Though the campground has a long history in Colonial Beach, if you mention the Curleys, old-timers will always think about oysters. And, according to his children, that’s just the way Landon Curley would want it.
Linda Gouldman, Candy Coates and Rusty Curley (left to right)
SAND IN THEIR SHOES:
The Mears Family
They lovingly refer to Colonial Beach as Mayberry on the Potomac and declare that it’s a town that finds its way into your heart and stays there.
Diane Anderson and Zedda Viets are two of five siblings who were raised in Colonial Beach and never left. Well, almost never. Diane and her husband, Andy Anderson, moved to Florida during one brief period when he’d lost his job as police chief thanks to a change in the town’s political leadership team. He became a detective in Dania Beach, Florida, Diane recalls. “I hated every day of it.”
At the first opportunity, the Andersons, along with a couple of other officers and their families, packed up U-Hauls and headed in a caravan right back to Colonial Beach. In all, Andy was a police chief in town for fourteen years, and Diane finally got over being embarrassed by having people stop them on the street to reminisce about the times they’d been arrested or jailed by Andy.
For Zedda, who worked in banking for her entire career in the town where she’d grown up, there are much fonder memories of the opportunities she had to help people with their financial needs.
But all of that came later. They were born to a hardworking waterman, Pud Mears, and his even harder-working wife, Mildred “Millie” Mears. There were two other sisters and a brother. Zedda was the baby, but that didn’t save her from doing her fair share of work.
The Lord Baltimore
The Miss Potomac
“Our grandfather ran a schooner up and down the [Chesapeake] bay,” Diane recalls. “Our father was born in Baltimore. He had five boats, including the Miss Potomac, which ran sightseeing rides and charter fishing excursions from fisherman’s pier by the town’s boardwalk.” He had help who operated his other boats for a share of the proceeds.
He did very well, they report proudly, especially for a man with a very limited education. “He only went to second grade because he was needed to help out at home. He had to go out and sell eggs.”
That work ethic, instilled when he was so young, was passed along to his children.
“All of us kids worked on the boats,” Zedda recalls.
After every fishing trip, “the older siblings would stay aboard and mop the decks or set up chairs,” Diane remembers. “The first mate would earn twenty dollars a week, the second mate was paid ten dollars or fifteen dollars. Zedda, as the baby, got two dollars. We saved everything we got in mayonnaise jars. For an allowance we’d get twenty-five cents. We’d go to Caruthers and Coakley [drugstore] where we could get a soda in a glass for five cents. If we got it in a paper cup it was six cents.”
They both recall how safe the town was back then. “I don’t think we even had a lock on the house,” she says.
“I’d walk around the Point carrying my doll,” Zedda remembers. “At seven, eight or nine, we’d go trick-or-treating and feel perfectly safe.”
One thing Pud insisted on was having his boats spotless. That meant scrubbing them down between trips out on the river, whether for fishing or sightseeing on a sixty-minute ride toward George Washington’s birthplace at Wakefield or around the Point into Monroe Bay.
“We’d take our schoolbooks on the boat,” Diane recalls. Their mom would bring lunch down to the pier between trips.
The fishing excursions would last until the weather turned cold, and then their dad would go to work for the Norman Oil Company and the kids would ride along hauling hoses to fill the fuel tanks at homes around town. “He always took butterscotch candies for any kids we ran into and dog biscuits for the dogs,” Zedda says.
Their chores didn’t end with helping their dad, either.
“Mama loved flowers,” Zedda remembers. They’d get paid two dollars for pulling weeds all along the fence. “Diane was more careful than I was. I’d get stuck out in the field because I’d cut down every flower Mama had.”
They both recall how the family would make ends meet by sharing their catch of perch with a neighbor, Junior Parker, who’d in turn share the occasional bushel of crabs.
“Mama was a good cook,” Zedda says. And their house was always as spotless as the boats. “The floors were waxed with bowling alley wax.”
While they grew up during the era of casinos and gambling, “We were raised very strictly,” Diane says. “It wasn’t an environment we were allowed to be in.” The same was true if the day’s charter fishing excursion was likely to be a rowdy group of men. The girls were all assigned to work on another boat that day.
But while their parents tried to shelter them from any rough-and-tumble activities, it didn’t mean they objected to the presence of the casinos during those years. Their mother, in fact, operated Millie’s Snowballs on the boardwalk within yards of the casinos. And every year their mother and father would go to Reno to see the Guy Lombardo band with Walter and Alberta Parkinson.
“Dad would have a highball,” Diane
