The Zacca family very proud of Christopher
Published:Sunday | November 3, 2024 | 12:10 AMAinsworth Morris - Staff Reporter
While Christopher Zacca, president and chief executive officer of Sagicor Group Jamaica Limited, delivered his speech on Thursday night after being inducted into the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica’s (PSOJ) 3oth Hall of Fame, he was emotional as he spoke of his late father, Edward Zacca.
He was also emotional when he mentioned his late mentors, such as Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart and R. Danny Williams, who were very instrumental in the development of his career and bringing him to the point where he could have been inducted into the PSOJ’s Hall of Fame.
Grateful to be here to witness Zacca’s installation was his 87-year-old mother, Hope, who told The Sunday Gleaner that her husband Edward would have said, “I told you this was a bright boy”, had he still been alive. The late resident magistrate judge passed in 2019.
“Chris was our firstborn. I remember him sitting on Eddie’s knee when he was about three years old reading The Gleaner, and we looked at each other, and we said, ‘This boy is a bright fellow’, but I never knew how bright he had become as a man, and I’m very proud of him, and I know Eddie in Heaven is looking down and having the same pride that I felt last night,” Hope said following her son’s induction at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in St Andrew.
“He would have been so proud of him because he was our firstborn of whom we have been well pleased,” she said.
Hope said that when she heard the accolades being read out during the citation by Christopher’s daughters Ashley and Summer, she could barely remember some of the achievements, but hopes it illustrates the investment, love and care she and her late husband of 62 years put into their three children: Christopher, Karen and Edward Jr.
“I want people to understand the love and care we put into these three children and to see my son blossom and become the man he is today, I’m very proud, very proud indeed. It was all worth it. It was all worth it in the end,” Hope said.
She said life was not easy for her and Edward because they had to move around the island as the public sector instructed her judge husband to, all while she served as a teacher.
“We were transferred to St Mary and Montego Bay, where we lived for a couple of years, and then back to Kingston, when he became the president of the Court of Appeal, and then on to being chief justice, and I taught in prep schools,” Hope said.
“We had to manage. The kids were still small, and we had a humble beginning, and here I am today, enjoying the fruits of us managing. We had such dreams for them, and, thank God, I have lived to see them blossom and flourish, and I couldn’t be more proud of my son,” she said.
Hope said she met Edward at a club for young people on Deanery Road, Kingston, after he returned from studying in England.
“And he was working in Black River at the time as a young barrister, and he would have to drive through Highgate to come and look for me. It was quite a trip, and I appreciated it. We were married for 62 years ‘til he passed,” she said.
“He was a very active man, and he loved to walk with the other judges because we were stationed in Turks and Caicos at the time, and he had a fall, which we never took seriously until we came home and they discovered that he had a haemorrhage in the brain, and that took him home eventually,” she said.
It was a grand celebration for Zacca on Thursday night when he was inducted into the PSOJ Hall of Fame. There were no long tributes, no long speeches, only fun, laughter, warm hugs for greetings, and food based on a Mediterranean dinner specially requested by the man of the night, Christopher Zacca.