These days the man called Bermuda's Natural Resource gets up and gets moving. Four days a week you can find him at the National Sports Centre, walking around the track.

"I'm easy to identify", he says with a smile. "I'm the one walking slowest!"

A punch line is never far away from the lips of this lavishly gifted entertainer.

It's been all of a year since Gene Steede last faced an audience, but he prepares as if he could get a call any day all the same. He practises his guitar, vocalises and is even learning to play piano, and he knows just what he would do if he should get the call.

Ideally he would love to work with a cabaret orchestra; strings, horns, voices. "But I could work with just a pianist," he adds.

Now 69, Gene's career took off like a shot while he was still a teenager, auditioning with his then wife and stage partner, Pinky Steede, for Don Gibson's renowned Holiday Island Revue. They went on to be one of the featured items in the show and attracted so much attention and positive comments that before long the idea that they could make it on their own was successfully tested.

In the mid-1960s, a holidaying judge from Canada booked a gig for them in Oshawa, and they were off on a dream-chasing whirlwind series of engagements. They played Calgary, then went south to the US, where a Bermudian friend, radio personality "Aunty" Nell Bassett used her entertainment connections to get them an audition in a recording studio.

"We walked in on Paul Anka, the man who wrote 'My Way',' Gene recalls.

Gene always knew he wanted to be an entertainer, and he became great at it. Work took him all around the US, sometimes as a duo, either with Pinky, or with Steve DePass, and sometimes as a solo act.

There were television appearances: He appeared on the Joey Bishop Show, and did an appearance on Hugh Downs' popular 'The Morning Show'. In the off-season, he worked the vacation resorts in the Catskills in upper New York State, where you could find yourself sitting next to any one of a dozen show business personalities.

"The Catskills kept us going when things were slow. Business types used to send their families there to vacation, so there was always a need for entertainment," he remembers.

Apart from vocal lessons with Bermuda's master music teacher Joseph Richards, Gene is largely self-taught. Richards advised him to stop smoking to save his voice.

"I used to smoke so much I'd be walking around with no cigarette lit and smoke still coming out my mouth!"

He learned comedy "by stealing from everybody. Redd Foxx, Nipsy Russell – everybody except Bill Cosby. Unless you were doing an imitation of Bill, the material couldn't be borrowed."

Similarly he learned to play congas early on when he worked with congista King Trott on the Holiday Island Revue. Then, as they were guides together at the Leamington Caves and spent hours together, Steede picked up all he could from Trott. Much later in New York he sat in for a Latin congista whose gig was playing for a dance studio opposite Gene's residential hotel.

Gene kept adding to his repertoire. When he saw that some guitarists could not come up with the right style to support him and Pinky, he decided to buy a guitar and learn to play. He had help from the late George (Kid Willy) Smith, Jimmy Landy, also deceased, and the master Milt Robinson.

Despite playing Las Vegas, the high point of his days in the business – so far – was a gig he did at The Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York for Melba Moore. Steve DePass was performing and the producer wanted to know what his friend Gene did.

"I sing", he said, "but I don't have any charts for the band."

The band leader told him where he could copy the piano chart and asked him to bring back 28 copies, one for each member of the orchestra.

That experience was outstanding for Steede as well because, apart from the live audience and the reach of the telecast, which was in the millions, it was also for a worthy cause; a fund that Ms Moore was hosting for the Arthritis Foundation.

It was Melba Moore who christened Gene "Bermuda's Natural Resource". He kept the name. Coming off stage he went into a nearby bar, Bermudian musician Lance Hayward's watering hole. The great pianist said: "Hey Gene! I just saw you on television!"

In the mid-1970s, Gene came home to his children who had missed him through all his years of travel and excitement, and couldn't believe the Bermuda he'd come back to.

Tourism was booming and there was an abundance of work in all the hotels and clubs for entertainers. He quickly got in on the act and in short order landed a handsome gig at The Hamilton Princess headlining The Gene Steede Show. There he employed all the skills and the experience he had garnered abroad.

Things are different now. The tourist trade is not what it used to be and few hotels or clubs have live entertainment. The economy is in worsening shape. But Gene still dreams of putting on his tuxedo and stepping out into the lights to the sweet sound of applause. He's still on the journey he set out on so many years ago, a starry eyed young hopeful. It's a journey that has taken him around the world, he literally worked the Holland American Line wintering in ports warmer than Hamilton for several years.

This gifted entertainer, who had given so much pleasure to so many in so many ways is waiting for another chance to display his enormous talent. Singer /song writer, comic, congista, guitarist; he does it all.

What a great thing it would be to sit in an audience, expectantly, and hear the MC announce: "Ladies and Gentleman! Bermuda's Natural Resource! Mr. Gene Steede!"

And then, the sweet sound of applause as Gene takes the stage again.