By THEA RUTHERFORD
They meet in a room with pale green walls and a conference table that swallows its centre. Two potted plants stand watch in the corners and a flat screen TV hovers near the ceiling, beaming down from the backwall. CNN flickers across the screen; something's going on in the world today. Four of them sit around the big table chatting while the large supreme pizza cools before them — tantalizing, unopened.
"He was very generous," says Liz Carey, who worked for him for eight years. "If you remember him at Christmas walking in with those big shopping bags? You remember? You remember Stacey?"
Laughter rolls back and forth across the wide table. Peals of remembrance and gratitude towards an old boss who enfolded his accounting staff – CPAs and bookkeepers, secretaries and couriers – into his arms like..."
"We were his family," says Bernie Rutherford, 52, an employee for 11 years.
Like family
They want to thank Maitland Cates now, the old staff of PriceWaterhouse, Grand Bahama. They've sat around a table every Thursday for the past four weeks thinking of the best way to do so during a luncheon they have planned.
Cates' former staff unearths words to package his meaning in their lives. They agree on "patriotism, professionalism and service." They discuss a menu. They discuss decorations; Mildred Stuart would be responsible for those. They discuss him. The pizza gets sticky cold in its box and bottles of water and apple juice huddle on the table untouched. Everyone is still talking about Christmas parties.
"There was one down at Buccaneer's," says Rose Delancy. "He even arranged for us to be bused there. So you really had no excuse."
More laughter.
A framed poster with matches lined up in ascending order like organ pipes leans against one of the pale walls, behind the chairs and the chatter of the old co-workers. The first two of the matches are lit. The others wait to catch the fire.
"Attitudes are contagious," the poster says. "Is yours worth catching?"
******
In 1951 Maitland Cates was a young boy who had done well enough at Rock Sound All Age School in Eleuthera to earn himself a trip to Nassau to take the Government High School's scholarship qualifying exam.
Saying goodbye to his mother, his father, his three brothers, and the little settlement where everybody knew everybody, he boarded the old mail boat with a group of other students from the family islands who would also be taking the test.
Young Maitland took the test but learned that he would not be getting into the Government High School that year, not on a scholarship anyway. He returned to Nassau in January of 1952 to take another qualifying test. This time Cates took the test to enter Queens College and passed.
"He had more confidence than me that I could get to the next level. When you finish one level you're so glad you finished, and when you went to him he was like, what's next," remembers Stacey Pinder, Cates' employee for 13 years.
Carey explains, "He said people believed in him."
Cates worked to be among the top four in his class throughout his time at Queens College. He took a weekend job at Fine's Department Store. He was good at math. He says his favourite sports were work and study.
When he graduated at the top of his class in 1956, Cates turned down a permanent job offer at the department store to work at the law offices of Sir Stafford Sands as a clerk. The would-be lawyer spent his days making coffee, mopping the floor and carrying messages. His boss also insisted that he learn typing and shorthand, skills he still uses now even as a partner of his own firm in another profession.
Cates' dreams of becoming a lawyer soon dissipated with a sum of money and a newspaper ad. He had been told that if he wanted to study law he could no longer receive his 10-shilling salary, but would have to pay to learn. With two of his younger brothers still in school, he knew his father could not afford the fee. An ad about correspondence courses through the London School of Accountancy offered a cheaper but equally interesting option.
Cates completed the course and joined the accounting firm of Andre and Fingland in 1959. Fingland, a boss and mentor, "gave me my first break." Cates worked for the firm, which became PriceWaterhouse in 1963, while studying advanced accounting. He began his professional exams in 1962, following the advice of another mentor at the firm, Bernard Gad.
By the time Cates qualified as a chartered accountant in 1965, and before he moved to Grand Bahama to head the PriceWaterhouse office there nine years later, he had made two good friends — friends who would make ambitious conversations over lunch as solid as cement years later on their return to The Bahamas.
Cates, Basil Sands and Clifford Culmer, among the group of the first Bahamians to qualify as chartered accountants in the sixties, officially formed the Bahamas Institute of Chartered Accountants in 1972.
Sands was the first president, while Cates and Culmer were the first vice presidents. Cates is still a member, but no longer on any committees.
"I leave it to the younger fellows," he says.
******
The pizza box remains unopened on the table at the mid-afternoon planning session. The four women have dug up buckets of memories.
Ellison Delva, 46, a former PriceWaterhouse staff member who returned to work with Cates again as his partner at Cates and Co. in 1994, joins them in mid conversation.
"He expected a great sense of loyalty from everyone," Delancy observes. "If we had any breakdown with him, he might have gotten mad with us because he didn't feel that we were as loyal as we ought to have been."
"Or committed," adds Carey. "And I think too he cared, he truly cared. He cared about you as a person."
"And your family," says Delancy.
The group discovers that Cates did things for each of them, personal things that they remember clearly even now. Extended paid maternity leave for one, a personal loan for another, the recommendation of a doctor for another's sick mother. And scholarships. Lots of scholarships.
Delva tells the group about a scholarship that Cates gave just recently to a young man who should be a semester away from graduating.
"Cates is the kind of person, no matter what he's involved in or what is going on, if there's a need for help, a genuine need, he will somehow find a way to help."
Cates also helped Delva get scholarships as a Catholic High School student in 1979. Delva first met Cates at a Careers Day for twelfth graders at the school. He approached Cates after his talk on the accounts profession and asked him about a summer job at Price-Waterhouse.
"He always told me (to)remember the kindness that was extended to you. Once you're in a position to help someone else, always look for that opportunity. And that's something that I learned from him: he gave me an opportunity."
Julian Russell, 52, another of Cates' former employees, meets the group eating slices of re-heated pizza a few minutes after one. The group greets Russell, one of Cates' earliest recruits, with hugs and smiles. In 1982 Russell became the first Grand Bahamian to become a Certified Public Accountant.
"He's deserving," he says of Cates.
The group continues its planning session and reunion. Planning resumes as they talk about who will call people on the luncheon's growing guest list of Cates' friends and former employees. The luncheon is an appreciation one.
"So he'll know we didn't forget," says Rutherford.
******
At 68, Cates' career and his staff have seen his black hair and eyebrows turn a creamy white. He remembers each one of his recruits by name. And he remembers the stories of how he came to know them. He smiles as he lists their names while telling the story of his life in the conference room of his office on a damp Saturday morning.
The glint in his blue eyes tells you he could sit at the table all day regaling you with story after story...
Why just the other day, a young man approached him after a Rotary meeting about becoming an accountant.
The young man was in his thirties and already in a career, but he wanted to know what it took to become an accountant. He sat in that very conference room asking Cates and Delva all about the field. He came in a week or so later to tell Cates the good news: he was enrolled in an accountancy program.
"I gave him a big hug," Cates smiles.
SUCCESSFUL CAREER — Maitland Cates initially wanted to be a lawyer, but he ended up with a very successful career as a chartered accountant.
