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

  “His father was from the Eastern Shore,” Alberta recalls. As had so many others from that area who wound up in Colonial Beach, Walter’s father had met a local girl and settled in this small town that depended for much of its livelihood on the water.

  At some point the tall, dark-haired girl who spent her time on a towel at the nearby beach captured Walter’s attention. He started coming up to Washington to court the young woman, who by then was working as a doctor’s assistant. He even took dance lessons at an Arthur Murray studio to impress her.

  “We’d go to a dance hall on H Street, Northeast. We’d have cocktails and dinner, then go in the back for dancing,” she remembers, her eyes lighting up. “Sometimes we’d go downtown to eat, or go to the theater at the Capital Stage to see shows.”

  Haines Point, Washington, DC

  She remembers distinctly that on the night he proposed, they’d gone to Haines Point, with its romantic view of Washington and a place where young people congregated in their cars at night. Because she’d been summering in Colonial Beach most of her life, the thought of giving up the faster-paced lifestyle of Washington didn’t bother her a bit. She said yes.

  But even after that proposal, it was a year or more before they got married in 1954, because Walter wanted to finish the house he was having built for her prior to the wedding. Local builder Jim Jett was constructing the ranch-style house on a prime piece of waterfront property facing Monroe Bay. From their living room window they were able to see the Stanford Marine Railway, where Clarence Stanford built two of Walter’s most famous wooden boats—the Big Dipper and its sister ship, the Midnight Sun. “Clarence built wonderful boats,” she says.

  Alberta and Walter married in an 8:00 a.m. ceremony at Our Savior Church, just blocks from the family home in Washington. After a reception at the house, they drove south to start their lives in Colonial Beach.

  She recalls that he carried her across the threshold into their new home, which was only partially furnished, then told her, “Don’t make any plans for summer. We’ll be working on the boats.”

  That’s how Alberta, who doesn’t even much like fish, wound up serving as not just wife, but first mate for Walter throughout their lifetime together. “I didn’t know anything about boats or fishing,” she says. Though her tone is wry, there’s also an unmistakable love in her voice for this man who’s never far from her thoughts. Even after his death, when others were serving as captain of the Big Dipper, she continued to carry bait across the street in the early morning haze and to continue her role as first mate on those Big Dipper fishing charters until she finally sold the boat just a few years ago.

  If the charter fishing and boat rides weren’t enough to keep the young couple busy, Walter also bought a bathhouse and snowball stand on the boardwalk and turned them over to Alberta to run. “He had the bathhouse building rebuilt, put in dressing rooms. People would put their clothes in bags and we’d keep them on a shelf while they were on the beach.” She had a frozen custard machine, too. “I wouldn’t get home until eleven or twelve at night.”

  She doesn’t recall there being any trouble on the boardwalk back then. “Captain Joe Miller was the only policeman. He walked everywhere. He’d stop somebody and say, ‘You’re drunk. Go home.’ And they would. He didn’t stay up too late,” she remembers.

  Because she and Walter had always been connected by a love of music and dancing, they didn’t miss the big bands that performed at Reno, especially Guy Lombardo. “I walked up. He was on the bandstand. He was very nice, very polite. I got his autograph. Walter wouldn’t have had the nerve to do that.”

  Though they bought a condo in the busier and faster-paced Ocean City, Maryland, and enjoyed visiting there, Colonial Beach was home.

  “There are very few things I’d change,” Alberta says. “We had a good life here.”

  They raised one son, who died of cancer as a young adult. There’s a plaque on the wall in the children’s section of the local library in memory of Walter Albert “Bert” Parkinson. “He would work on the boat if Walter needed him, but he wasn’t crazy about it,” she recalls, then picks up a photo cube of snapshots of the young man she lost too soon.

  Reno Casino

  Cooper Branch of Central Rappahannock Regional Library

  “I kept thinking God was going to heal my son, but He had other plans,” she says, her voice still filled with sorrow.

  Having a child gave Alberta yet another purpose. “He had plenty of books to read because I saw to it,” she declares. And because of that determination, she also saw to it that the town worked toward getting its own library.

  “The bookmobile came first, then the library. An elderly woman had a lot of books and she donated them.” Because Alberta was also an active volunteer at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the church found two rooms that could be used to house the growing collection of donated books. It became the library’s first location. Then the town was able to give them space in what had once been Greenlaw’s Hardware Store on Hawthorn Street.

  But Alberta and her friend Bobbi Cooper, whose family had owned Cooper’s store on a large piece of property on Washington Avenue, wanted even more. Working with the town and that piece of donated property, they built what is now the Cooper Branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library System, which is connected to other libraries in nearby Fredericksburg and throughout the Northern Neck Region.

  Alberta has a few other passions in her life. Clark Gable is one and there are photos of him on the walls of her home. She also loves old carousel horses and one sits now in a prime location where she can enjoy it every day, right along with the view of the bay. That view and the mementos of her years with Walter surround her with memories of the two men in her life.

