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 they’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
