BY OSWALD T. BROWN
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This in an update to a commentary I have published on this date every year for the past several years.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — March 5 has annually been a debilitatingly sad day for me since 2006. Today would have been the 79th birthday of my boyhood friend Preston Stuart, Jr., whose body was discovered in the back seat of his Cadillac DeVille sedan in a canal off Queen’s Cove in Freeport, Grand Bahama, on July 20, 2006.
Preston and I became friends when we were both students at Southern Junior and Southern Senior Schools in Nassau in the 1950s. We began our life-long friendship shortly after my family moved from Stanyard Creek, Andros, to Nassau in 1952, when I was 10 years old, and throughout our student years we were inseparable. At Southern Senior, he was not only an outstanding student, but he also excelled in virtually every sport in which he participated, particularly in basketball, baseball and cricket.
I can well recall a classic basketball game our Southern Senior team, on which I was also a member, played in 1957 against a St. John’s College team that included at the time excellent players like my late very close friend Charles “Chuck” Virgill, Garth H.O. Nash, Louis Dames, Dencil Major and Mackey Vanderpool. We lost the game by a score of 23-21 and Preston scored 20 of our 21 points.
When we left Southern Senior in 1958, after passing our Junior Certificate, we both went to work at the Bahamas Telecommunications Corporation (TELECOMS), but I only remained there for about six months before moving on to the Parcel Post Office in Oakes Field. I subsequently joining the staff of The Tribune as a trainee journalists in May of 1960.
Preston remained with TELECOMS for several years before also joining the Tribune as a trainee reporter and he developed into a very good journalist. In fact, he left The Tribune to take over as head of the Ministry of Tourism’s Office in Freeport, a position to which he was appointed by Arthur A. Foulkes, who was then the Minister of Tourism in the PLP Government.
Preston, of course, subsequently established himself as one of Freeport’s leading realtors as owner of First Atlantic Realty and he accumulated tremendous wealth at a time when selling real estate was a booming business in the rapidly developing city of Freeport.
He expanded his wealth tremendously by subsequently establishing himself as one of the leading operators of the “numbers business” in Grand Bahama. Even though the “numbers business” was illegal at the time, his operation was set up as professionally as a business of that nature could possibly be to not attract the attention of law-enforcement personnel.
I moved to the United States to live in 1974, but our friendship remained rock-solid over the years. Our birthdays are only two days apart – I shall be celebrating my 79th this Sunday, March 7 – and each year on our birthday, we would call each other to say happy birthday.
When all of our close friends were celebrating their 50th birthdays with huge birthday parties in 1992, Preston called my in Washington, D.C., and suggested that we celebrate our 50th together. Knowing how lavish the 50th birthday parties our close friends who were around our age had been, I asked Preston, “How much is this going to cost me?”
His response was, “Just purchase your ticket and come home because you can’t afford to pay half of what I have in mind.”
Preston literally renovated a night club on the canal that had been closed for several years, and I am sure that persons in Freeport who attended our 50th birthday party can very well remember it as being one of the biggest parties ever held in Freeport.
When I returned to The Bahamas in 1993, for what I thought would be permanent, I went to Freeport and lived with Preston for more than a year during my first tenure as Editor of the Freeport News. However, I returned to D.C. in 1994 and subsequently returned to The Bahamas, this time permanently, in 1996 and once again lived with Preston after again being appointed Editor of the Freeport News.
When Preston was reported missing and his body was subsequently discovered in his car submerged in a canal off Queen’s Cove, I was in Nassau working from an office at the Nassau Guardian, which owns the Freeport News, while receiving treatment for a medical condition.
I took the news extremely hard. Preston was owner of the popular Legends Sports Bar and we saw each other daily. In fact, during most of my lunch breaks while editing the Freeport News, I would send time playing dominoes or cards with him and other friends at Legends Sports Bar. If he was worried about something, I am certain that he would have told me.
That’s why I totally dismissed as utter nonsense rumors circulating at the time that he committed suicide. I still strongly believe that he met his death at the hands of persons he knew, but my personal investigation did not produce sufficient concrete evidence to support the circumstantial evidence on which my theory was based.
Nonetheless, I still miss my brother tremendously. May his soul continue to rest in peace.