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t wish they were still here,” she says softly, glancing up at a picture of Walter that hangs above the sofa. “Not a day.”

  Alberta Parkinson

  A COME-HERE WHO STAYED:

  Diana Pearson

  Practically from the day she was born, Diana Henderson was stirring up trouble. Her mother named her Diane, but when her birth certificate arrived it listed her name as Diana. So from that moment on, the people in her life were split into two camps—those who followed her mother’s lead and continued to call her Diane and those who used her legal name, Diana. To this day, folks around Colonial Beach are confused about which is correct.

  What no one questions, though, is her energy and her loyalty to the community she and her family adopted as home when she was only twelve.

  “We’d been coming here from Alexandria since my sister and I could walk.” Then her parents made the decision to move to town and her father opened a plumbing business. For a time they also had a motel and marina slips to rent on Monroe Bay Avenue where the Nightingale Motel sits now. Her mother cooked meals for the guests—“she cooked everything from scratch.”

  Diana worked at the school, even before she graduated, to earn extra money. Teacher Sarah Lee found typing jobs for her, and she helped out in the school cafeteria. It was the principal back then who hired her as his secretary, and Sarah Lee, who encouraged her to get her high school diploma at Colonial Beach. Her spirit and determination to finish school after she’d married at only sixteen encouraged other girls who’d quit to come back and do the same.

  Perhaps that explains her loyalty to the Colonial Beach Drifters and to the concept of keeping the tiny Colonial Beach school system separate from the county system, so that it continues to have its own identity. It’s a hot-button issue in town to this day, driven in part by those who are convinced their taxes would go down if the two systems were consolidated.

  The school system is unquestionably small—some thirty-five teachers and fewer than six hundred students from kindergarten through high school, with a graduating class in 2016 of only forty-one.

  “I still donate to everything in town,” especially any projects that will benefit the school, Diana says of her ongoin
g attachment to the school system. She was active in organizing a fifty-year reunion for her class that drew many old friends back to town, some of whom seldom return.

  Pearson’s Seafood

  Cultivating crabs

  Pearson’s Seafood

  Diana is not afraid to take on anyone, whether the subject is the school system or town politics. “I’ve been going to town council meetings since I was thirteen.” She remembers things others aren’t willing to take the time to hunt down in the minutes from years gone by.

  “My problem is, what I think, I say,” she says with a shrug. “But at least people know where they stand with me.”

  Thirteen was about the same age she was when she started volunteering with the legendary Frances and Jimmy Karn with the Chamber of Commerce. She credits them with teaching her and many others what community service and involvement were all about.

  “I started working with the Potomac River Festival in 1958. We had beautiful floats back then,” she recalls nostalgically. “We used to have school bands and majorettes. Today groups don’t have the money to come, and bands have to turn in their equipment at their schools before Festival week.”

  The energy that keeps her going today started way back when. “I was never a child to sit idle. I’d hand out trophies, whatever they needed. As I got older, I’d judge two or three categories during the parade.” She chaired the baby contests for fifteen years. And for her what mattered was the baby’s personality, not whether they were all cleaned up in fancy clothes and tiaras. “The littlest ones were a real joy.”

  She was thirteen when she met Bobby Pearson while she was walking with friends on the boardwalk. “He asked me if I’d go for a ride with him. I told him he was too old for me.”

  Bobby Pearson was born in the heart of town on Colonial Avenue to a family that already owned a successful seafood business. Even then he knew what—or most definitely who—he wanted, and it was Diana. She was only sixteen when they got married. “We had forty-seven wonderful years together” before his death.

  Bobby’s father, George, started Pearson’s Seafood in 1935. He opened a small retail seafood store, first on Irving Avenue, then on Hawthorn Street. “He had one truck,” Diana recalls. The business moved to its current location on Colonial Avenue in 1961. “Bobby and I took over in 1971.”

  They sold fish and crabs in season, as well as oysters, but eventually they gave up on oysters and concentrated on hard-and soft-shell crabs.

  George Pearson had been a waterman on St. George’s Island before he came to Colonial Beach. He and his wife had four children. Bobby was the one who took to the seafood business and had a vision to make it grow on the wholesale side.

  “One night Bobby came and told me I needed to tighten my belt because he wanted to work with his dad. I was about a size two then. I wasn’t sure how much tighter my belt could be, but I told him to go ahead.”

  Father and son expanded their seafood distribution, added freezers and came up with a technological innovation that gave them an edge with the soft-shell crabbing side of the business. To this day that technology is still in use, she says, proudly showing off the room where they cultivate the crabs during the brief time when they shed their shells.

  When the oyster supply started dwindling, they did away with their shucking room. “It didn’t pay to shuck ’em,” she says, echoing a conclusion others in town had come to. “And they weren’t good quality.”

  The rockfish were dwindling, too, but they’ve since come back. She describes that as a mixed blessing, though, because they eat crabs.

  Crab pots

  After years of working with watermen from around the region, Diana describes them as “a good, hardworking group of men. A lot of them started in their teens or younger, following in their father’s footsteps, but it’s beginning to be a dying occupation. It’s hard work.”

