Richard Arch, the chairman of the newly formed Cayman Islands National Council of Social Services, was featured in a page 1 story of the 27 Feb. 1975 edition of The Caymanian Compass. In his address to the Chamber of Commerce, Arch pointed to all the social ills in Cayman, including poverty, overcrowding and delinquency. Asking how many young people have “taken the wrong path” without anyone to oversee them, he said, “We have left them quite independently to get into trouble, get with the wrong gang and again get into more trouble because we pull them before a juvenile court for having a $2 stick of marijuana.”
Page 3 carried a story on a hydroponics business in Cayman. In about 10 weeks, the tomato plants had grown taller than owners Donnie and Dave Macdonald, whose growing unit was located on Crewe Road. About $50,000 had already been spent on the fibreglass-reinforced plastic structure, which housed about 1,150 plants. As of publication date, they had sold more than 1,000 pounds of tomatoes, and were “hoping to harvest about 1,000 pounds a week shortly”.
One of the topics covered in the editorial was ‘Murderer at Large’, referring to the unsolved case of a man killed in West Bay on 11 Jan. 1975. Noting that the police were “doing their utmost”, the editorial called on members of the public to give any information they might have on the crime to the police, saying that anyone who concealed facts about a crime was “morally guilty”.
A CUC crew member was photographed at the top of an electric pole making the final checks of the line from Gun Bay to The Tortuga Club. The line would carry electricity to the farthest point east in Grand Cayman, enabling the few remaining homes there without electricity to switch from oil lamps for lighting and invest “in the labour saving appliances and luxuries others have taken for granted for many years”.
