The St. Croix International Triathlon, set for Sunday, May 7, is a marvelous event that draws dedicated contestants from around the world.
The best way for me to pay tribute to the Virgin Islands' premier sporting event is to relate my own participation in one of the earliest versions of the race and to tell you what it did for me, my niece and my nephew.
My triathlon odyssey started with the first one, in the the spring of 1988. My niece, Sally Berriman, was visiting me on St. Thomas. We flew down to St. Croix for a few days. Runners filled the streets of Christiansted. Swimmers plied the harbor waters.
"It's a triathlon, they're practicing for a triathlon," Sally cried.
"What's a triathlon?" I asked. I didn't know my life was about to change.
A few days later we were lying on the sand at St. Thomas' Coki beach. I fell asleep. When I woke up, Sally was missing. But there was this terrible thrashing in the water. It was Sally. She staggered out, dropped to the sand beside me.
"I'll get better, I promise, I've got a year to train," she gasped.
"What are you talking about?" I asked, the first intimations of future trouble hitting my stomach like a greasy johnnycake.
"We're going to enter the St. Croix triathlon next year," she announced when she got her breath back. "They take teams. I checked. We'll be Team Jordan, in your honor."
By the time Sally left for her Philadelphia home a few days later, I had given in to her plans. It was that or be branded a coward inside my extended family. And, to tell the truth, I liked the sound of Team Jordan, as she had cleverly surmised.
She would do the swim. We recruited her cousin Steve Zimmerman, another couch potato, for the bike portion. And I would anchor this relay team by running across the finish line for all three of us.
You must understand we're not talking about next Sunday's St. Croix Triathlon, the one that the Source's own Jamie Bate is undertaking by himself. To veterans of the first two triathlons, 1988 and 1989, later St. Croix triathlons were, well, sissy events.
Back then, when swimmers were swimmers, they swam three instead of two kilometers around the Hotel on the Cay. The bike course was a brutal 59 miles instead of today's 34 miles. And I was to run more than 12 miles in the hot sun, compared to 7.4 miles these days.
During the ensuing fall and winter, we kept track of each other by telephone. Sally was swimming laps in an indoor pool near Philadelphia. Steve was off the couch and pedaling the streets of Concord, Calif., prior to practicing hill climbing to get himself ready for The Beast, which then, as now, tests the endurance of any biker.
"Next April on St. Croix!" we would shout to each other on the phone.
I already was a gentleman jogger. Not fast, but I was good for as many as 10 miles — in the cool of early morning along the waterfront on St. Thomas. So I started running under the sun in the hills around Mountain Top, where I lived.
I was teaching two evenings a week at UVI on St. Croix. The week before the 1989 triathlon I stayed over two nights on the Big Island and tried the exact course three days in a row. Dehydration was a problem, but on the third day I made it to the end. I was ready, I knew I could do it, but I didn't tell anyone.
Team Jordan assembled in Christiansted a few days before the April 23 race. We wore our Team Jordan T-shirts. Our team headquarters was in the Schooner Bay Condominiums, across Gallows Bay from the fort, the finish line and the transition area.
Sally's problem was that in the choppy waters of the harbor she couldn't swim in a straight line. We decided to depend on the course's boundary monitors, people in kayaks and surfboards, to keep her circling the Hotel on the Cay instead of heading out toward Buck Island.
On the eve of the race, Steve presented his somewhat rickety bike for a safety inspection at the fort. When the inspectors looked doubtful, Steve told them, "I'm just here for the beer." So they approved his bike.
Before dawn on race day, the three of us walked to the fort to have Team Jordan's number painted on our legs and arms.
"Just like Mike Pigg," Sally grinned. Pigg, who had won the race in 1988 and was to finish second this day, was her hero. Eleven years later, Pigg is a sentimental favorite in Sunday's event.
Another triathlon contestant that April day was 18-year-old Lance Armstrong, who would go on to become America's international champion bicyclist.
At the age of 62 I didn't want to hang around the transition area in the hot sun for five hours before Steve finished his bike run and tapped me on the shoulder so I could start running, so I decided to spend the time resting in the air-conditioned comfort of the Schooner Bay Condominiums.
I put Sally in the launch that would take her to the Hotel on the Cay and the start of the swim. I promised I'd be at the fort when she came out of the water and that both of us would slap Steve on the back as he started down the street on his bike. She said she could do the swim in two hours.
I returned to the fort in two hours. Biker Steve was long gone. Sally was jumping up and down on the grass in unrestrained joy. She had come up the ramp from the water in under an hour and 30 minutes.
I returned to Schooner Bay, where I stretched out, fully dressed for running, on my bed and dozed off while contemplating my forthcoming 12 miles in the sun.
An hour or so later, the phone rang. A female voice asked if I was Team Jordan. I said I was.
"Your biker has crashed," she said. "We have him at the main aid station."
I jumped from the bed, raced out the door, and sprinted at full speed, arms pumping, the more than a mile to the fort, realizing as I ran that my afternoon in the sun wasn't going to happen that day.
I raced around the fort and through the transition area, jumped over the snow fence around the aid station and burst into the first tent, shouting "Steve Zimmerman, Steve Zimmerman!"
They took me to him. He was lying stomach-down on a cot. Teams of doctors and nurses were hovering over him, not because of his injuries — which were not that serious — but because he was their first casualty of the triathlon and they wanted to practice their skills upon him. Behind the nurses came the masseuses with their ointments and skillful hands.
My feelings of concern for Steve gave way to jealousy.
The Beast didn't defeat Steve; he went up and over it. But at about the 30-mile mark, he was pedaling down a narrow Christiansted street when an old Crucian woman ignored the outstretched arms of the course monitors and set off across the street in front of his bike. He hit the brakes. They locked, and Steve went over the top of his bike.
Ring Lardner, one of America's greatest sportswriters, wrote in the 1940's a funny short story about baseball. It was called "You Can Look It Up."
So it was with Team Jordan. You can look it up. In the records of the 1989 St. Croix Triathlon you'll find Team Jordan and the designation "DNF." It stands for Did Not Finish.
We talked about returning to St. Croix the next year. But there was no triathlon in 1990 because of Hurricane Hugo.
Steve never went back to eating potato chips on the couch. He continued to train and started doing triathlons on his own. In 1993, one year after beating cancer through chemotherapy, he completed the Diablo triathlon in California. It was his last triathlon. He now teaches high school math.
Sally decided to concentrate on biking after St. Croix. She became very good at it. A distance of 100 miles was her norm. Now living in Denver, she fell prey to leukemia and underwent a bone marrow transplant. She plans to get back on a bicycle as soon as her doctors give her the green light.
St. Croix in 1989 was my only triathlon. My knees rebelled after years of jogging on pavement in Washington and St. Thomas.
We're having a family reunion later this year. Sally's going to bring the videotape we made of our adventures in St. Croix. We'll play the tape and laugh, and agree once again that the 1989 triathlon was a seminal event in our lives.

