A Small Town Love Story--Colonial Beach, Virginia Read online

  At least some of her hesitation stemmed from growing up with a dad in law enforcement, and Pete very blatantly engaged in illegal oystering on the Potomac.

  “He kept promising me he’d stop,” she says.

  After Pete’s tour of duty in the service ended, they started going together again and eventually eloped to LaPlata, just across the river in Maryland, an irony since Maryland was where Pete had already had legal troubles and had been charged with harvesting oysters illegally. The dredging of oysters had been outlawed in the river, but Maryland was far stricter about enforcing the law than neighboring Virginia. Virginia watermen, like Pete, often took their boats out at night, hoping to dredge without being detected.

  Pete Green and George Townsend

  Pete Green during his time in the service

  In an article about those early days written only for family and friends, Sugie describes an incident when Pete and two friends from school took out the Melrose. They were soon spotted by a Maryland patrol boat, the Pokamoke. That boat had a thirty-caliber, water-cooled machine gun on the bow, operated by Patrol Officer Guy Johnson. He began firing.

  An oyster dredge

  Pete’s friend, Weensie Atwell, tried to outrun the Maryland boat, but, according to Pete, “Weensie had neglected to fill the gas tank before leaving the docks and the Melrose ran out of gas.”

  Arrested, the boys were taken to Cobb Island and given bologna sandwiches while the officers phoned authorities to decide what to do with them. They were eventually sent home and told to report to Bill Marchant, captain of the Virginia patrol boat. They decided against reporting the incident, according to Sugie’s article, but “they each had a lot of explaining to do to their parents” because they’d been out all night.

  Even though she knew of such adventures, Sugie hoped they were a thing of the past. After she and Pete eloped, they spent their honeymoon in Daytona, Florida, and discovered that they both liked being warm in winter. It was years, though, before they bought property on the West Coast of the state in Venice and retired there, years that included plenty of dissension over Pete’s continued work on the river.

  Oystering wasn’t something Pete could give up easily. His parents had divorced when he was around thirteen. He recalls that he and his mom didn’t get along all that well.

  One day she simply told him, “I’m sending you to live with your father.”

  His father was living at Curley’s Point, on the north side of Colonial Beach, and working an oyster boat for Landon Curley. “I packed a bag and went down there. He didn’t even know I was coming.”

  Spending his time in that environment, going out on the Margaret with his father, got into his blood, Pete says. By the time he finished ninth grade, he was hooked. “I wanted to go on the river and work.” He played hooky from school when he could, worked with his father for three years and finally convinced Curley that this was what he was meant to do.

  “I wasn’t all that big, but he said he’d take a chance on me.” The days were long, the work exhausting. “When I got home, I’d go right to bed. But I loved the river, loved oystering.”

  Pete Green’s father

  Pete Green on a boat (left)

  The first night he took a boat out on his own with his own crew—his cousin Carroll Green and Sunshine Dickens—he came back to Curley’s with eighty bushels. “I remember the dock was all lit up.” When Curley saw their haul for the night, he told Pete he was “a chip off the old block.”

  For a young man from a broken home, the environment at Curley’s created a family for him. “Curley was very fair. I thought the world of him,” Pete says.

  Pete and Sugie (Gladys) Green

  There were always oystermen around, playing cards, gambling and talking. There was dancing, too, and homemade ice cream being churned. The store was open till midnight. Yachts would stop in the summer to gas up. “And we’d go out and fish till daylight,” he recalls.

  It all sounds idyllic, and for a time, it was. “The police let up on us, because they needed oysters for the military.” But when the war ended, they began to patrol the river in earnest.

  “We started working at night with very dim lights,” Pete remembers.

  When they were spotted by the patrols, the goal was to pull in their hauls or abandon them, then head back to Virginia waters as fast as they could.

