She recalls that he carried her across the threshold into their new home, which was only partially furnished, then told her, “Don’t make any plans for summer. We’ll be working on the boats.”
That’s how Alberta, who doesn’t even much like fish, wound up serving as not just wife, but first mate for Walter throughout their lifetime together. “I didn’t know anything about boats or fishing,” she says. Though her tone is wry, there’s also an unmistakable love in her voice for this man who’s never far from her thoughts. Even after his death, when others were serving as captain of the Big Dipper, she continued to carry bait across the street in the early morning haze and to continue her role as first mate on those Big Dipper fishing charters until she finally sold the boat just a few years ago.
If the charter fishing and boat rides weren’t enough to keep the young couple busy, Walter also bought a bathhouse and snowball stand on the boardwalk and turned them over to Alberta to run. “He had the bathhouse building rebuilt, put in dressing rooms. People would put their clothes in bags and we’d keep them on a shelf while they were on the beach.” She had a frozen custard machine, too. “I wouldn’t get home until eleven or twelve at night.”
She doesn’t recall there being any trouble on the boardwalk back then. “Captain Joe Miller was the only policeman. He walked everywhere. He’d stop somebody and say, ‘You’re drunk. Go home.’ And they would. He didn’t stay up too late,” she remembers.
Because she and Walter had always been connected by a love of music and dancing, they didn’t miss the big bands that performed at Reno, especially Guy Lombardo. “I walked up. He was on the bandstand. He was very nice, very polite. I got his autograph. Walter wouldn’t have had the nerve to do that.”
Though they bought a condo in the busier and faster-paced Ocean City, Maryland, and enjoyed visiting there, Colonial Beach was home.
“There are very few things I’d change,” Alberta says. “We had a good life here.”
They raised one son, who died of cancer as a young adult. There’s a plaque on the wall in the children’s section of the local library in memory of Walter Albert “Bert” Parkinson. “He would work on the boat if Walter needed him, but he wasn’t crazy about it,” she recalls, then picks up a photo cube of snapshots of the young man she lost too soon.
Reno Casino
Cooper Branch of Central Rappahannock Regional Library
“I kept thinking God was going to heal my son, but He had other plans,” she says, her voice still filled with sorrow.
Having a child gave Alberta yet another purpose. “He had plenty of books to read because I saw to it,” she declares. And because of that determination, she also saw to it that the town worked toward getting its own library.
“The bookmobile came first, then the library. An elderly woman had a lot of books and she donated them.” Because Alberta was also an active volunteer at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the church found two rooms that could be used to house the growing collection of donated books. It became the library’s first location. Then the town was able to give them space in what had once been Greenlaw’s Hardware Store on Hawthorn Street.
But Alberta and her friend Bobbi Cooper, whose family had owned Cooper’s store on a large piece of property on Washington Avenue, wanted even more. Working with the town and that piece of donated property, they built what is now the Cooper Branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library System, which is connected to other libraries in nearby Fredericksburg and throughout the Northern Neck Region.
Alberta has a few other passions in her life. Clark Gable is one and there are photos of him on the walls of her home. She also loves old carousel horses and one sits now in a prime location where she can enjoy it every day, right along with the view of the bay. That view and the mementos of her years with Walter surround her with memories of the two men in her life.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish they were still here,” she says softly, glancing up at a picture of Walter that hangs above the sofa. “Not a day.”
Alberta Parkinson
A COME-HERE WHO STAYED:
Diana Pearson
Practically from the day she was born, Diana Henderson was stirring up trouble. Her mother named her Diane, but when her birth certificate arrived it listed her name as Diana. So from that moment on, the people in her life were split into two camps—those who followed her mother’s lead and continued to call her Diane and those who used her legal name, Diana. To this day, folks around Colonial Beach are confused about which is correct.
What no one questions, though, is her energy and her loyalty to the community she and her family adopted as home when she was only twelve.
“We’d been coming here from Alexandria since my sister and I could walk.” Then her parents made the decision to move to town and her father opened a plumbing business. For a time they also had a motel and marina slips to rent on Monroe Bay Avenue where the Nightingale Motel sits now. Her mother cooked meals for the guests—“she cooked everything from scratch.”
Diana worked at the school, even before she graduated, to earn extra money. Teacher Sarah Lee found typing jobs for her, and she helped out in the school cafeteria. It was the principal back then who hired her as his secretary, and Sarah Lee, who encouraged her to get her high school diploma at Colonial Beach. Her spirit and determination to finish
