The Governor’s Indecisiveness

Each winter for several years before W.W.II, Gus Smith’s parents had rented a house in Dominica. The rational was probably that it was a wonderfully warm, and cheaper to spend the winter in Dominica than just to heat the family home in Maine.

Gus came to love Dominica from those winters of his youth.

After the war, Gus and his wife, Robbie, came to Dominica to start a lumber and construction business with a service buddy, but it was more challenging than anticipated.

Finally his partner left and Gus, determined to succeed, and with added experience on the island, slowly began to achieve a profit.

Gus was a large man, with thinning straight gray hair, a gentle nature and a wry, subtle, mischievous sense of humor. He was a moral man and since he had chosen to spend his life in Dominica, wanted the best for the island and its people. In time he felt that he had been a resident long enough to be able to criticize anything in the island that he felt needed rectifying. After seven years a foreigner who is a permanent resident “Belongs to the Island,” as the local law stated.

Gus truly loved Dominica and Dominicans and for this reason was critical of certain inactions of the current representative of the crown; the Governor. He considered him to lack, in his words, “Testicular Fortitude.”

Direct confrontation was not Gus’s method of criticism or complaint; humor was his preferred weapon.

His humor was reflective and usually subtle. He named one of his dogs, Ure-analysis, because the local, Cambridge trained, British veterinarian, Dr. Bill Ure, had diagnosed the dog as terminal with only a month or two to live, and in fact the dog lived on to a ripe old age.

Perhaps the funniest thing that he did, however, began with the securing, from the ruins of one of the old sugar factories, some of the parts belonging to the mammoth steam engine used to run the machinery.

The old power plant was large by any standard and the engine speed-governor was of equally impressive proportions. The device operated by the levered turning of four, balanced, ten-inch diameter iron balls. These were counterweights affixed to hinged arms. These arms were directly geared to the engine and spun faster if the engine ran faster. The centrifugal force caused these balls to pull away from the center and their attached arms in turn reduced the aperture of the fuel valve to the degree necessary to roughly govern and maintain a pre-set engine speed.

Gus removed the iron balls and had a sturdy solid wood packing case built to contain them.

Packed, it took two individuals to lift the case.

He then had a beautifully lettered, bold, identification of the contents as, “The Governor’s Balls,” painted on the case and had it delivered to “His Excellency, the Governor of Dominica, BWI, Government House, Roseau.”

It is said that the inference was not well received.