With the recent release of my book, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist, and the launch of this blog, I thought it only fitting to start with Anita Mahfood and a photo of her father and sisters that didn’t make it into the book. I love this photo. I think it says it all. There are the four sweet girls, innocent and young, full of potential and life, and their protective father, Jad Eid Mahfood, behind them, proud, brooding. But there is something sinister beneath the surface. Anita, the beautiful cherub, appears on the far left next to her sisters Janet, Conchita, and Monira from left to right. Theses four girls would each experience their own level of abuse from Jad Eid depending on the stages of his suffering. Anita would leave that home to go to another where the abuse was worse, marrying Rudolph Bent, the great British Honduran boxer, only after she was pregnant by him, the result of a rape. She would leave that marriage for the security of another, Don Drummond, her colleague of many years in the entertainment circuit–she a rhumba dancer, he the greatest trombonist the island, perhaps the world, had ever heard. But that abuse was worse than all others, resulting in her murder at Drummond’s hands early the morning of January 2nd, 1965 after she returned from her performance at Club Havana where she headlined.
I was sad to learn that Conchita had passed away this year in her home near Toronto, Canada. She was the last of the four girls here on earth. Jad Eid passed away the year after Anita was murdered–a heart attack, or a broken heart. Janet passed away a few years ago and Monira before that. Such tragedy had come to this family, not only from Anita’s murder and the aftermath of the pain that all the sisters and family felt, especially Anita’s children, forever, but also there was the tragedy of the girls’ mother, Brenda May Virtue, who attempted suicide twice before succeeding a third time. It was a brutal life. But in this photo, all appears happy, peaceful, loving, proud. You would never know by looking at this beautiful family photo all the pain that would follow.
I promise not to make all of my blogs so macabre. It’s just that, as I said, I do love this photo and my publisher wasn’t able to put it in, said the resolution wasn’t good enough and it was the only version I had. The world of foundation ska is big and there are many things for me to talk about, most all brighter than this, so upward and onward!
Heather Augustyn 