This story first appeared in Island Notebook in The Mid-Ocean News in 2001:We are not sure if there is one word yet that has been coined to adequatelydescribe an old Berkeley Institute student called Eddie Blue Lightbourne who hailed from Middletown on the outskirts of Hamilton.I was lucky enough to have known Eddie Blue. Certainly he was extroverted, flamboyant and probably the most rambunctious in the entire school.He was bright and sufficiently paradoxical to leave one or another of his exasperated teachers to wonder if he would ever make anything of his life and others to predict with certainly that he would succeed at anything to which he put his hands.I believe everybody loved Eddie Blue, teacher included. He would get on their nerves often, not in a disruptive or rude way, but he gained their attention.Lightbourne had an appetite for food that was gargantuan to say the least.He could consume with ease a half dozen eggs and a pound of bacon; and make old Quality Bakery cupcakes vanish by the dozen. His voice and laughter were also huge.He was a ringleader in a class of achievers academically, in sports and a variety of other extracurricular activities, choir singing included.His classmates included Arnold (Steedy) Francis, who became vice-president of the Upper House, a Queen’s Counsel and president of the Bermuda Bar Association; C. Leroy Simons, school master and respected churchelder; Dr. Earle Seaton, who became a Chief Justice in East Africa and an authority at the United Nations on the law of the sea; and Edgar (Teddy) Gordon, an anthropologist who became known as Hakim, son of Mazumbo (alias Dr. E.F. Gordon).Other contemporaries included Reuben (Snookie) Alias, a former Chief Immigration Officer and one of the two black Bermudian known to have served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.There were also Elmo Bean who became an AME Presiding Elder in the US and Whitfield Swan and Wilbur Pearman, both deceased ex-Immigration Officers; and the late Theo Taylor and Cleveland Hughes, who pursued careers in Canada.Eddie Blue’s brilliant contemporaries on the distaff side, who became outstanding educators, included Marion Trott (now De Jean), Betty Musson (Kawaley), Yvonne Seaton and Elsie Douglas (Weir), both of whom live in England, just to name a few.There is just one other distinguishing feature about high-flying Eddie Blue that I would like to mention here. He was fanatically interested in lifting weights and body-building. And with the Charles Atlas physique he developed he could have been crowned Mr. Bermuda if he had hung around.Eddie Blue did not complete his senior year at the Berkeley Institute. His father, Samuel Lightbourne, Sr., after whom he was named and who operated his own print shop in Reid Street East, took him out of school to learn a trade under Stanley Smith, one of the leading plumbers of the day. Smith also owned and operate a gym where young body builders frequented.After quickly mastering the fundamentals of plumbing, young Eddie found himself working in the machine shop at Meyer’s Shipyard in St George’s helping repair ocean-going ships under such highly skilled shipwrights and engine fitters as W.R. Perinchief (father of retired Mayor Lois Perinchief of St George’s).Being set to the trades was the best thing Eddie Blue’s father could have done for him, as it put him on the path satisfying another overwhelming yen, which was to see the outside world.Eddie left Bermuda for the first time in September 1942. He was one of six Bermudians who eagerly signed up as stokers aboard the coal-burning Canadian freighter Prince Albert Park. The ship, en route to West Africa, was forced to divert to Bermuda for repair at Meyer’s yard to boiler tubes which had been shaken loose by the dropping of depth charges when warding off a Nazi submarine.He was 20 years old, and totally undaunted by the fact that it was at the height of the Second World War when that first opportunity to travel presented itself. For the next 46 years he sailed the seven seas, turning home only for the briefest visit to family and friends. The most recent of those visits was this past Christmas (December, 2000), when he was accompanied by his Tennessee-born wife Ethel. Eddie accorded us an interview. He talked about his harrowing experiences in the Second World War, the Korean War and the war in Vietnam.By his own admission he was a “greenhorn” when he put to sea for the first time, shovelling coal aboard a 10,000-ton freighter. But what I found most fascinating was how he became one of the top men in the whole of the United States Marine service, a certified, qualified chief engineer. At the time of his retirement he was chief engineer aboard a 150,000-ton hospital ship, which later served in the Gulf War.He climbed the ladder of success by capitalising fully on all of the smarts he gained in and out of the Berkeley Institute, as a plumber and most definitely at Meyer’s machine shop.His fine physique and stentorian voice helped accentuate his authority as an officer as an officer, and proved more than a little intimidating to some who dared to get in his way.