Our trip to The Gleaner Company (Media) Ltd
AT THE Gleaner, we had the pleasure of meeting The Honourable Oliver Clarke, chairman; Mr Christopher Barnes, managing director; Paget deFreitas, the overseas editor; and HR Manager Tanya Smith, among other staff. They treated us like royalty. We toured through each department, beginning with a timeline depiction of The Gleaner’s many deCordova and Ashenheim directors and editors framed prominently on the wall. We learned how the paper continued to publish despite fires and the 1907 earthquake that destroyed its offices.
We inspected the archives in the research room – bound, microfiche, and digital – and learned that the newspaper’s digital database contained an impressive 970,000-plus historical newspaper pages.
FRAMED FIRST EDITION
Mr Barnes gave Trip a framed copy of the first edition of The Gleaner, which, interestingly, featured a love poem. To my pleasant surprise, Noel and Lane both requested a copy of The Gleaner’s front-page story reporting the untimely passing of Bob Marley. A reggae music fan since the early ’70s also, I had the good fortune to hear Bob Marley and the Wailers play in 1980 in Toulon, France, just months before he died. I’m proud that our kids love reggae. But then, between their father and me, how could they not?
The Ocho Rios reunion was held at the home of John Bailey, whose grandmother, was – you guessed it – a deCordova. And, to make a small world smaller, we have had the pleasure of getting to know John’s mother, Shirley Hart Bailey of Canada and frequently Grand Cayman, Bryan Ashenheim and his wife, Madge and cousin, Darryl Myers, all of Grand Cayman, because Trip’s business often takes us there.
With slavery finally coming to an end in 1834 and waves of German and Scottish immigration in Jamaica, I found it odd that a love poem would take up nearly the entire front page of the first published Gleaner. I confess, again, that I struggled to understand the poem. But, I would like to think it was a prophecy for me.