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

  Possibly because they were still young at the time, the siblings—Rusty and his older sisters, Linda and Candy—say their father never discussed the Oyster Wars that were raging for a time on the waters of the Potomac during the 1950s. He never mentioned if watermen from Virginia were illegally dredging from oyster beds at the bottom of the Potomac River in defiance of the law. Nor did he discuss the lax Virginia patrols or, by contrast, the fiercely protective Maryland patrolmen, who were often taunted by the determined oystermen with their faster boats, some of which were owned by Curley himself.

  Inside Curley’s Oyster House

  Original Curley’s oyster can

  Yet the legend of Maryland patrol boats firing on watermen, sending a hail of bullets into boats and on to shore during that era is well-known. Almost anyone living near the water during that period has a story to share of hearing the middle-of-the-night shots, witnessing the gunfire or finding bullet holes in buildings just onshore from where watermen outmaneuvered the patrols to seek safety in protected Monroe Bay, which was in less dangerous Virginia territory.

  In one account, reported in The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay by John R. Wennersten, at least four hundred people had gathered onshore one wintry night in 1957 to watch as two patrol boats and a seaplane tore after waterman Harvey King in a chase worthy of a Hollywood movie. Bullets slammed into the Wolcott Tavern on the Colonial Beach boardwalk, but luckily no bystanders were hit and King made it to shore unscathed, though his boat was hit. He was arrested, but the squabbling that ensued between Maryland and Virginia was as fiery as the gun battle. Astonishing many, when King was tried eventually in Maryland, he was acquitted.

  Curley’s oyster boat

  Curley’s Oysters

  Landon Curley might have known about the illegal dredging, he might even have owned a few boats that got tangled up in the fighting, but he didn’t talk about it with his children.

  The history of that time is well documented in Wennersten’s book, which also describes the gunfight that ended it all with the shooting death of Colonial Beach waterman Berkeley Muse, who was aboard Harvey King’s boat. King, who’d ignored the advice of many after his earlier brush with Maryland patrol boats and the law, was also injured in the fight. He got the boat to shore, but Muse was already dead.

  Bozo Atwell, 1962

  The one story of that era that Rusty does recall hearing from his father was of the arrest of Bozo Atwell, who worked in various jobs around the marina, and got caught up in a scuffle over oyster dredging. He was aboard one of Landon Curley’s boats at the time and allegedly led patrolmen on a merry chase, then threatened them with a rifle. After he was arrested, officials demanded that boat as payment to get Atwell out of jail. Curley had already sold the boat, but he bought it back and made the exchange.

  “I think that says a lot about the kind of man my dad was. He was loyal to his friends,” Rusty says.

  Growing up with such an example to follow and in such an environment was incredibly special, Rusty says. His sisters, Linda Gouldman and Candy Coates, concur, though to hear the women tell it, Rusty got a bit of preferential treatment, being not only the baby of the family, but the only son.

  “We worked the gas pump in the marina, we learned to shuck oysters just to help Daddy,” Linda recalls. “We didn’t get paid. Rusty did.”

  After working together for fifty years, the teasing among the three siblings, as they recall growing up around oystermen and the packing plant, speaks to their devotion to the family and their enjoyment of that period of the Curley Packing Plant.

  Not a one of them had any desire to leave the familiar lifestyle.

  Candy worked in Richmond for three years, and Linda worked at Dahlgren for eight years while her husband, Russell Gouldman, worked for the family business. Rusty, the youngest, worked at the packing plant when he wasn’t in school and then full-time after graduating.

  All three graduated from Colonial Beach High School, as did their children.

  Both Rusty and his brother-in-law, Russell, worked for the family business for fifty years, while Candy and Linda worked there for forty years. Linda’s son, Brian Gouldman, became the newest family member to join the business, working there in summers during high school and now full-time since 2010.

  “Our dad loved his family and the business, and he always wanted Curley Packing Company to remain family operated,” Linda says.

  Vacations were rare, but one time Rusty went to Florida for a week, leaving Russell in charge of the oyster plant. But Russell fell ill with a nasty flu, and the sisters pitched in doing tasks they admit tested their skills just so their brother wouldn’t have to turn right around and come back home. “That’s what you do in a family business,” Linda adds.

  Docked boats at Monroe Bay Marina

  Docked boats at Monroe Bay Marina

  Monroe Bay Campgrounds

  L. L. Curley Sr. Memorial

  If they each have a great understanding of what it takes to work together, they also have a deep appreciation for life in a small town. “It’s a comfort knowing so many people,” Linda says of living in Colonial Beach her whole life.

  “If you’re walking down the street, you can barely get a block or two before someone will come along and offer you a ride,” Rusty adds.

  People would also tell on them if they were caught misbehaving, Linda says, then adds with a pointed look toward her brother, “But Candy and I were never in trouble.”

  “I tried to give him some of my wisdom,” Candy said, also glancing in Rusty’s direction.