The first non-bank ATM machine on St. Thomas went into operation Wednesday, at Friendly Grocery on the island's North Side.
Sen. David Jones, who sponsored a provision in the 2000 Omnibus Bill to allow the machines in the territory, was at the convenience store, located at the former Berry's Farm Restaurant site on Crown Mountain Road, to cut the ribbon on the machine.
The ATM is the first of many expected to be installed on St. Thomas and St. John, according to Frank Nassetta, president of Caribbean Exchange Enterprise. Eleven machines have been set up on St. Croix already.
Ali Abu-soud, owner of Friendly Grocery, which is also home to the North Side's first and only gas station, said, "We are doing our best to build the North Side community."
One North Sider agreed. Kal Mousa, recently arrived from Miami, said he had been waiting three days for the machine to be available.
"I have no transportation," he said, "but I'm within walking distance of Friendly's." Friendly's is on the site of the old Berry's Farm on Crown Mountain Road, about a mile west of the crossroads.
Mousa said he was used to having machines in stores where he did business in Miami.
Non-bank ATM operators can charge a charge card "swipe fee" of up to $2.50 per transaction, Nassetta said. In high-traffic areas, the maximum will prevail, he said, but in neighborhood locations, his firm is charging $1.50.
If public acceptance is favorable, Nassetta said, "we may install 60 to 65 machines" in the territory.
He said Caribbean Exchange can operate the machines itself, or it can lease them to merchants, who then get to keep 85 percent of the swipe-fees.
Jones had to fight Lt. Gov. Gerard "Luz" James, the V.I. Bankers Association and the V.I. Banking Board to let non-bank ATMs operate in the territory. James and others in the banking community felt the machines would not be properly regulated and could be used for money laundering. The provision was made law when senators overrode Gov. Charles W. Turnbull's veto of 11 sections of the Omnibus Bill.
Pam Morales of Caribbean Exchange said any credit or debit card from a local bank can be used in machines such as the one at Friendly Grocery.
The ATMs have the capacity to disburse up to $200 per transaction, Nassetta said, but how much a machine will give out is set by the entity operating it.

