Desperate Virgil passed through Poco Cabesa during the Great Depression, looked around, and stayed just long enough to expand its gene pool and leave behind a few brochures.

Despite the island's isolation, things like this did happen occasionally.

Two years later Virgil fell asleep at the wheel of a "borrowed" Chevrolet outside Clearwater, Florida, and drove into a canal and drowned -- proving that the Big Amigo does sometimes work in mysterious ways.

Like his peers, Joe Forneaux came of age during the waning hours of the post-guano aristocracy -- referred to by the island's only historian as "The Days of Torpor" -- and spent his days and nights sleeping, singing, drinking, and borrowing against next month's Trust check.

(In 1939, Hyman's beneficence had been expanded by the trustees of the Poco Cabesa Limited trust to include more Poco Cabesans after a three day temperance strike by the island's very own mahatma, Sing Ree Smith.)

It was Joe's mighty thirst and lustrous baritone tremolo that earned him the nickname, El Negro Dino - the black Dean Martin -- and his sparkling gray eyes caused many a young female to swoon.

Joe's life changed forever one stormy night when he interrupted his extemporaneous one-man street staging of "Oklahoma" to break into the home of the island's Prime Minister looking for something to eat or anything not nailed down.

The terrified, chinless P.M. saw the size of Joe's walking stick, misunderstood Joe's intentions, and surrendered the government to his dazed intruder. Drunk but not stupid, Joe immediately accepted the charge.

When Joe sobered enough to respond to electro-chemical stimulation of his gray-matter he started thinking. Then he started doing.

First thing, Joe's entire family went on the public payroll. At this, most of the island's elite migrated to Boca Raton or St. Paul, Minnesota. Fortunately for Joe, the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world ducking and covering like the gallery at a Gerald R. Ford Pro-Am golf tournament.