Another Legend from Mexia

More about Don the Beachcomber can be found at the link, or you can also click here.

Don's Life Story: "It all began in 1907 on George Washington’s birthday – February 22nd – in the township of Mexia, Texas. His mother named him, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt.

At seven-years-old, Ernest began his wordly adventures in September of 1914 when he traveled by himself, on a bus, from Mexia to Mandeville, Louisiana to live for the first time on his grandfather’s plantation near Lake Pontchartrain across from New Orleans. Later in the same month he sailed with his grandfather on his grandfather’s yacht from the Port of New Orleans to Port Antonio, Jamaica in the West Indies. The exciting, exotic and romantic atmosphere of the Caribbean was to become quite familiar to the young boy, and Jamaica quickly became the scene of some of Ernest’s early days of schooling. The opportunity to visit and live with family and friends in this strange, and at the time, to Ernest, far away land, added flavor and inspiration to his developing mind. It was also when he first experienced fine Jamaican Rhum."