  Rusty takes the teasing in stride, then can’t help mentioning that his mother, at least, was strict with him. “I was in my thirties, divorced and living across the street, and she’d wait up for me, then call to tell me I’d been out too late. ‘Your father’s trying to sleep and he can’t,’ she’d complain. Well, if Daddy couldn’t sleep, it was because she was poking him to tell him I wasn’t home yet,” he recalls, laughing.

  When they speak of their father, it’s always with deep pride and respect. There’s a small stone memorial to L. L. Curley with an American flag flying in the courtyard of what used to be the bustling packing plant. Where oyster boats once lined up, there are now marina boat slips. Times change.

  At one time that packing plant had tractor trailers waiting to haul away a cargo of oysters graded as standard, select and count. They were shipped out in specially designed tins labeled with the Pearl of Perfection logo of the Curley Packing Plant. Nowadays, with the plant closed since the 2002-2003 oyster season, those old tins, even those not in the best condition, thanks to time and the rust from salty water, are considered collectibles.

  “I paid $350 for the last one I bought,” Linda says.

  “I think I paid $250,” Rusty adds. But recently he heard that while a gallon of oysters could be had for twenty-five dollars, one of those old gallon tins sold for a whopping $1,800.

  Mural outside Curley’s Oyster House

  Curley’s Oyster House

  Though the oyster supply had been diminishing, they kept the packing plant going for as long as they could in their father’s memory. For the last four or five years they remained in business, they had trouble even getting enough oysters to fill their orders during the prime oyster-selling season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In addition, they couldn’t find shuckers. They had one employee for a time who simply wasn’t as skilled as the rest and made a mess of the shucking process, dealing with the oysters as clams. They couldn’t bring themselves to fire this worker, though..

  Regulations were changing, too. Rules pertaining to the way oysters had to be handled, the temperature requirements in the plant—the shuckers wanted the room to be seventy-two degrees, the health department required the oysters to be kept at thirty-five degrees—and the destruction of so many oyster beds after Hurricane Isabel. All of it convinced them it was time to close the plant. It was a reluctant family decision.

  The Curley siblings continue to op
erate the Monroe Bay Marina on the old packing plant property, as well as the Monroe Bay Campground and the Monroe Bay Mobile Home Park just across the creek on land their father had once intended to build on. Instead, people came along and started putting tents up from time to time. It evolved into a thriving campground business that’s open from April to November. It, too, was damaged in the early spring storm in 2017, but the family and friends dove right in to get it cleaned up.

  Though the campground has a long history in Colonial Beach, if you mention the Curleys, old-timers will always think about oysters. And, according to his children, that’s just the way Landon Curley would want it.

  Linda Gouldman, Candy Coates and Rusty Curley (left to right)

  SAND IN THEIR SHOES:

  The Mears Family

  They lovingly refer to Colonial Beach as Mayberry on the Potomac and declare that it’s a town that finds its way into your heart and stays there.

  Diane Anderson and Zedda Viets are two of five siblings who were raised in Colonial Beach and never left. Well, almost never. Diane and her husband, Andy Anderson, moved to Florida during one brief period when he’d lost his job as police chief thanks to a change in the town’s political leadership team. He became a detective in Dania Beach, Florida, Diane recalls. “I hated every day of it.”

  At the first opportunity, the Andersons, along with a couple of other officers and their families, packed up U-Hauls and headed in a caravan right back to Colonial Beach. In all, Andy was a police chief in town for fourteen years, and Diane finally got over being embarrassed by having people stop them on the street to reminisce about the times they’d been arrested or jailed by Andy.

  For Zedda, who worked in banking for her entire career in the town where she’d grown up, there are much fonder memories of the opportunities she had to help people with their financial needs.

  But all of that came later. They were born to a hardworking waterman, Pud Mears, and his even harder-working wife, Mildred “Millie” Mears. There were two other sisters and a brother. Zedda was the baby, but that didn’t save her from doing her fair share of work.

  The Lord Baltimore

  The Miss Potomac

  “Our grandfather ran a schooner up and down the [Chesapeake] bay,” Diane recalls. “Our father was born in Baltimore. He had five boats, including the Miss Potomac, which ran sightseeing rides and charter fishing excursions from fisherman’s pier by the town’s boardwalk.” He had help who operated his other boats for a share of the proceeds.

  He did very well, they report proudly, especially for a man with a very limited education. “He only went to second grade because he was needed to help out at home. He had to go out and sell eggs.”

  That work ethic, instilled when he was so young, was passed along to his children.

  “All of us kids worked on the boats,” Zedda recalls.

  After every fishing trip, “the older siblings would stay aboard and mop the decks or set up chairs,” Diane remembers. “The first mate would earn twenty dollars a week, the second mate was paid ten dollars or fifteen dollars. Zedda, as the baby, got two dollars. We saved everything we got in mayonnaise jars. For an allowance we’d get twenty-five cents. We’d go to Caruthers and Coakley [drugstore] where we could get a soda in a glass for five cents. If we got it in a paper cup it was six cents.”

  They both recall how safe the town was back then. “I don’t think we even had a lock on the house,” she says.

  “I’d walk around the Point carrying my doll,” Zedda remembers. “At seven, eight or nine, we’d go trick-or-treating and feel perfectly safe.”

