During this time, her grandmother remained in Colonial Beach running various places in town—the Willow Lunch Restaurant on the boardwalk, the Colonial Beach Hotel dining room, the pub beside the Wolcott Hotel. She helped at the desk at the New Atlanta Hotel, too, and was even one of the town’s first telephone operators.
Her step-grandfather ran a poolroom on Irving Avenue. “Dad worked there for a time as a gofer.”
It was 1945 by the time her father and mother moved back to town. “He ran the King Cotton Hotel,” she says. It was located on Washington Avenue, where a small ice-cream vendor—Nancy’s—is now located. It was across the street from the Mayfair movie theater.
Serving ice-cream at the Willow Lunch
Playland Novelty Shop
Marguerite on horseback in one of the parades
He opened the Playland novelty shop on the boardwalk and bought a big building on Hawthorn Street. They lived in it above a tencent store.
Eventually her father left the King Cotton Hotel and in 1951 with a partner took over the ten-cent store.
Hawthorn Street was the heart of downtown back then. Pearson’s Seafood was across the street from their store, as was the post office. That building, once a central meeting place for town residents, now serves as home for the VFW. She remembers Edna Johnson’s dress shop, Wright’s Family Grocery, Greenlaw’s Hardware, Mary’s beauty salon and Costenbader’s barbershop. The A&P was the town’s first major grocery store when it opened just a block from the town pier. The Bank of Westmoreland was across the street. “I worked there when I graduated from high school,” she recalls.
“It was a fun time back then,” she remembers. “We did all sorts of things. I remember we tried to ride our bicycles to Westmoreland State Park.” The park’s beach was a favorite of locals back then, but miles away. “We got to Oak Grove [only six miles away] and gave up.”
Not everything was wonderful. Though the gambling era in the ’50s was good for businesses in town, her father hated it. He recalled parents coming into his Playland novelty shop on the boardwalk trying to hock things for money for gambling. Because children weren’t allowed in the casinos, they were often left outside to wander the boardwalk, crying. “He didn’t know if they’d been fed,” she remembers.
Willow Lunch Restaurant on the boardwalk
Margie married William Frank and had one son before they divorced. “We rode horses in a lot of the parades in town,” she says, recalling the annual Potomac River Festival parades that occurred each June. On Friday nights, there was a special and very loud parade of fire trucks and rescue vehicles from all over the region. On Saturdays, there was the main festival parade with floats, marching bands and majorettes and those riders on horseback. On Sundays, the weekend was capped off by a boat parade. Though smaller now, those parades continue today.
Margie is now married to Mitchell Staples. They’ve been together for forty-nine years. When her father could no longer run the store, she left the bank, and she and Mitchell took over. It was the arrival of a national chain of five-and-dime stores that finally drove them out of business. “They could sell retail for what we had to pay wholesale,” she explains.
“Dad lived to be one hundred. We built a home for him next to mine. Every day I’d go over to get him up and about. He’d always ask, ‘Where are we going?’” She remembers that every day he wanted to drive around the Point to see what was happening. “It upset Dad when we had to go out of business, but we couldn’t make a living selling nothing but newspapers.” By then their business had dwindled down to not much more than that.
They tried to reinvent themselves as the Seafair Shop, offering things for summer such as sunglasses, bathing suits and the like, but it didn’t work.
Once the store closed for good, Margie worked at the school as a paraprofessional in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. She also drove a school bus, but eventually gave that up. “I loved that bus,” she says nostalgically.
She started playing piano for the church choir at the Colonial Beach Baptist Church on a “temporary” basis, and has been doing it for sixteen years.
She and Mitchell had two children. Their daughter, Kathy, won a contest once that was a promotion for the movie of Tom Clancy’s bestseller The Hunt for Red October. The prize was a two-man submarine. “She was in college and asked for a cash prize instead.” It was enough to take her off of the financial aid she had for school.
For all of the experiences she’s had and the full life she leads, Margie still holds tight to the memories of Klotz’s GEM 5 & 10, and the way old-timers in town mention it and her family with such respect.
“We sold everything,” she says. “Candy, toys, curtains and window shades. We had all the little stuff. Embroidery thread, cases of buttons.”
One of her favorite memories is of a man who came in from a boat looking for a pot to cook soup. “He spotted a chamber pot and took that. I thought that was so funny.”
Every now and then she still runs into people who recognize her from the old store and introduce themselves. “They tell me they still miss that store.”
She’s sure that’s something her parents would love to hear.
BUSINESS REALITY: POTOMAC SUNRISE
As Margie Staples learned and as Luke Sydnor mentioned, owning a small business in Colonial Beach can be a struggle. In fact, even during the gambling heyday, when summer crowds were especially large, most people who operated businesses along the busy boardwalk had year-round jobs. These days the
