People

• Mr. Oscar de Brum, formerly administrative officer of the Marshall Islands, has taken up his new post as assistant district administrator, US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Born on Likiep, Marshalls, in 1930, he has worked for the territory’s government for nearly 19 years, including periods on the Copra Stabilisation Board and the District Parole Board. • Mr. Francis Cowan, currently managing his family’s diversified stevedoring and tourist bus busi nesses in Papeete, Tahiti, is also heading proposals to have a yacht club and marina based on a floating naval barge built in Papeete Harbour.

Papeete waterfront will not cater for cruising yachts when waterfront reconstruction, now underway, is completed next year. • Mr. Charles Klemes, trouble shooter-cum-manager for the world wide Intercontinental Hotels chain, is currently putting in several months work as assistant manager at the chain’s newest Pacific venture, the seven-months-old SUSS million Hotel Taharaa, Tahiti, He is well-remem bered in American Samoa, where he preceded the territory’s current manager of its Pago Pago Inter continental Hotel, Mr. Rudy Ritcher. • A round of social functions was held in May in Madang to farewell Mr. and Mrs. Neil Grieve, popular Madang couple, who have lived in NG for a combined 65 years and retired to Queensland on the Braeside, which left Madang on May • Ed Fearon, who looks after Huey Long’s SUS 3 million hotel invest ments in French Polynesia, and who supervised final work on Tahiti’s Hotel Taharaa, is currently dream ing of another spectacular resort in the Islands, maybe in the Cooks or New Guinea. Ed, a well-built suntan ned construction supervisor from Hawaii, expects to make an Islands trip later this year “just looking”. • Erwin Christian, 32, Bora Bora’s skindiver and unofficial photographer told a PIM staff writer recently that the island’s families of turtles were in danger of being ex terminated because of over-fishing

by locals and tourists. The German born former hotel executive has lived on the island since 1962 after he left a cruising yacht in Tahiti. • Mr. Marshall Barlas, an executive with Barlas Feed Company of Petaluma, California, which ex ports chicken meal to several Islands territories, made a two-week busi ness trip to French Polynesia in June, visiting Tahiti, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Moorea. PIM understands he’ll be back in the Islands next year. • Inspector Jack Woodmansey, of the Australian Commonwealth Police, and former Police Chief of Nauru (he is seen on this page in his Nauru uniform) has accepted an offer to manage Papua’s Tapini Hotel, which has just been bought by the Patair group. With his wife, Noreen, and two children, Glenn and Anna, he expects to take up his post in late August, or September. • Cathy Graindorge, an attractive black-haired hostess for a Papeete, Tahiti, travel agency, Pacific Travel, always has second thoughts about touching the two huge tikis, found by Paul Gauguin, and currently on show as part of Tahiti’s Gauguin Museum. The story is that anyone who touches the aged statues dies, and Tahitians can attribute three deaths which followed the transfer of the tikis to the museum about two years ago, • Jane Pavela, formerly with Matson Lines promotion staff in Sydney, put in a couple of days in

Tahiti in June with a team of Ame rican journalists and travel people who invaded French Polynesia’s capital to celebrate an inaugural UTA flight between Honolulu and Tahiti.

Jane’s now with UTA’s Los Angeles office. • Arnoux Serge, cruising yachts man, film-maker, skindiver and now manager of the French-inspired Club Mediterranee on Moorea in French Polynesia is itching to run a similiar resort on Rangiroa, in the Tuamotu atolls of the territory. Skindiving at Rangiroa, says Arnoux, is great.

Arnoux, 40, first reached the South Pacific in 1949, and he’s visited on yachts most of the Islands, with calls at out-of-the-way spots such as the Marquesas, Pitcairn, the Galapagos Islands and all of the New Hebrides. • Mr. Alan Rein, sales manager for Australia of William Collins (Aust.) Ltd., publishers, made a recent two-week business visit to the major New Guinea towns of Port Moresby, Rabaul, Madang, Lae, Goroka and Mt. Hagen. • A recent visitor to Tonga was Mr. A. R. Dreaver, governor of Rotary district 292, which com prises the Northern half of the North Island of New Zealand, New Cale donia, Fiji and will soon include New Hebrides and Tonga where clubs have been formed. Mr. Dreaver, and his wife Molly, were en route for Fiji for the installation of Rotary officers in the area.

Mr, Sione Christmas, Tonga’s new Rotary president, accompanied the Dreavers to Fiji. • The German Ambassador in Wellington, NZ, Mr. Kurt Leudde- Neurath and his wife paid a brief visit to Tonga recently during a familiarisation tour of the South Pacific. He liked it so much that less than a week after leaving Tonga for Fiji, he returned to explore the Tongatapu reefs.

Also visiting Tonga recently were the German Consul in Wellington, Mr. Rolf Potent, and his wife. • Irish-born Mike Mooney, who currently boasts the fuzziest pair of sidelevers in French Polynesia, is to be found at one of the three major resorts of Moorea, the Club Mediterranee. Mike rarely wears any thing else but a colourful sulu, and now friends can’t decide if Mike is a guest or a worker at the resort.

Officially his job is organiser—Mike describes it as “great hours with no pay”.

Jack Woodmansey. See below.