Having worked in the hotel industry for more than 15 years, including 10 in the Virgin Islands, I feel I have to make some comments on your Op-ed commentary "A Tale of Two Hotels."
First and foremost, many of the local people that I had the pleasure of working with in the hotel industry here understand what the term "hospitality" means. They practice it in their own homes by saying "please" and "thank you" and by showing guests in their homes sincere hospitality from their hearts. It is something you can teach, but you have to have a sincere desire to want to please others and make them comfortable — they same way that we would all like to be treated.
One of the biggest problems here, as stateside, is that these days we all want something for nothing. We all want to "be a millionaire" and not have to work for what we get. Many of the local people that I worked with in the resort industry, had worked hard for years to raise their families and make a good life for themselves in the Virgin Islands.
These people would go out of their way to make visitors to our islands feel comfortable so that they would want to return — and thereby also spread their hospitality back to the mainland, as the guests would tell others of their great experience in the Virgin Islands so they would want to come here, too.
Unfortunately, it appears that the majority of us have grown selfish. Today, we get instant gratification shoved in our face everywhere. Because companies want cheaper labor and bigger profits, training and rewarding the hard worker may not be a priority, and we forget to praise the positive and reprimand the negative. As a parent, I realize that it takes a lot more effort to enforce rules and stick to your guns then to just "let it slide this one time." Management in the hotel industry here, as well as stateside, needs to understand that training is an everyday undertaking. We must nurture our employees, like our children, every single day!
I was once a visitor in Tanzania, a very poor country with a lot of unemployment and problems — which one could say is motivation in itself for people there to work hard for their wages. But at the hotel where I stayed, I was amazed at the local staff's ability to anticipate their guests' needs and meet them in a swift and unobtrusive way. I asked the general manager of this lovely hotel what his secret was, noting that I worked in the industry myself. He said, "I must train and re-train every single day — reward when they do it right and show them the faults and correct when they do it wrong."
Every single person who comes into contact with a visitor to our islands has the opportunity to make that person feel that he or she is truly a welcome guest — or an intrusion in our day. Think of the difference we could all make — hotel employees, taxi drivers, restaurant wait staff, shop employees, trash collectors, police officers, even the children who stand in public areas and curse at their friends instead of smiling and saying "please" and "thank you."
Hats off to those who do make a difference and who keep on trying.

Editor's note: Barbara Seiler worked more than five years in the hospitality industry on the mainland before moving to St. Thomas and taking a position with the Stouffer Grand Beach Resort. She remained with that property, now the Renaissance, for 10 years before leaving last year.

