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

  With gourmet deli meats, wines and other specialties, the store was doing well. “A restaurant was not in the plans,” he concedes, then adds, “but I’ve always loved oysters.”

  After years of dwindling supplies, nobody was taking oysters seriously anymore, “but I saw that they were taking off again in the same way there were Virginia wines and craft breweries. There were eight regions, and they each had different flavors.”

  At first his enthusiasm was far from contagious. “I had this beautiful seafood in my cases, but I wasn’t selling any.”

  One chilly November day, Rocky put up a tent outside and started cooking. A man stopped to ask what he was doing, and he told him he was making Brunswick stew. Within an hour and a half, he’d sold out of oysters.

  “What are you going to do next?” Blaire asked him.

  He was out there with his tent all winter long in the freezing cold, and by the end of the season, he was convinced that adding a restaurant made sense.

  “Oysters built this,” he says of the R&B Oyster Bar addition to the side of his store. There are tables inside and out. And it was recently ranked the number one restaurant in the Northern Neck by TripAdvisor.

  On the wall is a sign that says it all: “To eat an oyster is to kiss the sea on the lips.”

  Chef Rocky Denson

  He credits Blaire with the motivation to make it happen. “She’s the brains. I’m just the good-looking guy. She’s very business savvy.”

  And, though she has a career in education that takes her to Richmond, Blaire has put down roots in Colonial Beach.

  Rocky says it’s the people you meet every day, the stories you hear and everybody knowing each other that make Colonial Beach special.

  Not long ago after what had been a crazy stressful week for the family, neighbors jumped in to help out and lend support. It’s exactly that sort of caring, he says, that explains why he can’t imagine living anywhere else.

  FROM KING COTTON TO PENNY CANDY:

  Marguerite Staples

  Ask almost anyone in Colonial Beach who’s of a certain age, and one of their fondest childhood memories is of buying penny candy at Klotz’s GEM 5 & 10 store in what was once the thriving center of the town along Hawthorn Street. Waxy bottles filled with colored sugar water, little foil pie “tins” filled with another sugary concoction and dozens of other brightly colored candies were on display to draw a child’s eye. Some also remember the stern “don’t touch” rules.

  For Marguerite “Margie” Virginia Klotz Staples, though, it was the family business, one she and her husband eventually took over from her parents, until bigger stores came along and their business died off.

  For the Klotz family, the connection to this little summer town along the Potomac began in the early 1900s. Her father’s family had property at the beach and moved here permanently when he was only five. “He was raised here,” she says, though at one point his grandmother sent him and his three brothers off to boarding school in Baltimore.

  Until then, though, he went to a one-room school called Hudson House where Mrs. Lena Franklin was the only teacher. She taught seven grades in that single room.

  “They had to light a fire when they got there,” Margie says. “On occasion they were known to put snow in the stove pipe to cause problems. They were mischievous.”

  Back then there were only seven or eight students in his class. Though her father only completed eighth grade, she says he was smart. “You could put figures into an adding machine and he could add them faster in his head than the machine could.”

  GEM 5 & 10 Store

  GEM 5 & 10 Store, 1959

  Chalk from the GEM

  He went to work at a young age, taking a boat across Monroe Bay to a farm located where Curley’s campground is now. The husband had died and the wife needed help. “She’d fix guinea hen sandwiches,” she says her father told her. “And they’d put the milk in the ground to keep it cold.”

  In 1925, looking for better opportunities, her father moved to Washington and went to work for the Capital Transit Company. A few years later, in 1933, he met her mother.

  The Original Gem 5 & 10

  “He’d gone to a party with someone else. He looked across the room, saw her and told a friend, ‘That’s who I’m going to marry.’”

  His idea of a proposal was to announce that they were getting married. He took her to a preacher’s house and gave him five dollars to perform the ceremony. Back home, “he gave her a roast and told her to ‘cook it while I’m gone [to work].’” Margie laughs. “She turned out to be a good cook.”

  During this time, her grandmother remained in Colonial Beach running various places in town—the Willow Lunch Restaurant on the boardwalk, the Colonial Beach Hotel dining room, the pub beside the Wolcott Hotel. She helped at the desk at the New Atlanta Hotel, too, and was even one of the town’s first telephone operators.

  Her step-grandfather ran a poolroom on Irving Avenue. “Dad worked there for a time as a gofer.”

  It was 1945 by the time her father and mother moved back to town. “He ran the King Cotton Hotel,” she says. It was located on Washington Avenue, where a small ice-cream vendor—Nancy’s—is now located. It was across the street from the Mayfair movie theater.

  Serving ice-cream at the Willow Lunch

  Playland Novelty Shop

  Marguerite on horseback in one of the parades

  He opened the Playland novelty shop on the boardwalk and bought a big building on Hawthorn Street. They lived in it above a tencent store.

  Eventually her father left the King Cotton Hotel and in 1951 with a partner took over the ten-cent store.

