A Small Town Love Story--Colonial Beach, Virginia

by Sherryl Woods

  The staff of Wilkerson’s over the years…

  Herbert and Walter were among the first to pasteurize crabmeat, and also grew cultured oysters indoors at one time during the 1970s. The high cost of labor for shucking put an end to the oysters for distribution, and the scarcity of crabs ended the packing of crabmeat for sale sometime later. However, they still serve steamed crabs in season and continue to plant and harvest oysters, which are sold to a local shucker and packer. Some of those oysters come back to be served in the restaurant. Jimmy and his son, Jay, catch the majority of the rockfish they serve in the restaurant in the Potomac River.

  Over the years the restaurant was updated and expanded to add a second dining room to meet capacity demands. Their signature seafood combinations and all-you-can-eat seafood buffet are legendary in the area. Each Thanksgiving, they offer a popular Thanksgiving–style buffet for those who choose to forego cooking and cleaning up. After Thanksgiving, they close for the remainder of the year and open again for business at the end of January.

  Jimmy’s son, Jay, worked in the restaurant growing up. After studying computers in college, he worked for a few years after graduation at nearby Dahlgren. “I always knew I would be coming back here someday,” Jay says. He has been working alongside his father in the family business for more than ten years now, continuing the family tradition.

  While much of their focus is on the restaurant and seafood, they also spend a lot of time on their farming operation, which took on a more prominent role after the wholesale distribution business’s decline. Soon after Jimmy returned home from college, he spearheaded the beginning of that operation starting with just seventy acres. That has grown significantly over the years and is now approaching four thousand acres, though that acreage has fluctuated recently.

  “There’s a whole lot of concrete being planted these days,” Jimmy says with obvious regret. Good farmland available to work is hard to find.

  One of the things both Jimmy and Jay love about their business is that while it’s a family operation, those who’ve worked there for years become part of the family, too. One current employee has been with the restaurant thirty-nine years, and another recently retired after first picking up trash around the restaurant when his mother brought him to work with her when he was just thirteen.

  “We also hire a lot of kids for summer jobs,” Jay says. “They start out washing dishes and busing tables just like I did, and move up from there. Once they get on here, most of them don’t want to leave and stay on for the duration of their high school years, some even longer.”

  They have all learned to work quickly to keep the tables turning over and the lines of customers moving. Jay’s son, Derek, is already learning to bus tables and help out where he can, the same way Jay started out.

  What Jimmy finds most gratifying is seeing people who come back to Colonial Beach over the years and have a lot of memories tied to this unique little beach town. He smiles when he adds, “It’s nice that this restaurant is one of them.”

  LAS VEGAS ON THE POTOMAC

  I am sometimes told by forward-thinking newcomers to Colonial Beach that I am living in the past, that the heyday I remember with such nostalgia will never be again. And while they may well be right, I can’t help thinking about how idyllic it all was to a youngster growing up in what seemed to be a full-scale amusement park with nonstop activity all around us during those years when casinos dotted the boardwalk and there was a wide variety of entertainment all within walking distance from home. People-watching, which perhaps prepared me well for writing books, provided endless fascination.

  A number of years back I was in the process of renovating the old Baptist parsonage in town to become a bookstore and gift shop. The windows were open to let in the mild spring breeze. Suddenly I could hear an announcement coming over a loudspeaker from the nearby waterfront, calling people to the upcoming boat rides. That sound, that beckoning announcement, took me right back to the boardwalk’s heyday and my youth.

  It’s said that scent stirs memories, but for me it was that crackly sound and its message hinting that an adventurous outing on the water was just a few minutes away. How many times over the years had I heard that same announcement as my friends and I played cards on a blanket by the lifeguard stand on the beach just yards away from the pier where those boats docked?

  There was so much fun back then. Sure, we were kids, and fun was our goal in life, but there were few places like Colonial Beach in that era. The pink plane that brought gamblers to town on champagne flights seemed incredibly glamorous. A ride on the little train that circled around under a moonlit sky was always a treat. Miniature golf was great for an evening’s entertainment. And the merry-go-round was so indelibly etched on my memory that it became the centerpiece of one of my Trinity Harbor books—Ask Anyone—in which I got to develop a fictional boardwalk my way.

  Outside the Ambassador Hotel

  With my parents, grandparents, cousins or friends, I played endless games of bingo on that real-life boardwalk. Though underage, I slipped into the casinos with my parents and put my share of nickels into the slot machines when no one was looking.

  I recall, as if it were yesterday, the night my mom’s slot machine started dispensing nickels at an astonishing rate, filling her purse and pockets at a clip that had us both laughing and rushing to try to collect the bounty before someone noticed that the machine was on some sort of wild and mechanically flawed tear.

  I also recall the hot summer night in 1963 that Reno, no longer a casino, but still a bone of contention with the Baptist minister in particular, burned. In the morning there were reports that the minister stood on the boardwalk as the flames rose in the sky and declared it was “the hand of God” that finally took it away. Maybe, but it was a very real human who was charged with arson.