  In Sugie’s article, Pete talks about being out one night on the Little Bill, one of Landon Curley’s boats. They were soon spotted by the operators on one of Maryland’s fastest patrol boats, which lit them with spotlights and started shooting. Pete and his crew did everything they could to evade them. “The boats ran into each other two or three times,” Sugie reports in her article. When Pete finally made it back to the safety of Virginia waters, the motor on the boat was destroyed and he discovered twenty-one bullet holes in the hull and engine. He apologized to Curley for the engine’s destruction, but Curley only said, “At least you brought the boat home.” He had the engine replaced, and Pete continued to operate that boat.

  Pete was still young enough the next time he was caught that, with local lawyer John Mayo representing Pete and fellow oysterman George Townsend, along with a Maryland lawyer, they were given a three-year suspended sentence, a five-hundred dollar fine and “they took the boat.”

  Pete did give up oystering for a time after that, but once he returned from his service in Korea, he and George decided to go back into business together and bought a boat they named the Botcha Me. They installed a 450-horsepower airplane motor in the boat and became the fastest workboat on the river.

  There were other incidents that didn’t end as well. In 1956, three boats from Virginia were side by side in the river when the patrol boats approached them. Pete and George Townsend headed home. Harvey King kept going and the patrols boats went after him. Though he tried to evade them, “they shot his boat all up,” Pete says.

  Scenes like that of gun battles on the river are described over and over by Colonial Beach old-timers who often awoke to the sounds of high-speed engines and gunfire in the middle of the night. Some would even gather on the shore to watch, as if the battles were a performance. But the bullets were real.

  Pete and Sugie (center) at prom, 1951

  Pete’s boat had been one of four boats on the river the night the Oyster Wars turned deadly. Pete and two others returned to shore when they spotted the Maryland patrol boats, but one defiantly returned to the water. Pete was safely home in bed by the time events took an ugly turn.

  Harvey King had been back out on the Potomac for two or three hours when the patrol boats once again cornered him. “He had a real fast boat,” Pete recalls. In fact, by then many of the boats were equipped with high-powered engines and traveled at speeds that the Maryland patrol boats couldn’t match. What the Maryland patrol boats did have, though, were weapons that could fire accurately at long distances and the determination to put an end to the oyster dredging.

  On that fateful night, there was a hail of gunfire aimed at Harvey King’s boat. Bullets pierced the boat and some even hit buildings on shore, including a sign at Wolcott’s Tavern.

  “They shot Berkeley Muse and got Harvey in the leg,” Pete recalls.

  Despite being wounded, Harvey drove his boat back into Monroe Bay—safe Virginia territory—and continued to the dock behind Miller’s Crab Shore. Berkeley was taken off the boat, but it was too late to revive him. “Berkeley was dead on the dock,” Pete says.

  Another with memories of that night, Mike Stine, recalls seeing Berkeley’s body on a table inside what was normally the workroom at Miller’s, where oysters were shucked in winter or crabs picked in summer. The place was crawling with Virginia State troopers.

  Pete, who’d made it safely back to shore hours earlier, was on his way to his day job at the Colonial Beach Yacht Center when George Townsend stopped him and told him that Berkeley was dead.

  A lot of things conspired to create that night’s tragedy. Harvey King tended to
aggravate the patrol boats more than most, taunting them with his speed and maneuvering ability, Pete says. More tragic, Berkeley wasn’t even in the habit of going out on the boats.

  “He didn’t need oystering,” Pete says. He was doing well with his other businesses. He had land on the river outside of town that he was developing into a community to be known as Berkeley Beach. His brother Corbin completed that development.

  On the night he’d died, Berkeley had been hauling topsoil earlier in the evening when he met up with some of the oystermen. He reportedly had a few shots of whiskey with his friends, including Pete, and Harvey King needed one more man on his boat. Berkeley was up for the adventure.

  Pete glances at Sugie as he describes that night. If not the turning point for him, it came close to being the deciding factor in giving up the career he loved. “With two children then, I got to thinking maybe it was time to quit.”

