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