  Clowning around by the pier

  So while there were plenty of detractors in town who disapproved of the casinos and gambling, my family liked to gamble. We always did it with a healthy respect for its dangers. My mother had a twenty dollar limit, whether in a casino or at one of the racetracks we frequented from time to time. My limit remains twenty dollars when I go to one of the Miami casinos, though it’s climbed a bit when I go to the races. I think I know more about the thoroughbreds than I used to. I don’t.

  Whenever my dad’s older sister, younger brother and his wife and my cousin came to visit at the beach, we played poker for pennies. I still have an old cigar humidor that remains filled with my dad’s winnings.

  So, while I do know that the casinos that created the lively atmosphere of my youth in Colonial Beach had their dark side, my experiences were entirely different, as were those of Sandra Conner Scroggs, whose family brought casinos and much of that boardwalk entertainment to town. Here’s how she remembers those days, when Colonial Beach gained a national reputation as Las Vegas on the Potomac, thanks to its appearance in an article in the Saturday Evening Post. I doubt we’re the only ones who remember it this way.

  GAMBLING ON A DREAM:

  Sandra Conner Scroggs

  Colonial Beach residents had a love-hate relationship with the town’s gambling era in the 1950s. The minister at the town’s largest church preached against it. Businesses thrived because of it. Some complained that gambling destroyed families. Others made their livelihoods in the casinos along the boardwalk. And at the center of it all were the Conner brothers.

  It was Delbert Conner who saw the possibilities when gambling was legalized in Maryland in 1949. He knew if he built casinos beyond the high-water mark in the Potomac River, they would sit in Maryland, making the slot machines legal under Maryland law. Some saw that as visionary. Others viewed it as trouble.

  Sandy Conner and date, prom 1967

  And even with the distance of time and fading memories of gambling’s brief heyday in Colonial Beach, there are still those who argue its merits then or debate the possibility of the return of that era in the future as casinos are once again being
legalized in Maryland in certain off-track betting locations. Riverboat, built where the Reno and Monte Carlo casinos once stood before being burned, has one of those off-track betting licenses.

  No one in town today, perhaps, is closer to the story of that time than Sandra Conner Scroggs, whose father, Paul, along with his brothers, Delbert and Dennis Conner, were at the heart of the town’s transformation into what the Saturday Evening Post described in one issue as “Las Vegas on the Potomac.”

  The year-round population in town grew during that era to 2,400 or so. On weekends in summer, it swelled to quadruple that number—or even more by one estimate that put the number of gamblers, families and visitors on any given weekend at twenty thousand—cramming the town’s eleven small hotels, five motels, cottages, rooming houses and apartments with tourists who filled the restaurants, patronized businesses and jammed the boardwalk and the beaches to capacity.

  Easter egg hunt at the Colonial Beach Hotel

  “Uncle Delbert didn’t have children, but he loved little kids. He wanted things for them to do,” Sandra recalls. “He dressed up as Santa at Christmas and gave presents to the kids. He held an Easter egg hunt with lots of prize eggs to be found. The Conner kids were not allowed to participate. They did get to color hundreds of eggs for the event, but Uncle Delbert always colored the golden egg and hid that one himself.”

  He created an amusement park with rides along the boardwalk and built the town pool. Along with Frances and James Karn, he worked with the Chamber of Commerce and organized the Potomac River Festival. They did baskets of food with turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas for any families in need.

  “I thought my dad and my uncles were heroes,” Sandra says. And yet she adds, “There were people in town who wouldn’t let their kids play with me because of the gambling.” That resistance faded sometimes in summer, when she had free tickets for the rides and the pool to share with her friends.

  For all the negative talk about the type of people drawn to town in that era, she remembers it very differently. “I grew up in the casinos [her family owned three of the six at the time]. I never felt in jeopardy. I went on the boardwalk and never felt threatened. Everyone looked out for you. They felt like family. The summer kids were wonderful. Getting to know them was like traveling the East Coast without leaving town.”

  She hates that some people dubbed it the Redneck Riviera or a Poor Man’s Las Vegas, because that’s not what she remembers at all.

  She recalls that customers flew in from Washington on a 1933 Boeing 247 called the Champagne Cruiser. The highly recognizable pink plane landed on a small airstrip just outside of town with its well-heeled passengers. Singer Kate Smith and radio and TV broadcaster Arthur Godfrey were frequent visitors during that era. The people who flocked to town to hear Guy Lombardo, Jimmy Dean and others perform at Little Reno weren’t poor. “They dressed up like they were going to a ball,” she says.

  One of her favorite memories is of the time Patsy Cline performed. Sandra was only six or seven and Patsy had a new baby. There was an apartment upstairs at Little Reno and Sandra was assigned to sit with the sleeping baby and run downstairs to get the singer if her baby woke.

  A few years later, her mother and father, Retta and Paul Conner, opened a tiny, walk-up pizza place virtually on their front lawn on Washington Avenue, just across from the Colonial Beach Hotel. “They did it so they’d know where I was in the summer,” Sandra says. “It stayed open later than most places in town so people could eat something before driving home.”

  For Sandra, the casinos and all of the other Colonial Beach hotels and businesses operated by the Conner brothers and others in their large extended family might have been unusual, but they were still family-run businesses. They took care of their employees.

