letter to the editor from Bill Wright, of Texas, started off by saying,”Overwhelmingly, the most pleasant recollection of your islands is the friendliness of the people.” During his visit, he went diving with “Bob Soto’s group”. He said he saw Kem, the divemaster, “pick bottles off the bottom and bring them to the surface to be placed in a trash container on the dive boat”. Adding that he was “proud” of his actions, he said, “I know there must be many people like Kem who believe in beauty and know that it will be destroyed eventually if everyone does not do his part to preserve it.”
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