  Pete went to work at Dahlgren as a painter, a skill he’d also learned working with his father. Eventually, though, after eleven years in that job, he was having medical issues that doctors said were being aggravated by the paint fumes, so he retired. By then Sugie had also been working at Dahlgren for several years. Pete waited for her to retire before they left Colonial Beach for good to finally build their dream home in Florida. It was a long time coming, but a decision neither of them regrets.

  They still come north to celebrate special occasions with their four daughters and one son, who are scattered in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. It was on one of those trips recently that they sat down to share their memories.

  Pete mentions his children with pride, but there’s also pride and nostalgia in his voice when he speaks of the boats he and George owned together—the Botcha Me and the Splish, Splash—and those he owned himself, the Wanda Ann and the Sugie G.

  “We won workboat races with the Botcha Me,” he recalls, describing how the competition came down to his boat and Bozo Atwell’s, the Mary E., which had been souped up with a 630-horsepower Hall-Scott navy surplus motor. “I would slow down to make it look like a real race, so we could put on a show,” Pete says.

  While the dangers of being a waterman during the days of the Oyster Wars created tension for Pete and Sugie, they weathered those days and built a lifetime of memories of their own.

  Even so, he admits wryly, “We’re real lucky we’re still together after sixty-two years.”

  Pete on his birthday

  FOOD FOR THE SOUL

  In just about every place I’ve ever lived and in just about every fictional small town I’ve ever created, there’s always a restaurant where friends gather. In my Chesapeake Shores books and in the TV series on Hallmark Channel, that restaurant is Sally’s, a favorite of the O’Briens. In my Sweet Magnolias books, it’s Wharton’s.

  The original Parker’s Crab Shore

  Parker’s Crab Shore

  And for me, in real-life Colonial Beach, that restaurant is Lenny’s, or as one of my family members insists on calling it, Earlene’s, because that’s the fictional name I used in Amazing Gracie, which she identifies most closely with Colonial Beach.

  As in most communities, different crowds gravitate to different restaurants in those early morning hours when coffee and gossip are essential to getting the day off to a good start. It used to be in Colonial Beach, when I needed my plumber, I knew I could find him at Ola’s most mornings.

  One group of friends in town, all senior citizens, rotated among the various restaurants for dinner every night. I have no idea if they stuck to the same menu selections, but that routine was rarely varied.

  In the very early years seafood was definitely king at most of the local restaurants. People debated over which one had the best crab cake, the best steamed crabs or the best hush puppies on the side. Whatever any individual’s preference, one thing held true: the eateries were all packed with locals and visitors on the weekends.

  For years along Monroe Bay Avenue, parking lots were jammed from Dockside at the Colonial Beach Yacht Center at the Point, to Parker’s midway along the bayside road and on to Miller’s Crab Shore at the opposite end. Dockside is still serving dinners and offering weekend entertainment, but Parker’s is gone, replaced by a house and an empty lot that’s still for sale. Miller’s has changed hands a couple of times and is now serving Thai-French food under the Lighthouse name.

  Many other restaurants in town have come and gone, but one name is constant, Wilkerson’s. The family-owned restaurant at the entrance to town has been in business for decades, though not without a bit of family squabbling over the years. Here’s the story of the Wilkerson family and their ties to seafood and to the restaurant that bears their name.

  A NAME SYNONYMOUS WITH SEAFOOD:

  The Wilkersons

  Anyone driving into Colonial Beach on the two-lane road into town knows Wilkerson’s. Perched on a narrow spit of land that backs up to the Potomac River, it’s been a landmark restaurant for decades. Before the nearby Harry Nice Bridge was built connecting Maryland and Virginia on Route 301, a primary north-south highway, ferryboats brought passengers, cars and even cattle to docks just beside the restaurant.

  Though that tiny stretch of road in front of the restaurant is referred to as Potomac Beach, it’s now considered part of the town of Colonial Beach.