The two stories that follow are true. The names have been omitted to protect the not-so-innocent. Read them carefully, because there will be a quiz at the end.
Hotel No. 1:
A guest checked into the hotel the evening before the first of a series of meetings. He called the front desk and asked for a 7:30 a.m. wake-up call and hot coffee to be delivered at 7:45. He got his wake-up call at 7:40, and 10 minutes later his coffee arrived, lukewarm. The guest informed the bellman that his wake-up call had been late and that his coffee was cold. The bellman immediately apologized and was back with hot coffee in two minutes. The bellman then proceeded to "blast fax" everyone on the hotel staff to let them know that this guest had had two problems.
When the guest arrived in the lobby to go to his meeting, the hotel manager was there to meet him. He apologized for the late wake-up call and the cold coffee and told the guest that the hotel had taken the liberty of calling a car service to make sure that he got to his meeting on time. Upon the guest's return that afternoon, another hotel manager greeted him, acknowledged the problem the guest had had in the morning, again apologized, and said that the hotel was removing the charge for the movie he had watched from his bill. When the guest checked out, the desk clerk also acknowledged the problem and assured him that the hotel would take every step to prevent a recurrence because it valued the guest as a customer.
Four months later, the guest returned to the hotel. When he checked in, the desk clerk acknowledged the previous slip-ups and said, "Please let us know if there are any problems." The guest has become a walking advertisement for the hotel, all because of a late wake-up call and a cold cup of coffee.
Hotel No. 2:
A guest checked into the hotel. When he got to his room, the air-conditioning was not working properly, and the room temperature was 86 degrees. He called the front desk and informed them. He was told someone would be sent to check it. He also requested a table, since the room lacked a writing desk. Three hours later, he called the front desk to say that no one had shown up in response to his earlier call. The desk clerk sounded exasperated, although it was not clear whether she was annoyed at the guest or the maintenance department. One hour later, a beat up folding table was propped up in the hallway outside the room. The air conditioning had not been checked. The guest went to the front desk, and the desk clerk, remembering the problem, found a maintenance man and sent him to the room.
The following morning, and on each ensuing morning, a pitcher with milk was set out for the continental breakfast in the restaurant. As the pitcher was emptied by guests, staff would walk past it avoiding all eye contact with either it or the guests in the area. Only when a guest took the empty pitcher and requested milk did a staff member silently take the pitcher and disappear into the kitchen, often for up to five minutes, leaving a line of people waiting for milk. This scenario was repeated day after day.
One afternoon, a young woman with her infant and mother were checking in. They had the full range of baby support items and two huge suitcases. The young mother said that they had had a "bad day." The desk clerk assigned them to a room on the third floor at the far end of a wing. They began to drag the suitcases, the baby and the baby items away from the check-in desk. The guest (from the beginning of our story) told them that the hotel could deliver their bags to the room. The desk clerk, looking at them, said nothing except to confirm that the hotel could provide this basic service.
Four months later, the guest was back in town and checked in — at another hotel.
The Quiz:
Based on the information above, identify which of these hotels is in the Virgin Islands.

Editor's note: Dr. Frank Schneiger is president of the Human Services Management Institute, a consulting firm. He has served as assistant commissioner of health for the City of New York and founded Comprehensive Medical Management Inc. He is the author of "Cutting and Coping," a how-to guide for managing retrenchment. He has worked with V.I. agencies since 1975, most recently as consultant to United Way of St. Thomas/St. John. He is one of the founders of the St. Thomas/St. John Youth Multi-Service Center.
Readers are invited to send comments on this article to source@viaccess.net.

Having worked in the hotel industry for more than 15 years, including 10 on St. Thomas, I feel I have to make some comments on your Op-ed commentary "A Tale of Two Hotels."
First and foremost, many of the local people that I had the pleasure of working with in the hotel industry here understand what the term "hospitality" means. They practice it in their own homes by saying "please" and "thank you" and by showing guests in their homes sincere hospitality from their hearts. It is something you can teach, but you have to have a sincere desire to want to please others and make them comfortable — they same way that we would all like to be treated.
One of the biggest problems here, as stateside, is that these days we all want something for nothing. We all want to "be a millionaire" and not have to work for what we get. Many of the local people that I worked with in the resort industry, had worked hard for years to raise their families and make a good life for themselves in the Virgin Islands.
These people would go out of their way to make visitors to our islands feel comfortable so that they would want to return — and thereby also spread their hospitality back to the mainland, as the guests would tell others of their great experience in the Virgin Islands so they would want to come here, too.
Unfortunately, it appears that the majority of us have grown selfish. Today, we get instant gratification shoved in our face everywhere. Because companies want cheaper labor and bigger profits, training and rewarding the hard worker may not be a priority, and we forget to praise the positive and reprimand the negative. As a parent, I realize that it takes a lot more effort to enforce rules and stick to your guns then to just "let it slide this one time." Management in the hotel industry here, as well as stateside, needs to understand that training is an everyday undertaking. We must nurture our employees, like our children, every single day!
I was once a visitor in Tanzania, a very poor country with a lot of unemployment and problems — which one could say is motivation in itself for people there to work hard for their wages. But at the hotel where I stayed, I was amazed at the local staff's ability to anticipate their guests' needs and meet them in a swift and unobtrusive way. I asked the general manager of this lovely hotel what his secret was, noting that I worked in the industry myself. He said, "I must train and re-train every single day — reward when they do it right and show them the faults and correct when they do it wrong."
Every single person who comes into contact with a visitor to our islands has the opportunity to make that person feel that he or she is truly a welcome guest — or an intrusion in our day. Think of the difference we could all make — hotel employees, taxi drivers, restaurant wait staff, shop employees, trash collectors, police officers, even the children who stand in public areas and curse at their friends instead of smiling and saying "please" and "thank you."
Hats off to those who do make a difference and who keep on trying.