  Hawthorn Street was the heart of downtown back then. Pearson’s Seafood was across the street from their store, as was the post office. That building, once a central meeting place for town residents, now serves as home for the VFW. She remembers Edna Johnson’s dress shop, Wright’s Family Grocery, Greenlaw’s Hardware, Mary’s beauty salon and Costenbader’s barbershop. The A&P was the town’s first major grocery store when it opened just a block from the town pier. The Bank of Westmoreland was across the street. “I worked there when I graduated from high school,” she recalls.

  “It was a fun time back then,” she remembers. “We did all sorts of things. I remember we tried to ride our bicycles to Westmoreland State Park.” The park’s beach was a favorite of locals back then, but miles away. “We got to Oak Grove [only six miles away] and gave up.”

  Not everything was wonderful. Though the gambling era in the ’50s was good for businesses in town, her father hated it. He recalled parents coming into his Playland novelty shop on the boardwalk trying to hock things for money for gambling. Because children weren’t allowed in the casinos, they were often left outside to wander the boardwalk, crying. “He didn’t know if they’d been fed,” she remembers.

  Willow Lunch Restaurant on the boardwalk

  Margie married William Frank and had one son before they divorced. “We rode horses in a lot of the parades in town,” she says, recalling the annual Potomac River Festival parades that occurred each June. On Friday nights, there was a special and very loud parade of fire trucks and rescue vehicles from all over the region. On Saturdays, there was the main festival parade with floats, marching bands and majorettes and those riders on horseback. On Sundays, the weekend was capped off by a boat parade. Though smaller now, those parades continue today.

  Margie is now married to Mitchell Staples. They’ve been together for forty-nine years. When her father could no longer run the store, she left the bank, and she and Mitchell took over. It was the arrival of a national chain of five-and-dime stores that finally drove them out of business. “They could sell retail for what we had to pay wholesale,” she explains.

  “Dad lived to be one hundred. We built a home for him next to mine. Every day I’d go over to get him up and about. He’d always ask, ‘Where are we going?’” She remembers that every day he wanted to drive around the Point to se
e what was happening. “It upset Dad when we had to go out of business, but we couldn’t make a living selling nothing but newspapers.” By then their business had dwindled down to not much more than that.

  They tried to reinvent themselves as the Seafair Shop, offering things for summer such as sunglasses, bathing suits and the like, but it didn’t work.

  Once the store closed for good, Margie worked at the school as a paraprofessional in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. She also drove a school bus, but eventually gave that up. “I loved that bus,” she says nostalgically.

  She started playing piano for the church choir at the Colonial Beach Baptist Church on a “temporary” basis, and has been doing it for sixteen years.

  She and Mitchell had two children. Their daughter, Kathy, won a contest once that was a promotion for the movie of Tom Clancy’s bestseller The Hunt for Red October. The prize was a two-man submarine. “She was in college and asked for a cash prize instead.” It was enough to take her off of the financial aid she had for school.

  For all of the experiences she’s had and the full life she leads, Margie still holds tight to the memories of Klotz’s GEM 5 & 10, and the way old-timers in town mention it and her family with such respect.

  “We sold everything,” she says. “Candy, toys, curtains and window shades. We had all the little stuff. Embroidery thread, cases of buttons.”

  One of her favorite memories is of a man who came in from a boat looking for a pot to cook soup. “He spotted a chamber pot and took that. I thought that was so funny.”

  Every now and then she still runs into people who recognize her from the old store and introduce themselves. “They tell me they still miss that store.”

  She’s sure that’s something her parents would love to hear.

  BUSINESS REALITY: POTOMAC SUNRISE

  As Margie Staples learned and as Luke Sydnor mentioned, owning a small business in Colonial Beach can be a struggle. In fact, even during the gambling heyday, when summer crowds were especially large, most people who operated businesses along the busy boardwalk had year-round jobs. These days the town’s business regulations can be frustrating to navigate. Common sense often doesn’t rule.

  Still just about every author—or avid reader—dreams of opening a bookstore, and I was certainly no exception. Just like Shanna in the Chesapeake Shores series, I decided to follow my dream and give it a try.

  And so, in 1996, a friend and I decided to open separate businesses in a house on Washington Avenue. Mary Warring, who loved antiques, ran Potomac Accents in the front of the house. I opened my bookstore, Potomac Sunrise, in the back. Just a few years after opening, I sold my half of the house to Mary and bought the old Baptist parsonage farther up the street and expanded my business to include a wide variety of gifts, along with my beloved books and a coffeepot that was always filled with my favorite coffee. The discussions with the health department over that coffeepot were almost comical.

  Originally my intention was to operate only during the spring and summer months, but it turned out, after an experiment, that fall and especially Christmas were the very best seasons of all. Because I only lived in town part of the year, running the business long-distance was especially tricky, even with some very good and loyal employees. When the pipes froze one winter and sent water cascading through the newly renovated house, I was finally forced to reconsider.

  Until then, though, I loved having the chance to talk books with readers from all over who came to the store. Talking local news with residents who stopped in to catch up kept me up-to-date on just about everything going on in town. Every week when the shipments of books turned up or the boxes of gifts I’d selected for various sections arrived, it was exactly like Christmas morning. I couldn’t imagine anything more fun.

