They remember the objections that the Baptist preacher at the time had to the gambling in town. “He preached against Reno, so we were Methodists.”
Both women are still active in that church. “There are a lot of things to be involved with in the community,” Zedda says.
“We have a spaghetti dinner at the church that benefits different things. Andy does the cooking,” Diane says. There are ten or so regulars who run the kitchen for those events like a well-oiled machine. “It’s good fellowship. They solve the problems of the world in that kitchen.”
Andy might head up the cooking crew on the night of the event, but Diane does her share. With a double oven at home, she baked twenty-four cakes for a dinner last year benefiting the Colonial Beach Volunteer Rescue Squad.
“The same customers come every time.” People run into neighbors and share the meal at a table with folks they might otherwise rarely see.
Diane worked for the government, specializing in computers at the Naval Space Surveillance System at Dahlgren. Zedda worked in banking. She had to wait for the much-coveted position until someone left the Bank of Westmoreland, which later became First Virginia and most recently BB&T. Now she manages several regional branches of BB&T.
Shores of Chesapeake Bay
They both talk about the small-town feeling they love, about the neighbors caring for each other and watching out for each other’s kids.
During Andy’s tenure with the police force, he got to know a couple of generations of kids, especially as a truancy officer. Often he’d pick up a kid for misbehaving and take him or her home to let the parents deal with any discipline.
And in the way of small towns everywhere, stories of misdeeds were quickly passed around. Diane recalls hearing from Bill Cooper, who owned the closest thing the town had to a department store back in the day. He called and taunted her by suggesting she ask her husband what he’d been up to that day.
It turned out Andy had arrested a woman who’d taken off all her clothes and ditched them somewhere. He had to escort the naked woman up the boardwalk to his police car, an act that was noted and spread through town at a rapid-fire pace.
It’s Diane’s words that sum up how she and her siblings feel about Colonial Beach, where they grew up with hard work that did nothing to take away from childhood innocence and joy.
“It’s not just a place to live,” she says. “It’s a place in your heart.”
A FISH TALE:
Alberta Parkinson
Like so many people who came to Colonial Beach in their youth and wound up staying a lifetime, it was all about a man for Alberta Parkinson.
Born on November 26, 1926 in Washington, DC, Alberta first came to town to stay with her aunt and uncle who rented a cottage at the small beach town on the Potomac. On some occasions her father rented a cottage for the family from a professor at George Washington University, so throughout her childhood Alberta was a summer regular.
She remembers the boat rides and fishing trips that left from the town fishing pier every thirty minutes or so all day long, the announcements made on the loudspeaker that echoed up and down the beach and boardwalk. “It made things seem so alive,” she recalls.
There was plenty to do along the boardwalk back then. “There were two or three bingo places, a shooting gallery, snowball stands. They even had moonlight boat rides.
“I went on some of the boat rides,” she says, and remembers sitting in the stern of the boat. What she doesn’t recall is the exact moment when Walter Parkinson caught her eye…or she caught his.
Fishing excursions at Colonial Beach
Walter, along with his father, took out fishing charters and scenic boat rides. They’d take tourists on rides over to Cobb Island and back or to other destinations on the river, pointing out the local sights. It was the Parkinson family business.
“His father was from the Eastern Shore,” Alberta recalls. As had so many others from that area who wound up in Colonial Beach, Walter’s father had met a local girl and settled in this small town that depended for much of its livelihood on the water.
At some point the tall, dark-haired girl who spent her time on a towel at the nearby beach captured Walter’s attention. He started coming up to Washington to court the young woman, who by then was working as a doctor’s assistant. He even took dance lessons at an Arthur Murray studio to impress her.
“We’d go to a dance hall on H Street, Northeast. We’d have cocktails and dinner, then go in the back for dancing,” she remembers, her eyes lighting up. “Sometimes we’d go downtown to eat, or go to the theater at the Capital Stage to see shows.”
Haines Point, Washington, DC
She remembers distinctly that on the night he proposed, they’d gone to Haines Point, with its romantic view of Washington and a place where young people congregated in their cars at night. Because she’d been summering in Colonial Beach most of her life, the thought of giving up the faster-paced lifestyle of Washington didn’t bother her a bit. She said yes.
But even after that proposal, it was a year or more before they got married in 1954, because Walter wanted to finish the house he was having built for her prior to the wedding. Local builder Jim Jett was constructing the ranch-style house on a prime piece of waterfront property facing Monroe Bay. From their living room window they were able to see the Stanford Marine Railway, where Clarence Stanford built two of Walter’s most famous wooden boats—the Big Dipper and its sister ship, the Midnight Sun. “Clarence built wonderful boats,” she says.
Alberta and Walter married
