Fifteen years ago, just before Hurricane Ivan paid Grand Cayman a visit in September 2004, my wife Vicki and I and our keynote speaker, the Hon. McKeeva Bush, had gathered at the Grand Pavilion Commercial Centre on West Bay Road to introduce our new publication, titled, appropriately enough, Grand Cayman Magazine.
A decade and a half later, we gathered again at the Grand Pavilion to mark and celebrate the 15th anniversary of Grand Cayman. The ballroom which served as our original venue is long gone, but this time we gathered in the courtyard around the pool to visit with about two hundred friends, associates, well-wishers, and advertisers (many of them have been with us in every issue since our inception).
Certainly there were new faces, including our new Governor, His Excellency Martyn Roper, who had made an appreciated extra effort to stop by. He was “double booked” since he was hosting an event that evening at Government House just up the road.
(For those who have not yet personally met Governor Roper, we introduce him, along with this wife “Lissie,” at some length in a profile that begins on Page 54 of this issue.)
Between our inaugural issue and the current one, much indeed has changed on these islands and, yes, dear readers, that includes you, too. For the duration, perhaps the most popular feature in Grand Cayman has been our “Shooting Stars” section where Cayman’s “peacocks” strut themselves and their finest at the countless events that collectively make up Cayman’s social scene. It’s a rainy-day delight to thumb through that archival history and see how so many of us have, er, matured. Since we have published thousands of these pictures, perhaps it would be a suitable exercise to pull a few hundred together and put them on exhibition at a local gallery — maybe even the National Gallery would have an interest.
If I may tell a tale, the arrival of Hurricane Ivan almost put a premature end to Grand Cayman Magazine. Vicki and I were off-island when the storm hit. We didn’t make it back for nearly 30 days to both good news and bad news. Our beachfront condominium was largely undamaged, but our offices at Regency Court were devastated. In fact, the building was literally a “poster-child” for photographers showing the extent of the island’s damage.
To Vicki’s credit, certainly not mine, she donned “Wellingtons” (high-water waders) to rifle through the rubble of our offices for hours to try to recover our computer hard-drives. I thought the search was futile, but I was wrong. She and a helper retrieved all five of them, and four were in working condition. They contained all of our photo archives of “your pictures” that I mentioned above.
But an obvious question loomed: Should we continue to publish Grand Cayman Magazine? Being an upscale, upbeat, “party magazine,” did it even have a place on an island that was struggling for its very survival? Would anybody want to read it, or importantly, advertise in it (since that is our only income stream)?
We sought advice from McKeeva Bush, who said publish. Then-Governor Bruce Dinwiddy encouraged us similarly, but it was Cayman National’s CEO Stuart Dack, who actually convinced us to go forward.
We met at length with Mr. Dack at Cayman National’s Elgin Avenue offices, which had taken terrible abuse during the storm, and he convinced us that it was more “important” than ever that Grand Cayman continue to “fly the flag” of these islands. It was important, he told us, that we show the residents — and the world — that the island, indeed, would endure.
We raised a practical question: Where would the money come from? Who would advertise in a “good news” magazine amidst the hardship and the rubble.
“Cayman National will,” he said, “and I will help you.”
I’ve told that story many times before, and I intend to keep telling it.
One funny anecdote: After my meeting with Stuart Dack, I revisited our devastated offices. They were on the second (top) floor, and the roof had blown completely off. I took a few pictures from our parking lot, looking upward, through our windows (which had Grand Cayman Magazine decals on the glass), clear through to the blue sky.
We then bought full-page advertisements in the newspaper under the headline:
Grand Cayman Magazine
Is ‘Wide Open for Business!’
For the next year we produced Grand Cayman out of our Laguna Del Mar condo. As every entrepreneur knows, “You gotta do what you gotta do,” but more than once we asked ourselves, “Are we crazy?”
About seven years ago, when Vicki and I bought the Cayman Compass and a stable of seven or eight magazine titles, we brought Grand Cayman along with us and folded it into the mix.
About a year ago, we sold the newspaper and all of the magazine titles — except one. This one. Call us sentimental, or parental (or just not ready for retirement), but we decided to keep and continue publishing Grand Cayman.
That meant forming a new company (Legge Communications (Cayman) Ltd.), securing two business licenses (one for publishing, the other for marketing and communications), making our first hires, and searching for new office space, which we found, where else, at the Grand Pavilion!
Of course, Suites 14 and 16 were empty, so that meant shopping sprees in Cayman and Florida for desks, chairs, bookshelves, sofas, plants, TVs, not to mention new bank accounts, telephone lines, and internet service . . . the list goes on. (I’ll tell you something you may already know, but I didn’t: When you buy furniture, put it on a boat, and ship it to Cayman, it generally arrives fine, but it arrives “unassembled.” Don’t even ask . . . )
And so the saga continues. Thank you for a wonderful 15 years, and our pledge to all of our loyal readers and advertisers is that we will never compromise the quality of this magazine. Grand Cayman Magazine must, and will, always reflect the excellence of the community that we — and you — are privileged to call our home.
