A Small Town Love Story--Colonial Beach, Virginia

by Sherryl Woods

  “All Carlton could talk about was the fact that he wasn’t dressed,” she remembers. “I just kept telling him we had to get out of there.”

  Hospital workers are always pleased when the volunteers come in with a patient, she says. “Often we know their history. That’s the positive side of it.”

  But if Carlton is proud of the years he spent taking calls and driving the ambulance or a fire truck, he’s even more proud of the years he served in Korea.

  He was assigned to the motor pool. “If one of the jeeps broke down, I was sent to deal with it.”

  He remembers a staff meeting in which his first lieutenant stood up and announced Carlton would be taking over the motor pool. “Two months later he called me back in and said it was in better shape than it had been in years.”

  Not only had he kept the equipment in top working condition, he’d improved the record-keeping, too. “I had four of the best mechanics you could find and the best generator man. We got that motor pool straight,” he says proudly.

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad, 1950s

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad, 1969

  Vintage Fire Truck

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad, 1955

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad, 1955

  At one memorable inspection, he recalls that though they did pass, points were taken off for one thing. “There was grease underneath our fingernails.”

  On one occasion, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find General Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I shook hands with President Ike,” he says with a sense of wonder.

  When he was promoted to sergeant, he told his superiors they were “moving too fast for me.”

  At one point during the war, he crossed paths with the son of Captain Joe Miller, the Colonial Beach police chief. A lieutenant colonel, Miller suggested Carlton stay on and serve as his chauffeur. Carlton declined, so he could see the job he’d started with the motor pool through to the end.

  His brother started his own tour of duty in Korea just as Carlton’s finally ended, and he came back to Colonial Beach.

  Back home he officially joined the Colonial Beach Volunteer Fire Department and once more continued his involvement with the rescue squad.

  His full-time job by then was working for the Norman Oil Company, owned by George S. Norman. Carlton was there for thirty years, and, as it had in the military, his reliability paid off.

  “Mr. Norman had racehorses, and he liked to go to the track to check on them and watch the races.” Carlton called him one day at the track about a problem.

  “I called Mr. Norman my second daddy,” Carlton says. When Mr. Norman came home to resolve the problem, part of his solution was to have Carlton’s name added to the company checks. “He told me, ‘If you need something, you buy it. Just don’t ever call me at the track again.’”

  From that time on, Carlton managed the company, which was located at State Road 205 near Wilkerson’s restaurant. “We dealt with Mobil Oil,” he recalls. “The product came by boat. We had to wait for high tide so it could get in there.”

  Class trip to the firehouse, 1950s

  Colonial Beach Rescue Squad, 1980s

  Colonial Beach Fire Department, 2015

  He took one of the drivers down to Richmond to look for a new truck. The driver was drawn to a big Mack truck with lots of chrome on it. Carlton got the salesman to “sharpen his pencil” and make a better deal, then he bought the truck.

  The next time Mr. Norman came by, the driver was worried about the expensive purchase.

  “He said, ‘Mr. Norman’s going to jump all over you,’” Carlton recalls. “I told him, no, he’s not.”

  Mr. Norman spotted the truck right away. “Where’d you get this?”

  The worried driver jumped to his boss’s defense. He didn’t need to. Carlton stood up for himself to the man, who was seldom around from May through December.

  “I told him, ‘You don’t realize we’re a big oil company now. There are people who want to take over.’” He showed him the company checkbook, detailed the changes he’d made, the routes he’d expanded. He showed his boss every expense and every bit of income itemized. “I told him, ‘I’ve built you a big business.’”

  Mr. Norman wanted details about the staff and what each of them made, information Carlton readily supplied. “The next time he came in he had a big suitcase full of money, and began to hand out bonuses. He gave me $1,500, one of the drivers $900, others $500. He gave $200 to the girls in the office. He said one of his horses had come in.”

  Though there were offers to buy out the thriving business, “he never would sell,” Carlton says. After he died, it was finally sold off. “If I’d been younger, I’d have bought it,” he says.

  Just as he felt a personal kinship to George Norman, Carlton and Pat both feel as if the Colonial Beach residents are more than a community. “We’re one big family here,” Pat says.

  Like all families, there are occasional squabbles, but in the end, in a crisis, everyone pitches in, and dedicated volunteers like these two are the glue that holds much of it together. Pat, who’d coached at the school for years, was recently honored for that work and so much more. One of the ballfields was renamed Fitzgerald Field, a surprise that deeply touched her. Like so many who give so much to the town, the reward for her is in the giving, not the recognition.

  Colonial Beach Fire Department building, 2015

  CHANGING TIMES:

  Burkett Lyburn

  Burkett Lyburn was born during a transition era for African Americans in Virginia history. Schools in the state were slowly desegregating, but there were still signs of discrimination in other ways.

