Saturday, September 15, 2012

Famous British Honduras family of four generations.

Sue Williams on left, her daughter Lisa on right.   Sue's mother, immigrated to Belize back in the late 1960's as I recollect and had a restaurant down by the Swing Bridge in the port of Belize City, where scattered immigrants and pioneers used to gather, particularly on a Saturday for breakfast and lunch, after a grueling trip from the boondocks to the only big city in the country of those colonial British Honduras days.  It was here, old rural friends used to meet, after a day of shopping in the only large town then, on a Saturday morning.  Sue's mother was a hardy crusty old soul, who arrived in Belize with her son, who had built a tri-maran sailboat, in California.  They both sailed down to the Panama canal, went through it, and came up the coast of Central America and ended up in British Honduras flat broke.  They started a restaurant called Mom's restaurant.  Jim Black, her son, started a marina on the Northern highway, a couple of miles from the then, much smaller port town.
  The old lady eventually died,  the son eventually died, and Sue was the runner of the restaurant.  It was a famous meeting place for at least 15 years or so, for pioneer  farmers, Mennonites, plantation builders, parrot smugglers, marijuana smugglers, cash hungry Southern evangelists with their crusades, logging people and a host of oddball eccentrics passing through.  Lisa, Sue's daughter, on the right in photo, used to go with me when she was about 4 years old, to stay with the Auxillou girls on Caye Caulker, a trip in those days made by sailboats, with an island village of no electricity.  Eventually, rental prices in the port town for the restaurant got higher and higher, and eventually the restaurant was closed as uneconomical, as the port town expanded and grew.  Sue went back to the USA for a few years, but gave up trying to make a living there and returned to Belize with her baby child Lisa.  Sue has worked at Cave's Branch tourist place for years now and has a few acres across the Southern highway in the bush, inherited when her brother Jim Black died.  Lisa has babies of her own, growing up in Belize and is an entrepreneur of some sort.  She has also been in and out of the restaurant business, once or twice.  True Belizean immigrants and salt of the Earth types.  Rugged and determined going back to the history of colonial British Honduras times.  You don't get more Belizean than this old British Honduras family.  Four generations of them have lived, or died and survived in PARADISE.  This was when pioneering in a wild untamed wilderness was the real thing.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I remember jim black from 25 years ago when he had the marina there and lived upstairs my father kept a 45ft boat there for some repairs it turned into 6 months that I lived at the marina with jim still running his backwater fishing trips