  One man whose family—his mom, grandma and in later years he himself—worked for them was struggling financially. Years later he described to Sandra the night “this big white man [her father, Paul] showed up at their door with money for the rent. He saved my family.”

  Sandra says she was so proud when she heard the story. “Dad had been dead for a long time. What a legacy of kindness he left his family!”

  The Colonial Beach connection for the Conners all started with their great-aunt who encouraged the young Delbert Conner and his eight siblings in a poor West Virginia family to come to Colonial Beach to work for her at the DeAtley and Ambassador hotels. The Ambassador Hotel became Delbert’s first purchase in town. He paid fifteen thousand dollars for it, according to a report in the Washington Post, but was left with so little cash on hand that he couldn’t pay for the gas hookups for the ovens.

  He sold that hotel to his brother, Howard, in 1949 and turned his attention to getting the casinos into town, a business that the Washington Post reported made him “a millionaire several times over.”

  It was 1954 by the time Paul and Retta Conner (she was pregnant with another daughter, Paula, at the time) and their daughter, Sandra, arrived in Colonial Beach, qualifying Sandra to many as a “come-here.” She likes to argue with those who label her that by telling them, “I got here as soon as I could.”

  She was only five when Hurricane Hazel destroyed several of the casinos, dumping slot machines and liquor into the river and causing a frenzy among people hoping to seize some of the bounty from the water.

  By 1958, less than a decade after the first casino opened in Colonial Beach, the movement to force them out had reached a fever pitch and become a political hot potato. Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley was won over by the opponents of the slot machines. He, in turn, won over politicians in Maryland, who banned any casino whose access wasn’t from Maryland. The Colonial Beach casinos, of course, were legally in Maryland waters, but were accessed from the Virginia shore. Even today, those walking onto the Riverboat, which is the newest incarnation of what was once Reno, find a clearly marked dividing line between the two states just beyond the front door. It’s possible to buy lottery tickets for the respective states on either side of that line.

  After the slot machines were banned, they were loaded onto boats and taken upstream to a new location owned by the Conner brothers—Aqualand—at the Maryland base of the Nice bridge across the Potomac. The entire Jackpot casino was transferred to a barge and floated to its new location, as well.

  Still operating with a belief that children should be welcome as well, Delbert created a Storybook Village and a zoo at the new location.

  Though the casinos closed, family members—Sandra’s great-aunt Mary Curry and her husband, Leo—ran Reno, the Black Cat and the Colonial Beach Hotel for years, maintaining a Conner presence in town.

  In general, though, the prosperity of the gambling era dwindled away. Hotels and motels closed. Business along the boardwalk died. Eventually the increasingly run-down structures were torn down. What had once been the thriving Little Reno casino became first Reno, and more recently Riverboat, which ironically depends at least in part on an off-track betting license from Maryland for its success.

  When Maryland recently revived casinos in some off-track betting locations, there was talk that Riverboat might be among the chosen spots. When it was rebuilt after being damaged by Hurricane Isabel, a second floor was added for just that purpose, but thus far it has only been used for private events. Once again, the issue was hotly debated around town, reviving talk of the “element” it might bring to the beach.

  For Sandra, whose memories of the time are far more positive, it was motivation to change the record and remind people of all that was good in that long-gone era.

  She says that local historian Joyce Coates showed her a photo of a slot machine being operated in a Colonial Beach store well before the first casino came to town. And there were newspaper reports about college kids who came to Colonial Beach to party and caused their own sort of havoc before the first gamblers ever arrived. Ellie Caruthers, who worked for a physician in town at the time in addition to running Doc’s Motor Court, recalls being called
to those rented cottages in that era to deal with kids who’d had too much to drink, her recollections backing up Sandra’s reminders about the past.

  Sandra founded a Facebook group, Memories of Colonial Beach, which has an active online presence with both locals and with those who grew up in town but have since moved away. The group also gathers monthly at Hunan Diner, a Chinese restaurant attached to an actual old dining car, to share personal memories, town history and photographs.

  Though she married a marine and traveled extensively, after her divorce Sandra gravitated back to the town where she grew up and the house where she was raised. She still lives and works in Northern Virginia, but spends weekends at the beach and plans to retire there. “You know everybody in town and everybody’s friendly,” she says.

  That doesn’t mean there are things she wouldn’t change. She’d like to see the school system take better advantage of the nearby experts in various fields at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren.

  “I read somewhere that Lord Nelson had his first ship when he was fourteen,” she says to explain why more attention needs to be paid to giving broad-ranging experiences to kids at the high school level.

  She’d like to see the weekenders who own property take a more active role in the town. More importantly, she’d like their voices to be heard by town officials. Too often, though, they’re ignored because they can’t vote in town elections. They do, however, pay town taxes, Sandra argues, and should have some say in town decisions that affect them.

  When the town’s reputation is tarnished, when there’s negativity about the past, she’s offended by it. “I want to try to heal this kind of stuff,” she says, then adds with passion, “I want people to be proud that we have such a unique history in this town.”