HARTLEY NEITA HARTLEY NEITA
LAST TUESDAY, Hugh Shearer celebrated his 81st birthday at home.
From the crack of dawn until late evening, his telephone rang as his sons, Howard and Lance, and friends called from all over the island. Some sent fruit baskets and flowers. Bill Clarke of the Bank of Nova Scotia and long-time friend Arnold Foote, called from abroad to wish him a happy anniversary. So, too, did Leslie Watts and Hopeton Caven.
His trade union colleagues, Ruddy Spencer, Dwight Nelson, George Fyffe, Pearnel Charles and Lloyd Goodleigh visited to toast him. Present, too, was Opposition Leader Edward Seaga. Prime Minister P.J. Patterson called to say he would visit him on Friday, and Parliament paid him a birthday tribute. And the steady trek of friends, including former Editor of this newspaper, Wyvolyn Gager, to his Hope Pastures home, prevented him from enjoying his daily evening walk.
Hugh Shearer has retired from active public life. In recent months he has discovered the time to watch the world on his television screen. This was the world in which he once played a role of leadership on issues ranging from apartheid to better terms of trade from small countries such as Jamaica. The men and women with whom he once debated these issues are no longer on the scene. Today, the faces are new, facing new problems with which he did not have to deal in his time.
He has held more posts in the trade union movement and in the local and central Government system than any other person in Jamaica. He has been assistant to the general secretary, assistant general secretary, island supervisor, vice president and president of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union. And more recently, he was the president of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions.
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
He has been a councillor in the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation, member of the legislative council and member of the Senate of Jamaica. He then became a minister without portfolio, serving as the de facto spokesman for Jamaica in foreign affairs, Member of Parliament and de jure Minister of External Affairs, Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in Government.
The petunias, begonias and other flowers in his garden were blooming their many colours and attracting scores of birds who sang from early dawn to dusk on his birthday.
His previous birthdays were celebrated differently. There were some when he was surrounded by his parliamentary colleagues, when he would cut his birthday cake with Enid Bennett, a former Member of Parliament in St. Catherine, who also celebrates the same birth-date as he does. There were birthday tributes paid him by teachers and students of the Vere Technical High School in his former constituency.
BREAD LUNCH
There was also another when he drove to Rocky Point at the south end of his constituency where he was treated by the fishermen to a fish tea, and fried fish and hard-do bread lunch on the beach. He loved it.
Jamaica must never ever lose the memory of those who have served the country. Too often, men and women retire after giving everything they once owned to people, some of whom they never knew, and then are forgotten by the same people who came to them for help and got it.
Over the years I have had the habit of telephoning or visiting persons who have retired. There was a senior officer of government who, when I telephoned on the third occasion, said:
"You know, I am now discovering my real friends. While I was working my telephone never stopped ringing at my home during the first half of the night. I thought then, that these were my friends. Now, they no longer call. I can now cross out their telephone numbers from my address book."
