I am constrained to pay tribute to two venerable matriarchs who have gone on to their heavenly rewards after having long, exemplary and highly productive lives. Theirs were lives that have been enormously beneficial to their native Bermuda land as a whole; and to me personally in meaningful ways.

I honour and salute Mrs. Esther Allen Bentley and Mrs. Lillian (Lilly) Minors, who died within days of each other, Mrs. Minors at age 98 and Mrs. Bentley who passed March 11, 2010 three days after celebrating her 106th birthday.

Mrs. Minors, along with the late Hilton G. Hill and others founded the Bermuda Resort Association (BRA) to promote travel to promote African American travel to Bermuda from the US, and to counteract the nasty treatment accorded black visitors before the 1959 Theatre Boycott.

The BRA tried vigorously but unsuccessfully to get Government through its Trade Development Board to lift its boycott on advertising and promotion of tourism in the "Negro market". As a compromise the TDB gave the BRA a "do it yourself" duplication grant to open a Bermuda Office and an office on 42nd Street in New York. Mrs. Minors "had my back", as the saying goes, in becoming BRA's executive secretary and public relations officer.

At the time I was a sort of "hot shot" general news reporter for the now defunct Bermuda Recorder newspaper. Somehow I managed to wear all of those hats fairly well, enjoying the frequent expenses paid weekend trips to New York, Boston and Philadelphia for first one celebrity promotion or another.

Regarding Mrs. Bentley, she was the highly esteemed Minister of Music at Allen AME Church situated on Merrick Avenue, Jamaica, Long Island, New York. The church, or cathedral as it is known, is to Long Island what the world-famous Abyssinian Baptist Church has been to Harlem, New York. It was the pulpit of the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Allen had its own Congressman – the Rev. Floyd Flake.

In any case, one of Mrs. Bentley's youth auxiliaries was having an event and she needed a celebrity from home around which to promote it. At the time I was deemed to be one of the dominant television personalities in Bermuda, being news director and station manager of Capital Broadcasting Company's ZFB Radio and Television stations.

I had no hesitation accepting her invitation. She treated me royally, spending a week in her lovely split level home. There was a piano on one floor, an organ on another, and music everywhere else, instruments, citations, certificates.

Her home, in fact was her studio, where countless Americans were given instrumental and voice training. Music was her life. She was liberal with her knowledge, charging only $5 a half-hour for piano and organ lessons.

Children, she jokingly remarked, were charged according to their ability and parents according to their pockets.