  What newcomers may not know and what a few old-timers remember well is that way back there were two Wilkerson restaurants, maybe one hundred yards apart, competing for customers on their way into town.

  “The family has been in the seafood business for a long time,” Jimmy Wilkerson, owner of the existing restaurant, recalls. “My great-grandfather, Stephen Wilkerson, started the first restaurant in the early 1930s.”

  It was a natural fit to complement the local seafood industry that most men in the area with the last name of Wilkerson worked in.

  Stephen had four sons—William E., Herbert, Butch and Albert—and all had a hand in the restaurant in one way or another, whether it was catching the seafood or helping to run the day-to-day operations.

  “When Dad [Walter, Herbert’s son] came home after World War II ended, it was already crowded, and there was no room for him in the restaurant,” Jimmy says. “So in 1946, Herbert and Walter purchased land down the street and started a second restaurant, where Herbert and his wife, Florence, and Walter and his wife, Catherine, all worked together to get the new business going.”

  There was no business connection between the two restaurants, despite the family ties and their proximity.

  Tensions mounted when Walter applied for a liquor license and his uncle fought it. “There was right much friction at the time,” Jimmy says. “They all had right much of a temper.”

  Friction or not, the two restaurants coexisted for years. Walter’s sister, Ellen, later began working in the family business. Walter and Catherine’s son, Jimmy, grew up working in and learning the business, as well.

  Ellen Wilkerson

  Jimmy went away to school to the Fork Union Military Academy during his high school years, then attended college in North Carolina. When he came back in 1970, Jimmy was ready to follow in his father’s footsteps by continuing to operate the restaurant and staying in the seafood business.

  Jimmy remembers growing up when Colonial Beach was “a robust little town.” His father and Denny Conner, one of the brothers who brought casinos and a lot of entertainment to the boardwalk, were close friends. He’d go down to the boardwalk as a child to ride the amusement park rides.

  His father had a business strategy that took into account people’s gambling habits. Because of the restaurant’s location, he liked to catch their attention when they drove into town. “He tried to get them when they were coming in, when he could sell them seafood dinners. On the way out, they were more likely to buy hamburgers,” Jimmy says.

  After Stephen passed away, the first Wilkerson’s restaurant was then run by his son, William E., and later was passed on to his children, Louis, Helen and Stephen. Soo
n after that transition, Louis came to work for Herbert and Walter after a falling out. When the first location closed in the late ’70s, Helen and Stephen joined Louis in working at the current location, as well. Helen, who died in May 2017, was a beloved waitress there for many years.

  The Happy Clam after Hurricane Isabel

  Wilkerson’s dining room after Hurricane Isabel

  The original restaurant was later reopened as The Happy Clam, which operated for a number of years, but was destroyed by Hurricane Isabel when it hit Colonial Beach in the fall of 2003. It was not rebuilt, though it did operate for a time at another location in town.

  The current Wilkerson’s was severely damaged by that September storm as well, but Jimmy had workers on the job almost immediately after, assessing the damage. He reopened the following spring. Wilkerson’s is qualified now as the longest continuously running restaurant business in town, celebrating its seventieth anniversary in 2016.

  From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Herbert Wilkerson & Sons Inc. had a thriving wholesale seafood business distributing green crabs, oysters in the shell, oysters shucked and packed on the premises, crabmeat, fresh and pasteurized on the premises, and fish caught locally throughout the region. Their trucks ran six days a week and had delivery routes from Baltimore, Maryland, to Washington, DC, to Richmond, Virginia, and even had routes into the Shenandoah Valley.

  “At one time we’d sell 150 to 200 bushels of crabs wholesale every week, and we had more than forty daily shuckers when the oyster business was booming. Our oysters went up and down the East Coast from New Jersey to Georgia. In the summers I drove the delivery routes, but I didn’t like driving all that much,” Jimmy says.