While the occasion of opening a new roundabout would cause some to believe that some focus would be placed on traffic alleviation, the life stories of the statue honorees stole the attention of those who attended the ceremony.
Tata was known as the bus driver who made sure there was discipline on his bus, and he transported several persons now holding government function including Commissioner Theo Heyliger.
Another interesting roundabout statue is of Osborne Kruythoff, whose supposedly real job was to clean up seaweed on Great Bay Beach.
If there ever was a Don Quixote knight errant on St. Maarten it was Osborne Kruythoff.
His supposedly real job was to clean up sea-weed on Great Bay Beach whenever such a need arose. This took place very seldom. So at a certain point a unique opportunity presented itself to Osborne to gain fame. St. Maarten had gone from 83 motor vehicles to some 200 or more in the early nineteen sixties.
Osborne, on his own, decided that traffic on the square in front of the Court House needed someone to properly direct it. How he acquired a traffic whistle no one knows.
The crucial moment came when the Lt. Governor saluted Osborne one day, and followed his traffic directions. Osborne felt emboldened and became obsessed with directing traffic, and his whistle became as familiar as a train whistle must have been in former times to those living along the train tracks.
Osborne’s outfit consisted of a brown khaki uniform, a white tropical helmet and a machete used as a baton to direct traffic with. A machete on Saba is still called a cutlass, a throw back to our pirate ancestors. If the car did not obey he would give it a good planass, which he must have learned while cutting cane back when in the Dominican Republic. A planass is the art of hitting someone with the flat part of the machete.
Finally he became too enthusiastic and gave a planass to someone’s new car. Police were called and they dragged him down the alley by the Court House to the Police Station.
Osborne was screaming his head off for the local Judge to come to his rescue. What a pathetic sight he was, his helmet lay smashed on the ground, but the two police officers kept dragging him towards the Police Station kicking and screaming and calling for the Judge. In the end the locals convinced the judge to go to the rescue at the station.
Don Quixote did not surrender easily however. Whether the police liked it or not he continued directing traffic until the number of cars overwhelmed him and he was lost among the crowd along with an entire host of colorful St. Maarten characters.
Many of the Saint Maarten round-abouts have statues in them representing the history of the island. The Dutch settled the southern half of the island in order to exploit the salt deposits found in three large salt pans that provided as much as 400 boat loads of salt per year, unit production of salt stopped in 1949
I only know of one other bus driver that has been immortalized with a public statue, Jackie Gleason's character Ralph, from the tv show The Honeymooners https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-western-hemispheres-biggest-bus.html
To the moon,Alice;to the moon!
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