By Earl Bousquet
It’s always interesting how and what people remember the dearly departed for.
I told an upper-class (investor) friend Saint Lucia ‘lost a good soul in Greg Glace’ and after asking me ‘Why?’, he concurred: “Yes, he was a good guy, a self-made man who contributed to business here…”
A middle-class (teacher) friend who’d also heard told me (softly): “I hear he owned half of Castries, so he leaves back a lot…”
A working-class (grassroots) guy who claims he ‘knew Mister Glace’ told me: “He had a lot of style and he had money, but even with all that, he just loved a cock-fight!”
But none of the recollections saw Greg in his whole being – as a pioneer, for example, in the development of tourism at Rodney Bay; or as a simple man from Hospital Road in Castries, who migrated to the US seeking greener pastures and returned home as an ambitious and confident businessman who lost or wasted no time pursuing his lofty dreams.
Not many will recall Greg’s hot pursuit of financing, building and owning a hotel at Rodney Bay, back in the late 1970s when tourism was considered only for ‘foreigners.
He purchased a prime piece of property and proverbially went ‘To Hell and Back’ securing capital assistance from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), where thinking hadn’t emerged to accept that a simple Saint Lucian, with no related track record, would want to build and run his own hotel.
But while some wondered why he thought they should trust his ambition, others admired his grit and backed his bid, because they saw he had all that it took, just not on paper…
Greg eventually built and owned The Islander, a multi-room apartment hotel in a veritable islander setting – prime real estate in the then-developing Rodney Bay strip.
The Islander was doing well, but when other opportunities landed on his lap, the better businessman in Mr Glace didn’t hesitate.
The Islander Hotel stood where The Baywalk Mall now sits.
Prior to the Islander Hotel, Greg also started Glace Motors and Glace Supermarket at Marisule, and owned several other prime properties in Gros Islet and Castries.
Greg loved cock-fighting — long before it started being frowned upon by animal rights advocates.
But none of that bloody criticism would even be listened to by the man, usually all decked out in stainless white.
A gambler he might have been – like everyone else buying Lotto tickets or feeding dollars into slot machines at bars and casinos – but not a foolish one, as his steady climb to business success allowed him to reach higher than the highest heights of some of his whispering critics.
Born ‘by the sea’ at Hospital Road, son of ‘Ma Glace’ (a strict no-nonsense mother) and ‘Mister Glace’ (a quiet multitalented carpenter and butcher) and raised with his siblings on the ‘Blue Danube Road’ overlooking Faux-a-Chaux and the Castries Harbour, Greg also had an eternal craving for boating and yachting – and just as with his prized vehicle registration number ‘51’, he also named one of his yachts ‘Fifty-One’.
Greg Glace’s business acumen and no-nonsense approach were well-known among friends who better knew his success story – and learned the hard way by those who mistakenly felt he was a piece of cake for the eating.
Legend has it that the multi-millionaire American actor, Nicholas Cage, saw and had an interest in Greg’s Marigot property and while on island, sent an agent to negotiate- only for Greg to tell the middleman: “Tell the man to come talk to me himself!”
That prime Marigot Bay property, with home and berthed yacht, was the envy of many eyes in heads driven by jealous minds, but – to those who know – it’s just another example of the man’s true grit.
Born May 25, 1940, Greg started his last ride into the Afterlife on a slow boat along the River of No Return on March 26, 2025 – two months short of what would have been his 85th birthday, but looking and sounding nowhere near that age when we last spoke at Marigot on Easter Monday, 2024.
Whether the body of the sailor or yachtsman in him is ‘buried at sea’ in traditional maritime form, cremated to the dust from which we all came, or laid to forever rest his bones in a tomb, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to the mortal being who turned-out to be a bigger small-islander than those who misunderstood him, ignored or failed to see his eternally boundless determination to succeed.
His daughter Debra remembers Greg thus: ‘Faded into the sunset… My rock, my shield, my guide, my motivation, the force that drove me to many moments of angst along the path which led me to the place and the person that I am today…’
It’s the type of message her ‘Mister Glace’ would have wanted her to bury with him, whether planted or inside a sealed bottle at the bottom of Marigot Bay, the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean.
Basking in the sunshine of his eternal glory on Yonder, the fruits of his loom and flowers of his life’s fruitful harvests bear testimony to the way my dad would have referred to Greg: “He worked his bloody life out to make a good example of himself…”
Except that, the Greg we knew on Planet Earth wouldn’t have cared a ha’penny (half-a-penny) whether anyone saw any ‘example’ in him – and far less from where he rests, in eternal peace!