  Watermen are out at dawn checking their pots and hauling in crabs. In the afternoon they have to maintain their boats or clean their pots, if needed. “If a pot grows ‘hair’ on it, it won’t catch crabs,” she explains.

  She says it’s not a job that draws a lot of women. Some wives will go out with their husbands, but very few go out on their own. “In 2016, there are none in this area,” Diana says. And she’s the only woman seafood buyer in the area.

  While running the business started by her husband’s family keeps her busy, she still makes time to attend those council meetings, to participate in fundraising drives and encourage others to get active.

  She admits it’s harder now to get young people interested in the way she was drawn to community service. They have too many other activities taking up their time.

  “I’ve always been proud of Colonial Beach. It’s the kind of town where, when times get tight, people will buckle down and work.”

  Over and over she stresses the need for people to get more involved, to show a greater interest in what’s going on in town.

  That small-town atmosphere is what makes it special. “When I went to school in Alexandria, I was a number, not a name. People didn’t see me as a person. Here I had one-on-one contact. We were friends with the teachers.”

  So, whether it was the attention of those teachers back then, the guidance of the Karns, her marriage into the Pearson family or simply her own personality, Diana has spent most of her lifetime working to make Colonial Beach a better place. She was vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, helped organize the Potomac River Festival and beat on doors to raise funds for just about every cause that’s important to the town.

  “All we can do now is hope that the youth will get involved and start where we left off.”

  BUILDING BOATS…AND A FUTURE:

  Mary Virginia Stanford

  In 1940 Mary Virginia Tucker was a recent high school graduate working in a bank in Apalachicola, Florida, when a dashing Clarence Stanford and his brother came to town to help their father find some way to settle the debt he owed.

  As Mary Virginia recalls, she and Clarence met at a dance hall where young people gathered for an evening of fun for a mere five cents. It was not, she says very firmly, love at first sight. He asked her to go to the movies, though, and she agreed. They saw Sergeant York. Her best friend dated his brother, and while those two didn’t last as a couple, Clarence was persistent.

  After joining the navy, he taught her to drive and left his car with her, then came back to town whenever he was on leave.

  It was Clarence’s father, William “Captain Billy” Stanford, who brought her north on the train for her first visit to Colonial Beach, Virginia, in 1941, two years before she and Clarence married. Even though Apalachicola was a small waterfront community, comparable in size to Colonial Beach, both with populations well under five thousand and plenty of opportunities for boating and fishing on the waterways, there was one noticeable difference. After coming from the wide expanses of sandy beaches along Florida’s Gulf Coast, she looked around at the narrow shoreline in Colonial Beach and asked, “Where’s the beach?”

  Billy and Maria Rebecha Stanford

  Clarence and Mary Virginia Stanford

  After Clarence left the navy with an honorable discharge as a Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class in 1945, there were jobs to be had at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, so the young couple settled in Colonial Beach. The family bought a small marina on Monroe Bay in 1945 from Frank Oliff, but Clarence’s travels weren’t yet over.

  He spent nearly a year in India working for the Office of Strategic Services—a predecessor of the modern CIA—leaving Mary Virginia behind. After his letters describing the conditions he found, he added in one note that the Red Cross center was “the only place over here that even resembles home.” That plaintive comment was all it took to give Mary Virginia a mission. She began raising money to send to the Red Cross, just one of the many volunteer projects she would tackle over the years.

  By marrying into the Stanford family, Mary Virginia found herself amid a staunc
h family of men tied to the sea. Her father-in-law, born in 1877 in nearby Lancaster County, went to sea at the age of eleven as a cook’s helper on an oyster boat.

  In 1898 he served in the navy during the Spanish-American War, meeting his wife in New York during that one-year stint. His wife, Maria Rebecha Lucht, immigrated from Germany at the age of sixteen and was working as a handmaiden for an actress at the time, according to Mary Virginia’s great-niece Grace Roble Dirling, whose grandmother was Clarence’s sister. They were two of Captain Billy and Maria’s twelve children.

  Captain Billy Stanford

  Captain Billy worked on a variety of vessels before captaining a series of schooners on the Chesapeake Bay, taking cargo up the bay to Baltimore and back. Sometimes that cargo was fish, destined to become fertilizer, a smelly business, Mary Virginia says, her nose wrinkling even now.

  There are oft-told stories of Captain Billy operating the three-masted schooners on his own, if need be, when his crew failed to show up on time. In 1940, there are even pictures from the Washington Post showing a “crew” of Girl Scouts who worked the boat for ten days.

  Captain Billy plied his trade on the waters of the Potomac River, Chesapeake Bay and other waterways for some seventy years. In 1959, he was featured in an article in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, written by Paul Muse. The article showcased his new career as an artist, painting pictures of the boats he loved. He was eighty-one. In the article he is quoted as saying, “I’m going to have to stop giving them away. The cost is starting to add up. It costs fifty-cents for a tube of paint.”