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Business [image: image takes up top third of the page. It's a image of the ocean and its horizon. In the middle of the image is an island with only a tower on the island.] [Caption: TOWER ISLE (FROM THE HOTEL) The builder was not cocksure.] [[3 column table]] | [[bold]] MAN OF THE YEAR]] (See Cover) A visiting newsman surveyed the mammoth project in the late November evening sun. "Impossible! Humanly impossible!" he muttered to the cameraman beside him. "It will be done. [[italics]] It's got to be done". [[/italics]] Abe Issa spoke fiercely, more to convince himself than the newsman whose mutter he had overheard. Turning to the nut-brown man in khaki pants and thin open-neck shirt he half-asked, half-reemphasized: "That will be ready in December, won't we Tad?" Since early March this year the coconut straw-hatted man had worked off 20 of his original 190 lb. translating blueprints into fact against the sand | padded waterline. Fatigue lined his good-looking face; mud caked his boots. He did not answer right away. His bloodshot brown eyes shrewdly roved from the bare-torsoed workmen sweating in the sun amidst a babble of human and construction sounds. Stroking his gray stubbled chin he looked up from under his hat brim at other workmen clambering over or perched on every square yard of the 650-ft-long building. From where he stood in the shade of the bunkhouse they looked like so many ants. [[bold]]Speed & Sinew [[/bold]]. "Doing the best we can," he said at length. Tad Smith, Jamaica's ablest contractor and builder, no doubt wish he as cocksure of the deadline for opening Tower Isle as Abe Issa. Lest he be high-pressured. | again for a positive answer he moved off. Soon he was swallowed up in the labyrinth of scaffolds, columns, passageways, rooms, sandstone stacks; providing his men into faster, more precise, more sinew-stretching activity. "Why December Abe? Why such a helluva rush?" Abe wasn't telling. His answer could only be guessed at. Correct guess: the first big Winter tourist rush would be on about then and Abe Issa, who thinks only in terms of CAN-DO, MUST-DO and MILLIONS, wanted Tower Isle to be more than part-ready for them. Was it true he was importing Benny Goodman or Harry James or Xavier Cugat or some such American name-band for the opening?… that cover charge would be Four Guineas a head?… that he had invited 2000 guests? | [[image - hotel and the beach surrounded by palm trees]} [[caption - THE HOTEL (FROM THE HILL) [[italics]] "Blessings . . . unsurpassable gifts . . . assets." [[/italics]] ]] | | Abe wasn't saying yes; he wouldn't say no. "Good publicity. Jolly good publicity. Wonder how that got around?" he mused as if thinking it over. [[bold]] Man Thinking. [[/bold]] All the time he seemed to be thinking. Perhaps, of the quarter-million pounds sterling which the project, including the cost of land, was costing; perhaps of how much he was likely to recover the first season and subsequent seasons before his auditors could start dipping in the black ink. Perhaps Abe was thinking of the guests who would come to stay at the hotel which he knew for sure would be second to none in the hemisphere and better than many of the best elsewhere. He couldn't possibly be thinking that he was pouring a fortune into a white elephant. For more than any other man in Jamaica, Abe knows the brass-tacks of the tourist industry's future. He knows there are millions to be made by adding man-made amenities to those which are Nature has lavished on the 144 x 49 mile island whose entire north coast is one beautiful, rolling bathing beach of white coral sand and blue water; whose landscapes, sunrises and | [[/3 column table]] 20 SPOTLIGHT, DECEMBER, 1948.
