A photo of an overturned car on the side of the road was front and centre in the 7 Aug. 1975 edition of The Caymanian Compass. Shown was Mervyn Cumber, manager of Coconut Car Rentals, which offered VW ‘Things’ like the one pictured. However, as the headline, ‘Don’t Worry, Mervyn’, implied, the vehicle was not one of his. The 17-year-old driver and his passenger were not injured.
Below that photo was a story on film censorship. A sub-committee of the Legislative Assembly, headed by John Jefferson, legislator and religious leader, was to meet with cinema representatives to “ascertain whether or not censorship is feasible for Cayman”. A similar meeting had already been held with bookshop owners “to prevent undesirable publications which would tend to have a bad influence on the community”.
A small article at the bottom of the front page announced ‘Hoffa Disappears’. The 62-year-old ex-boss of the US Teamsters union, who had visited Cayman in November 1972, as shown in a photo with the story, had either been killed or kidnapped.
The only story on page 3, ‘Crowds Invade Cinema For James Bond Film’, was about the screening of ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, which attracted “huge crowds” for opening night. More than 100 people were turned away from the first show, and almost 200 from the late screening, with a photo included of the crowd waiting outside the door of Cinema 1 to get in to watch the movie.
In light of seven major fires which had already occurred in 1975, the Compass editorial called for a fire-fighting service for domestic purposes, separate from the facility at the airport. “As is often the case when misfortune occurs, some of these fires … broke out when the Airport Fire Service was engaged because of aircraft activity at Owen Roberts Airport,” which is their primary duty, the editorial said. The newspaper called for establishing a domestic fire service, as well as a volunteer auxiliary fire-fighting corps.
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