In a conversation with Ms. Gay McKee, the proud Cayman Airways employee in charge of tracking down lost luggage for close to three decades, the careful listener will hear stories of the Islands’ past, the thrill of hunting for sunken treasure and how the airline has become her life.

With her girlish laugh and sparkling eyes, it’s easy to forget that Ms. Gay McKee is a grandmother in her 70s and 28 years into her fourth career. I recently met up with Ms. Gay to see what life was like growing up in the Cayman Islands. She reveals that during the 1930s and 1940s, the sea was everything to islanders. It was survival and death, fortune and misfortune, and everything in between. Her intriguing stories cover everything from living in Grand Cayman before there was electricity to witnessing German submarines blowing up tankers and even being romanced by a famous American treasure hunter.

You were a young girl during World War II. Tell us a bit about the German submarines that appeared in the Cayman Islands.
The German submarines would come up all around the island to charge their batteries or whatever they did in those days. They torpedoed 20-odd ships, mostly tankers, in close proximity to the island. Once, a German submarine came in and the sailors came ashore. All the little kids came out, lining the streets and staring at them. They handed out Chiclets.

One time, I was on the waterfront with my friends and their mother, and way out on the horizon, we saw this explosion. They sent a ship out there and found all these men and they were badly burned. Guantanamo Bay sent a sea plane to pick up the seamen. After that, Washington, D.C., put a small naval base here.

You had three brothers, can you talk about them? 
My brothers were all older than me. Haden, Rene and Bob. When I was 5 years old, my two oldest brothers were part of the crew on The Hustler, a sailing vessel on a commercial trip to Panama. When they were heading out, a sloop was coming into the harbour and yelled to the captain that he had better turn
around, that bad weather was coming. In those days, you didn’t have the technology to tell you if there was a hurricane. The captain said he could make it and that was the last anybody ever saw of it. The whole island was in mourning.

It was really hard on me, especially because of my second brother, Rene. He taught me how to swim.

What was life like in Grand Cayman in those days? 
We didn’t have electricity. The mosquitoes were so bad that you were locked in by 7 o’clock at night. During World War II, radios were scarce on the island. A gentleman had one of these beautiful old radios. My mother would take me by the hand every evening to go over to this gentleman’s house to listen to the news. His family and others would sit all around the room. It was a battery-operated radio and you would pick up a lot of static. Everybody was quiet as mice. That was where we spent a good part of our evenings.

A lot of Caymanians left the island because things were not good here so they went to Tampa and Miami [Florida] and Mobile [Alabama] for work. But I feel like I lived an ideal life growing up because of the ocean. We paddled canoes, we sailed, and we swam. We were always in the ocean. Our mothers would be yelling at us to come in. I had so many friends. I always say I laughed my way through school.

Can you talk about how you met your treasure hunter husband, Art McKee?
My husband was on the cover of Life and National Geographic and in many other magazines. He was doing a commercial on the island for National Airlines and he needed a bunch of girls to film waterskiing and diving. The first time I went diving was right there by the Lobster Pot [on Seven Mile Beach]. We went down about 38 feet the first time. It was like being in a different world; it was so fascinating.

Learning to scuba dive today involves several hours of teaching and preparation. What was it like back in 1955?
He just gave us instructions right there on the boat and then he took us down where he wanted to take the pictures. We didn’t have any problems at all.

Since there were several young ladies in the commercial, how did the romance get going? 
He kept asking me to go out to dinner and I went a few times. Then he wanted me to marry him and I said ‘no.’ I liked him, but he was 24 years older than me. But he would never let up, so I ended up marrying him.

The night before the wedding the photographer dropped dead and we had no one to take photos. I thought that might be an omen. All we had was my husband’s movie camera so a friend of ours ran that. My husband’s brother-in-law was a photographer in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. So after the wedding, we went up there to his studio, put on our clothes from the wedding and he took our photos.

What was it like diving with your husband? Did you find treasure, too?
We did a lot of diving on sunken galleons. There were a lot of wrecks near the Florida Keys, strewn from Key Largo to Key West. The first time I went in with a Miller-Dunn [enclosed] helmet I got hugely claustrophobic. It was about 30 feet of water, so it wasn’t deep. I found out the Miller-Dunn helmet is fantastic. The water comes up around the chin area and you can stay down there for many hours without decompressing because the water was shallow. We would find all kinds of things: a large religious pendant, Spanish pieces of eight (Spanish dollars), pocket watches, ivory tusks, copper pots and buttons from uniforms. I dove with him for a long time on the wrecks until the kids came along.

Have your children followed in the family’s business of treasure hunting?
Due to their dad’s line of work, both of our children learned how to remove the coral from the silver coins and artefacts without damaging them. My son Kevin and daughter Karen are both divers who worked with Mel Fisher when he found the Spanish galleonAtocha off Key West. My son is also a goldsmith and frames pieces of eight and gold doubloons, and my daughter is an expert on Spanish colonial coins.

How did you start working for Cayman Airways? 
My husband died in 1980 and I came back a few years later to care for my sick mother. I needed a job so I applied at Cayman Airways and the only opening they had was in baggage tracing. Back then we did it by teletype. It was like investigative work. And you were only as good as the person you were dealing with at the other airlines. In 1993, I became the claims manager and I have had that job ever since.

I had never thought about working for an airline before I started here, but once you get it into your blood, it’s something you want to keep doing. I wouldn’t change my 28 years here for anything.

Source: caymanairwaysmagazine.com