Ellie and Doc outside the motor court
What amounted to a long-distance courtship wasn’t easy back then. Doc would only rarely ask to use his father’s phone to call. “We wrote letters. As you can imagine, I wrote epistles,” she says, a laughing reference to her habit of spinning a story infused with details. “Doc would write back, ‘I might be able to get up there Tuesday night.’”
The office of Doc’s Motor Court
When Doc first proposed, Ellie was having none of it. She wasn’t about to marry someone who only worked four months out of the year. “I had a real job. I told him he needed to find one, too.”
Through an uncle who worked at the naval base and a navy veteran himself, Doc was about to line up a job there as a plumber. “He was a real good plumber,” Ellie recalls. “And he dressed nice.”
A chance encounter on the base moved him in an entirely different direction, toward those newfangled things called computers. The big ones new to the base. Doc had no idea what a computer was.
“What’s that?” he reportedly asked the friend, John Blue.
Blue described it as a fancy typewriter. Doc apparently nodded and told him, “Oh, I like typewriters and adding machines.” To Doc, Ellie says, “It was all fun and games. He loved gadgets.”
In fact, his love of gadgets could be a bone of contention between them from time to time. “He’d drive me insane,” Ellie says with the affectionate tolerance of a beleaguered wife who knew her husband’s faults all too well. For ten years, they lived in a couple of rooms behind the office at the motor court. They then moved into the Sears, Roebuck house that Doc’s mother and father had built in 1937.
During those years, Doc was always looking to buy this gadget or that, to try building some boat he’d found the plans for. Ellie was the voice of reason, warning when they couldn’t afford something or had nowhere to put it, but more often than not, she got caught up in Doc’s latest enthusiasm.
“Doc was a boat-building nut,” she says affectionately. “The first ones sank.”
She recalls vividly his discovery of the recipe for making a “flotation kit,” and it came with some boat kit that Doc wanted to assemble. They filled boxes and coffee cans with the mixture, according to the directions. “They started swelling up till they looked like loaves of bread.” Some of those ended up with a local waterman, Henry Parker, to float his crab pots. Some of it was used to build a kayak that couldn’t be sunk. Their two adopted children—Sarah and Mark—along with their friends, did their best to try, but they couldn’t sink that kayak.
Doc even got the plans for a Mediterranean caïque from Popular Mechanics magazine, just because the look of it fascinated him. He built a twenty-three-foot cabin cruiser from a kit. It took him years to build it and required fiberglass to make it seaworthy. Once it was done, he took it up to Washington and sold it. The smell of that fiberglass caulking made them both “drunk as a skunk,” Ellie recalls with a chuckle.
While Doc learned everything he could about computers at his job on the base and, then, at home, Ellie ran the motor court. Initially she thought she’d run it for those four months of the year as Doc had, then work in the nursing profession in nearby Fredericksburg the rest of the year. The administrators at the hospital there weren’t enthused about having a nurse who was taking such a long vacation every year. “They laughed me right out the door.”
One of Doc’s handmade boats
When a new doctor arrived at the beach, though, he was happy to have Ellie working for him. And even after he retired, she kept his records in case the patients ever needed them. When they’d gone unclaimed for years, she asked what she ought to do with them. Told they needed to be destroyed, she had a fire and burned them to protect the patients’ privacy. And, as a legacy from her father-in-law, she still has some of the big old jars of medicine from which he’d dispense prescriptions to his patients.
One of Doc’s handmade boats
Doc on left and Ellie on right
While nursing was the profession she’d trained for, Ellie was a natural at running the motor court. Even on the day of the interview, with Doc’s closed now for a couple of years, she was getting calls from old customers. Some were just checking on her. One, Chet, checks in regularly. He was eight years old the first time he came with his parents. “He’s in his seventies now,” Ellie says.
Others want to reminisce about a place that had been so important to them or their family. One who called that day told her he was over by the motor court and asked if she had a little time. “I’d like to talk about my dad.”
Of course, Ellie remembered him and hurried right over. “He was from West Virginia,” she recalled. “And he raised minks. I thought that was so interesting.” Her eyes sparkled at the memory.
On one of his visits the father had noticed that the small perch—a sweet, if bone-filled, fish caught in the Potomac—were being tossed aside at the end of the day. “After that, he sent over a truck and took those fish home to feed his minks.”
Another vivid memory of another guest comes to mind. The man checked in, but when checkout time came, he hadn’t left and wasn’t
