Denson Family today
Rocky has no interest in getting involved in town politics as his father did and for years couldn’t imagine following in his parents’ footsteps in the grocery business, either. He worked in financial services and spent most of his career with the Farm Bureau.
It was during his tenure there that he met the woman who would later become his wife, Blaire, at a Farm Bureau event in Florida. They sat together by chance at a crowded convention session and were encouraged by their kids from previous marriages to spend more time together.
When the convention ended, she went back to North Carolina and he came back to Virginia, but they continued to meet in Emporia, partway between their hometowns, whenever they could and eventually married.
“During my last five years with the Farm Bureau, the only thing I could think about was reopening Denson’s Grocery,” he says, acknowledging the irony.
With Blaire’s encouragement and help from his sister, who made the family’s chicken salad for the deli and helped with a million other details, Rocky opened in a former ice-cream and pizza shop on Colonial Avenue.
With gourmet deli meats, wines and other specialties, the store was doing well. “A restaurant was not in the plans,” he concedes, then adds, “but I’ve always loved oysters.”
After years of dwindling supplies, nobody was taking oysters seriously anymore, “but I saw that they were taking off again in the same way there were Virginia wines and craft breweries. There were eight regions, and they each had different flavors.”
At first his enthusiasm was far from contagious. “I had this beautiful seafood in my cases, but I wasn’t selling any.”
One chilly November day, Rocky put up a tent outside and started cooking. A man stopped to ask what he was doing, and he told him he was making Brunswick stew. Within an hour and a half, he’d sold out of oysters.
“What are you going to do next?” Blaire asked him.
He was out there with his tent all winter long in the freezing cold, and by the end of the season, he was convinced that adding a restaurant made sense.
“Oysters built this,” he says of the R&B Oyster Bar addition to the side of his store. There are tables inside and out. And it was recently ranked the number one restaurant in the Northern Neck by TripAdvisor.
On the wall is a sign that says it all: “To eat an oyster is to kiss the sea on the lips.”
Chef Rocky Denson
He credits Blaire with the motivation to make it happen. “She’s the brains. I’m just the good-looking guy. She’s very business savvy.”
And, though she has a career in education that takes her to Richmond, Blaire has put down roots in Colonial Beach.
Rocky says it’s the people you meet every day, the stories you hear and everybody knowing each other that make Colonial Beach special.
Not long ago after what had been a crazy stressful week for the family, neighbors jumped in to help out and lend support. It’s exactly that sort of caring, he says, that explains why he can’t imagine living anywhere else.
FROM KING COTTON TO PENNY CANDY:
Marguerite Staples
Ask almost anyone in Colonial Beach who’s of a certain age, and one of their fondest childhood memories is of buying penny candy at Klotz’s GEM 5 & 10 store in what was once the thriving center of the town along Hawthorn Street. Waxy bottles filled with colored sugar water, little foil pie “tins” filled with another sugary concoction and dozens of other brightly colored candies were on display to draw a child’s eye. Some also remember the stern “don’t touch” rules.
For Marguerite “Margie” Virginia Klotz Staples, though, it was the family business, one she and her husband eventually took over from her parents, until bigger stores came along and their business died off.
For the Klotz family, the connection to this little summer town along the Potomac began in the early 1900s. Her father’s family had property at the beach and moved here permanently when he was only five. “He was raised here,” she says, though at one point his grandmother sent him and his three brothers off to boarding school in Baltimore.
Until then, though, he went to a one-room school called Hudson House where Mrs. Lena Franklin was the only teacher. She taught seven grades in that single room.
“They had to light a fire when they got there,” Margie says. “On occasion they were known to put snow in the stove pipe to cause problems. They were mischievous.”
Back then there were only seven or eight students in his class. Though her father only completed eighth grade, she says he was smart. “You could put figures into an adding machine and he could add them faster in his head than the machine could.”
GEM 5 & 10 Store
GEM 5 & 10 Store, 1959
Chalk from the GEM
He went to work at a young age, taking a boat across Monroe Bay to a farm located where Curley’s campground is now. The husband had died and the wife needed help. “She’d fix guinea hen sandwiches,” she says her father told her. “And they’d put the milk in the ground to keep it cold.”
In 1925, looking for better opportunities, her father moved to Washington and went to work for the Capital Transit Company. A few years later, in 1933, he met her mother.
The Original Gem 5 & 10
“He’d gone to a party with someone else. He looked across the room, saw her and told a friend, ‘That’s who I’m going to marry.’”
His idea of a proposal was to announce that they were getting married. He took her to a preacher’s house and gave him five dollars to perform the ceremony.