Editor's note: Barbara Seiler worked in the hotel industry for more than five years on the mainland before moving to St. Thomas to take a position with the Stouffer Grand Beach Resort. She remained with that property, now the Renaissance, for 10 years before leaving a year ago.

Having worked in the hotel industry for more than 15 years, including 10 on St. Thomas, I feel I have to make some comments on your Op-ed commentary "A Tale of Two Hotels."
First and foremost, many of the local people that I had the pleasure of working with in the hotel industry here understand what the term "hospitality" means. They practice it in their own homes by saying "please" and "thank you" and by showing guests in their homes sincere hospitality from their hearts. It is something you can teach, but you have to have a sincere desire to want to please others and make them comfortable — they same way that we would all like to be treated.
One of the biggest problems here, as stateside, is that these days we all want something for nothing. We all want to "be a millionaire" and not have to work for what we get. Many of the local people that I worked with in the resort industry, had worked hard for years to raise their families and make a good life for themselves in the Virgin Islands.
These people would go out of their way to make visitors to our islands feel comfortable so that they would want to return — and thereby also spread their hospitality back to the mainland, as the guests would tell others of their great experience in the Virgin Islands so they would want to come here, too.
Unfortunately, it appears that the majority of us have grown selfish. Today, we get instant gratification shoved in our face everywhere. Because companies want cheaper labor and bigger profits, training and rewarding the hard worker may not be a priority, and we forget to praise the positive and reprimand the negative. As a parent, I realize that it takes a lot more effort to enforce rules and stick to your guns then to just "let it slide this one time." Management in the hotel industry here, as well as stateside, needs to understand that training is an everyday undertaking. We must nurture our employees, like our children, every single day!
I was once a visitor in Tanzania, a very poor country with a lot of unemployment and problems — which one could say is motivation in itself for people there to work hard for their wages. But at the hotel where I stayed, I was amazed at the local staff's ability to anticipate their guests' needs and meet them in a swift and unobtrusive way. I asked the general manager of this lovely hotel what his secret was, noting that I worked in the industry myself. He said, "I must train and re-train every single day — reward when they do it right and show them the faults and correct when they do it wrong."
Every single person who comes into contact with a visitor to our islands has the opportunity to make that person feel that he or she is truly a welcome guest — or an intrusion in our day. Think of the difference we could all make — hotel employees, taxi drivers, restaurant wait staff, shop employees, trash collectors, police officers, even the children who stand in public areas and curse at their friends instead of smiling and saying "please" and "thank you."
Hats off to those who do make a difference and who keep on trying.

Editor's note: Barbara Seiler worked in the hospitality industry for more than five years on the mainland before moving to St. Thomas to work at the Stouffer Grand Beach Resort; she stayed with the property, now the Renaissance, until a year ago.

Car rental owners are invited to attend a public hearing scheduled for St. John at 7 p.m. on tuesday, May 9, at the Legislature Conference Room.
Rental companies and the public are invited to discuss the rental issue. The hearings will determine whether the current limitations are sufficient on each island.

Car rental owners are invited to attend a public hearing scheduled for St. John at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 9, at the Legislature Conference Room.
Rental companies and the public are invited to discuss the rental issue. The heearing will determine whether the current limitations are sufficient on each island.

Car rental owners are invited to attend a public hearing scheduled for St. Croix at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 12, at the Legislature Conference Room.
Rental companies and the pbulic are invited to discuss the rental issue. The hearings will determine whether the current limitations are sufficient on each island.

Car rental owners are invited to attend a public hearing at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 12, at the Legislature Conference Room.
Rental companies and the public are invited to discuss the rental issue. the hearings will determine whether the current limitations are sufficient on each island.