  One thing Pud insisted on was having his boats spotless. That meant scrubbing them down between trips out on the river, whether for fishing or sightseeing on a sixty-minute ride toward George Washington’s birthplace at Wakefield or around the Point into Monroe Bay.

  “We’d take our schoolbooks on the boat,” Diane recalls. Their mom would bring lunch down to the pier between trips.

  The fishing excursions would last until the weather turned cold, and then their dad would go to work for the Norman Oil Company and the kids would ride along hauling hoses to fill the fuel tanks at homes around town. “He always took butterscotch candies for any kids we ran into and dog biscuits for the dogs,” Zedda says.

  Their chores didn’t end with helping their dad, either.

  “Mama loved flowers,” Zedda remembers. They’d get paid two dollars for pulling weeds all along the fence. “Diane was more careful than I was. I’d get stuck out in the field because I’d cut down every flower Mama had.”

  They both recall how the family would make ends meet by sharing their catch of perch with a neighbor, Junior Parker, who’d in turn share the occasional bushel of crabs.

  “Mama was a good cook,” Zedda says. And their house was always as spotless as the boats. “The floors were waxed with bowling alley wax.”

  While they grew up during the era of casinos and gambling, “We were raised very strictly,” Diane says. “It wasn’t an environment we were allowed to be in.” The same was true if the day’s charter fishing excursion was likely to be a rowdy group of men. The girls were all assigned to work on another boat that day.

  But while their parents tried to shelter them from any rough-and-tumble activities, it didn’t mean they objected to the presence of the casinos during those years. Their mother, in fact, operated Millie’s Snowballs on the boardwalk within yards of the casinos. And every year their mother and father would go to Reno to see the Guy Lombardo band with Walter and Alberta Parkinson.

  “Dad would have a highball,” Diane says. “It was the only time he drank. They called it their night of sin and said they had the rest of the year to repent.”

  They remember the objections that the Baptist preacher at the time had to the gambling in town. “He preached against Reno, so we were Methodists.”

  Both women are still active in that church. “There are a lot of things to be involved with in the community,” Zedda says.

  “We have a spaghetti dinner at the church that benefits different things. Andy does the cooking,” Diane says. There are ten or so regulars who run the kitchen for those events like a well-oiled machine. “It’s good fellowship. They solve the problems of the world in that kitchen.”

  Andy might head up the cooking crew on the night of the event, but Diane does her share. With a double oven at home, she baked twenty-four cakes for a dinner last year benefiting the Colonial Beach Volunteer Rescue Squad.

  “The same customers come every time.” People run into neighbors and share the meal at a table with folks they might otherwise rarely see.

  Diane worked for the government, specializing in computers at the Naval Space Surveillance System at Dahlgren. Zedda worked in banking. She had to wait for the much-coveted position until someone left the Bank of Westmoreland, which later became First Virginia and most recently BB&T. Now she manages several regional branches of BB&T.

  Shores of Chesapeake Bay

  They both talk about the small-town feeling they love, about the neighbors caring for each other and watching out for each other’s kids.

  During Andy’s tenure with the police force, he got to know a couple of generations of kids, especially as a truancy officer. Often he’d pick up a kid for misbehaving and take him or her home to let the parents deal with any discipline.

  And in the way of small towns everywhere, stories of misdeeds were quickly passed around. Diane recalls hearing from Bill Cooper, who owned the closest thing the town had to a department store back in the day. He called and taunted her by suggesting she ask her husband what he’d been up to that day.

  It turned out Andy had arrested a woman who’d taken off all her clothes and ditched them somewhere. He had to escort the naked woman up the boardwalk to his police car, an act that was noted and spread through town at a rapid-fire pace.

  It’s Diane’s words that sum up how she and her siblings feel about Colonial Beach, where they grew up with ha
rd work that did nothing to take away from childhood innocence and joy.

  “It’s not just a place to live,” she says. “It’s a place in your heart.”

  A FISH TALE:

  Alberta Parkinson

  Like so many people who came to Colonial Beach in their youth and wound up staying a lifetime, it was all about a man for Alberta Parkinson.

  Born on November 26, 1926 in Washington, DC, Alberta first came to town to stay with her aunt and uncle who rented a cottage at the small beach town on the Potomac. On some occasions her father rented a cottage for the family from a professor at George Washington University, so throughout her childhood Alberta was a summer regular.

  She remembers the boat rides and fishing trips that left from the town fishing pier every thirty minutes or so all day long, the announcements made on the loudspeaker that echoed up and down the beach and boardwalk. “It made things seem so alive,” she recalls.

  There was plenty to do along the boardwalk back then. “There were two or three bingo places, a shooting gallery, snowball stands. They even had moonlight boat rides.

  “I went on some of the boat rides,” she says, and remembers sitting in the stern of the boat. What she doesn’t recall is the exact moment when Walter Parkinson caught her eye…or she caught his.

  Fishing excursions at Colonial Beach

  Walter, along with his father, took out fishing charters and scenic boat rides. They’d take tourists on rides over to Cobb Island and back or to other destinations on the river, pointing out the local sights. It was the Parkinson family business.