  But reality took precedence over the joy of meeting new people, discovering new authors and selling just the right gift or card for someone’s birthday or anniversary. After ten wonderful years, I had to close the business in 2006 to focus on the career that paid my bills.

  My only regret is that I hadn’t waited until I had more time to be on site all the time. Running a small business requires dedication and personal interaction. Those years with Potomac Sunrise gave me a newfound respect for anyone who can survive the challenges and make a success of such a business. One of these days, I’d love to try it again.

  THE TOWN’S WELCOME MAT:

  FROM GRANDEUR TO COZY B AND Bs

  When I was spending my childhood summers in Colonial Beach, the sprawling Colonial Beach Hotel sat stop a slight hill in the middle of town facing the Potomac River. At the bottom of its sloping lawn, amusement park rides—a merry-go-round, a train ride, a Ferris wheel and a whip among others—dotted the landscape along the water. Delbert Conner, who’d brought gambling to town, owned the hotel, the rides and even the nearby town swimming pool.

  DeAtley Hotel

  Westmoreland Motel

  The New Atlanta Hotel

  Rock’s Rooms Hotel

  I wanted desperately to grow up and own that hotel, to create a gracious sweeping porch open to the breeze, to have badminton and croquet games on the lawn. Even then, a part of me was living in another era.

  Alas, that old hotel, which was purported to have a resident ghost and was the onetime home of General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, was eventually declared to be too run-down to save and was demolished in 1984, long before I could get my hands on it and create the hotel of my childhood dreams.

  Perhaps that thwarted desire led to my fascination with charming and welcoming small hotels such as The Inn at Eagle Point in the Chesapeake Shores series. They may eventually knock down some of these gracious old hotels in real life, but I can keep them going in my books.

  In the early days in Colonial Beach, visitors had a variety of options. There were boardinghouses all over town, homes where dinner bells rang to call guests in for an evening meal.

  Small hotels were situated on the boardwalk and beyond—Rock’s, DeAtley’s, the Wolcott, Linwood House, the King Cotton, the New Atlanta Hotel, the Crown Castle. Many had porches with rocking chairs and a view of the water, or was certainly within walking distance of the Potomac. Some had their own restaurants.

  Alexander Graham Bell House

  There was a scattering of small, local motels—the Wakefield, the Westmoreland and others—long before chains became the norm across the country. And during the gambling heyday, when casinos were built on piers over the river, every motel, hotel and boardinghouse room was filled with those who came for family vacations, to gamble or to listen to music from the likes of Guy Lombardo, Kate Smith and Patsy Cline.

  When the gambling was outlawed in 1959, many of these smaller boardinghouses and gracious, if small hotels that dotted the Colonial Beach landscape died with it. Motels were shuttered or their rooms rented to transients or to churches offering a hand to someone down on their luck. In some cases paint peeled and lawns were overrun with weeds.

  In their place came a handful of rental cottages and bed-and-breakfasts. The most famous of these is the Bell House, once the summer home of Alexander Graham Bell. A pale yellow Victorian with a wide porch and a sweeping view of the Potomac River, it had a gracious proprietor in Anne Bolin, who was proud of its history under the ownership of the man who invented the telephone and even allowed my publicity photo to be shot on that front porch. The Bell House was filled to capacity on many summer weekends. Its fate is in doubt now due to Anne’s passing on February 17, 2017.

  And then there is Doc’s Motor Court. Doc’s is in a class by itself. Opened in 1948, it sat just across the street from the main beach and the town pier. Guests pulled their cars into the tiny courtyard to park directly in front of their rooms. They were welcomed at first by Doc Caruthers, who was never a doctor at all, but the son of one, and after a time by Doc’s wife, Ellie, a former nurse who told her husband she had no idea how to run a hotel when he handed her the keys.

  “You’ll learn j
ust like I did,” he responded and went off to the “real” job she’d insisted he get before she’d marry him.

  So Ellie learned and the guests came, many of them over and over again through the years. Her notes reminded her of which rooms they preferred, which festival or holiday drew them here, and anything else that she needed to know to make them welcome.

  But though Doc is gone now and Ellie closed the motor court a few years ago, Ellie remembers the repeat customers even without those detailed notes. And the guests still come back to reminisce, begging to stay one last time, though the doors have been locked tight. Often she lets them, as long as they bring their own sheets and towels and leave their favorite rooms as clean as they found them.

  That’s just who Ellie is, as welcoming as a favorite aunt, a storyteller with a long memory and a quick wit.

  Not too long ago my cousin, Michael Fitts, an artist who lives in Charlottesville, was here visiting. I told him and his brothers and their wives about Ellie and about Doc’s. Mike’s eyes lit, his artistic sensibility awakened. He immediately turned to his wife. “That’s the place we saw. I told you I wanted to stay there.”

  When I mentioned that to Ellie, she immediately said, “Bring him by.”

  And I will, because no one should miss the chance to meet Ellie Caruthers. And for those of you who might never have that chance, here’s her story. She remembers well what it used to be like when Colonial Beach was crowded with tourists who, it seems, were always welcomed like family.

  Doc’s Motor Court

  MAKE NO MISTAKE, IT’S A MOTOR COURT, NOT A MOTEL:

  Ellie Caruthers