Flashback

Even with all the hints it seems readers were way off base when it came to identifying our last FLASHBACK stars. Not one reader got it right. So straightaway, the answer to the mystery. It’s sort of a long story but we’ll go easy on you (we know there’s all those carnival fetes to attend in the rain!).

The year was 1998 and health minister Romanus Lansiquot had just about given up on the nation’s lousy health services—or on any money from his government to ease the people’s pain. So, typically, Lansie set out to raise his own money. He had always been pretty good at that: he’d raised funds for something called Jaycee and other such organizations and, as I recall, even for the Vigie playing field.

Lansie talked and talked, in the name of a new hospital. Or a refurbished one. Then he marched and marched and finally he staged the world’s first Occupy demonstration, yep, right there in William Peter Boulevard. Can you imagine that? A government minister going out on his own to beg for money from red shirts, yellow shirts and skirts of all hues. Nothing new in that, you say? Well, think again. The money wasn’t for anything to do with any party. Or even for Lansie himself, remember he did all, as he put it, “for Victoria.”

The opposition stayed away. The only fellow minister who showed up was the prime minister John Compton. And when it came time to put his bucks in the box, he dropped his car keys instead and then had a hard time fishing them out again. But Lansie had the last laugh when he pulled out a check in the amount of one million smackeroos—that’s right, a million dollars—collected over the previous several weeks of marching and talking and getting laughed at by folks of suspect intellect.

And now let’s see how many of you recognize any of the faces or heads in our latest picture from the past, sent to us by a regular reader who took it back in the day and kept it to himself until now.