  Born in Lancaster County, not far from Colonial Beach, to a father in the military and a mother who taught school, he can recall times when he’d go with his father to a café window to pick up food because they weren’t allowed inside, times when they had to use a different bathroom in public places. “My dad was very cautious. He played by the rules,” Burkett says, recalling that he struggled to understand those rules.

  After Lancaster County, they lived for a time in Baltimore, which he remembers as “a go-go-go” kind of place. He was twelve by the time his father was transferred to the Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center, and they settled in Colonial Beach, which had a slower pace that better suited him.

  By then it was 1966, and the schools at the beach had integrated. There was no longer a separate school on Lincoln Avenue for black children.

  “I think it was a smoother process, perhaps, because everybody knew everybody. Kids in town played together, regardless of race.”

  Even so, Burkett remembers that when he first moved to town, he was told he couldn’t swim on the main beach; that he’d have to swim down at the Point. His friends promptly dismissed that.

  “They’d say, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ It evolved because we were friends.”

  Like so many of the youngsters of that era, he remembers the train ride on the boardwalk, the bumper cars, the water slide and the town pool.

  The Mayfair Theater

  Mayfair movie card, October 1952

  Mayfair’s movie projector

  His dad bought him a lawn mower and suggested he make his own money. He worked for a time at Cooper’s, the business known for “selling everything,” but his best memory is of working at the Mayfair Theater on Washington Avenue, just down the hill from the school. He was a projectionist there. “We’d get in new movies on Monday and show ’em for two or three days, then ship ’em back out and get a new one.”

  Tickets back then were three or four dollars, popcorn a dollar, a drink fifty cents and candy twenty-five or fifty cents. “You could take a date to the movies for fifteen dollars.”

  “When the theater burned down [in 1972], it was a sad day for us.” He remembers watching the fire from the humongous windows at the school and wanting to go down to help fight the flames. “We were told we couldn’t go until th
ey’d knocked the fire down.”

  Just like that, his job was gone.

  Burkett had plenty of things to fill his time back then. “I was into music. I sang in a lot of talent shows. I was usually singing three or four times a year in something, talent shows, homecoming dances. There were a lot of activities.”

  Colonial Beach First Baptist Church, 1925

  He still loves gospel music and continues to pursue it. In fact, he met his wife at a gospel concert. “She likes to sing, but she’s kind of bashful. I’ll get up and sing anytime.”

  He’s sung for forty-two years at the First Baptist Church—the town’s oldest established church, which started in 1892, the same year the town was founded. At one time the membership there was around three hundred people, but some have moved away. Some members live out of town, he says, but return for services on Sunday morning. Children, if they come at all, it’s with their grandparents. It’s a change many churches in town are seeing.

  Burkett has had his own quartet for forty years, the GospelAires as well as the All Together Gospel Singers. He’s performed with some of the greats in gospel music and has a CD. He likes the balance of music with his own post-military career in transportation services in Washington. The long commute, which he’s dealt with for many years, is something he shrugs off, the price of getting to live in a community he’s considered home for so long.

  Besides, he says, when it comes to music, “when you have kids, you can’t go on the road. You’re missing all that time with your children. In the gospel field, you’d have to perform four or five times a week to make a living.”

  He has six children, now scattered all over. His oldest daughter lives in nearby King George County. “My baby is in college,” he says. “She wants to be a lawyer.” One daughter has followed in his mother’s footsteps and works as a special education adviser for home schools in Maryland. Two sons followed his path through the military, and the third works in IT at Dahlgren.

  “One’s a bookworm. Another’s all about making money. One loves to sing. The boys can sing, but won’t,” he says ruefully.

  He wishes that Colonial Beach was the draw for all of them that it has been for him, his wife and his parents, who also continue to live in Colonial Beach. Part of his mission on Town Council, where he’s serving his second term, has been to find more activities to keep young people in the area.

  Economic growth is something that concerns him, too. He filled a vacant seat on the Westmoreland County Board of Supervisors before running for town council at the beach. “It was a good learning experience,” he says. “And around here, if you’re wrong, they’ll tell you.”

  The path for him in local government was paved by Charles Garland, Colonial Beach’s first African American mayor. The former mayor was elected in 1980, nearly a century after the town was incorporated.

  Trying to balance the reality that the town has become something of a retirement community with the costs of its infrastructure needs is a challenge, Burkett says thoughtfully. “We need to encourage business to get that money. We have to think outside the box.”

  He’d like to see more incentives to encourage businesses to start. Those incentives matter when a small business owner’s cash is tied up with getting the business up and running, he explains.

  During his childhood years when his dad relocated with the military and during his own years of service, Burkett says, “You travel. You learn a lot and meet a lot of different people. The military is a big family.”

  In the end, though, he, like so many others, got sand on his feet. “I love being around water, and I love my little town.”

  RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW:

  Michael Mayo

  Attorney Michael Mayo has a passion for several things—the law, the town of Colonial Beach and the woman he met back in the ’70s when he was studying law at the University of North Carolina.

  Though there are a lot of Mayo families in Westmoreland County, his father, John Mayo, was actually born in Lewiston, Maine, one of eight children in a poor family, Michael recalls. “The boys in the family started going to college. My father ended up at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, then went to Georgetown Law School, graduating in 1932.”

  Aerial view of Colonial Beach, 1920s

  Because he met and married a woman from this area, John Mayo settled in Colonial Beach and opened a law practice, defending, among others, some of the local oystermen who got caught up in the Oyster Wars on the Potomac in the 1950s. He also worked as an oysterman himself for a couple of years and had a bit of a drinking problem. He quit drinking in April 1946. It was the month Michael was born, and that was the likely motivation for him getting his act together, Michael believes.

  “He had a golden tongue,” Michael recalls. “People would drive down just to listen to him in court.”

  Because his father had a successful career as a small-town lawyer, Michael remembers having a “blissful” childhood in Colonial Beach. “We rode our bikes everywhere. We knew all our neighbors. School was good. I liked learning.”

  There were some racial issues at the time, he recalls, echoing Burkett Lyburn’s memory. Others have recalled that there were tensions and protests at the time. Schools were integrated during the years he attended, which caused some strife, and African Americans were not expected to go south of Boundary Street unless they worked for a family in that part of town. In his own family, though, their housekeeper was considered a part of the family. When he was married in Ohio, she was right there with them for the festivities.

  He admits that the small Colonial Beach school had its limitations, limitations he wasn’t aware of until he went away to college and compared his educational background with others. Despite the less extensive classroom opportunities in diverse subjects, he remembers fondly the math teacher he especially liked, Mrs. Virginia Ford, and talks with pride about the basketball team that made it all the way to the state championship and lost in the finals. His graduating class was only twenty-four students.

  His father told him he could go to college anywhere he wanted, so he chose a big city and went to the University of Miami to expand his view of the world. He spent two years there in a dorm and two off campus in an apartment near the Orange Bowl stadium. With Miami’s large influx of Cuban exiles fleeing Castro at that time, he had his first significant exposure to another culture.

  It was during those years in Miami that he made his decision to follow in his father’s footsteps and study law. “Once I’d decided that, I knew I wanted to work for myself.”

  From Miami, he went to law school at the University of North Carolina, where he met Valerie Jean Powers, the woman who was to become his wife. An Ohio native, she was in graduate school studying library science.

  “She thought I was babysitting her for another man,” he recalls. It was months later before she realized they were actually dating.

  At the time both he and his housemate were studying law. Valerie would come to dinner, and the two of them would essentially dismiss her from their conversations. “We thought we knew everything,” he says wryly. “She decided to go to law school, so she’d know everything, too.”

  Current library and town center in Colonial Beach

  Though she, also, has had a successful law career in the county, she continues to have “a great love of libraries,” he says. Among her passions was working to see a central library system for the region become a reality. Colonial Beach’s Cooper Branch is now part of that Central Rappahannock Regional Library System.

  Michael’s father died when he was in his first semester of law school. By then Michael knew he wanted to open his law practice back home in Colonial Beach.

  He started out practicing a little bit of everything from criminal defense to estate law. “I was a standard country lawyer,” he says.

  He handled the legal work for some of the property developments around town and remembers when there was nothing but a little dirt road outside of his office
“from here to the river. A salesman flew in and landed on the street. He was charged with reckless flying.”

  Over the years he honed his practice and began concentrating on estate law.

  Now in his early seventies, Michael likes some of the building changes he’s seen in town through the years, whether it’s big houses or little cottages. “There’s money coming into town. We’re making ourselves known.”

  Michael Mayo fishing

  It’s happening, he says, because of the natural beauty of the area. “The water’s not deep, but it’s nice. It’s what we have to offer. I still water-ski. I started when I was twelve. I can still get up on one ski,” he says, then laughs. “It’s not pretty, but I can do it.”

  And yet, despite the changes and growth, he sees the small Colonial Beach community retaining one of the things that drew him back home. “There’s that strong sense of connection with people here.” Because of that, coming home is something he’s never once regretted.

  A WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD:

  The Sydnors

  Whether it was back in the mid-1900s or in 2016, one unifying thread for people who’ve found their way to Colonial Beach from Washington, DC, Northern Virginia or any other big city is that this little town on the Potomac River is “a whole different world.”

  No one is able to describe the differences better than the Sydnor siblings, who grew up in Washington, but spent their summers coming to Colonial Beach and staying in the house their father built in the late 1930s. They eventually retired to the town they loved.

  Edna Edmondson is the oldest of the three, Luke is the youngest, which puts Betty Wilson smack in the middle, “where I really suffer,” she jokes.