Voices From The Forest (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781456307059)

I am Gladstone D Meyler Age 81 years young, very active and don't look a day older than 50. I was born on April 13th 1929 in the small town of Montego Bay Jamaica. An illegitimate son of my mother Ellen Oatfield a descendant of a Scottish Grand Father, My father was a man of color descendant of slaves. My mother was a seamstress by trade. My father was a businessman, after being hired out as a common laborer, to harvest sugar cane in Cuba. He returned home after learning a trade in sheet metal and opened his own business. My father married another woman, a school teacher, ten days before my birth. I grew up in that small town with a stigma of rejection, along with the embarrassment that my mother suffered. My only support, both financial and mental was from a mother's inexhaustible love. I finished school at the early age of sixteen. The age afforded by the government for the less fortunate. I never stopped trying to gain knowledge, by acquiring friends of higher learning, and constantly probing them for answers to questions that haunted me. A friend introduced me to the library in out town. Through odd jobs, at the wharves, and other places, I acquired a small private loan to rebuild and extend my mother's two-room house. I was nineteen years old. At twenty one I was fortunate to receive a visa to visit the United States of America. Seeing the vast opportunity, I took a job to pay back the loan. I was fully aware that my visa did not afford me to work. In seven months I was caught, and deported, back to Jamaica. Fortunately I had paid off the loan, and also fell in love with a young lady from Arizonian living at the time in New York. She flew to Jamaica where we got married, and after four years of antagonism from the United States Embassy I was granted a permanent visa to live with my wife in New York. Working in restaurants and catering halls both in Brooklyn and New York City. I attended a course at Brooklyn community collage, in catering. In 1957 I led the largest workers strike in the history of the culinary industry. It was at the Lundy's Brothers Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn. The largest restaurant in the world. They hired 300 waiters. I began a house to house catering business. I catered a NAACP dinner of three hundred guests at the Ossining, NY home of the actor Sydney Poitier, also a reception for then Prime Minister of India Mrs. Gandhi. Building a home in Montego Bay, in 1969, for the soul purpose of raising my only daughter, away from the bigotry that existed in America at the time, I took a job as the Food and Beverage Director of a 500 room resort hotel. Nine months later I opened my first establishment. The Montegonian Restaurant Inc: Later a branch in Coral Gables Florida. The first man of color to open a business in that prestigious City! In 1995 retiring at the age of 66, I was sent to Zimbabwe Africa to refurbish a restaurant by the International Executive Service Corps. I spent seven years in Africa including creating and building a Butterfly Sanctuary in the Ashanti region of Ghana for the United States Peace Corps. Divorced at that time, I fell in love with not only Africa, but a young African lady. Her one son and two nieces visited my dwelling on weekends and holidays. There presence and activities reminded me of my own childhood. They became dear to my heart. Leaving Africa, I could not abandon the affection and love that I developed for them. I married that young lady and adopted all three children. They all reside here in the US. My son is the recipient of a full scholarship to Florida University. The two girls are still in high school. The mountains I have climbed. I have also fallen into deep valleys. In those times I remembered the saying of my dear mother, "Son the darkest time of the day is just before the dawn". It has helped me to climb again, always looking for the possibilities that lie ahead. To my next sunrise!