So, whether it was the attention of those teachers back then, the guidance of the Karns, her marriage into the Pearson family or simply her own personality, Diana has spent most of her lifetime working to make Colonial Beach a better place. She was vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, helped organize the Potomac River Festival and beat on doors to raise funds for just about every cause that’s important to the town.
“All we can do now is hope that the youth will get involved and start where we left off.”
BUILDING BOATS…AND A FUTURE:
Mary Virginia Stanford
In 1940 Mary Virginia Tucker was a recent high school graduate working in a bank in Apalachicola, Florida, when a dashing Clarence Stanford and his brother came to town to help their father find some way to settle the debt he owed.
As Mary Virginia recalls, she and Clarence met at a dance hall where young people gathered for an evening of fun for a mere five cents. It was not, she says very firmly, love at first sight. He asked her to go to the movies, though, and she agreed. They saw Sergeant York. Her best friend dated his brother, and while those two didn’t last as a couple, Clarence was persistent.
After joining the navy, he taught her to drive and left his car with her, then came back to town whenever he was on leave.
It was Clarence’s father, William “Captain Billy” Stanford, who brought her north on the train for her first visit to Colonial Beach, Virginia, in 1941, two years before she and Clarence married. Even though Apalachicola was a small waterfront community, comparable in size to Colonial Beach, both with populations well under five thousand and plenty of opportunities for boating and fishing on the waterways, there was one noticeable difference. After coming from the wide expanses of sandy beaches along Florida’s Gulf Coast, she looked around at the narrow shoreline in Colonial Beach and asked, “Where’s the beach?”
Billy and Maria Rebecha Stanford
Clarence and Mary Virginia Stanford
After Clarence left the navy with an honorable discharge as a Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class in 1945, there were jobs to be had at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, so the young couple settled in Colonial Beach. The family bought a small marina on Monroe Bay in 1945 from Frank Oliff, but Clarence’s travels weren’t yet over.
He spent nearly a year in India working for the Office of Strategic Services—a predecessor of the modern CIA—leaving Mary Virginia behind. After his letters describing the conditions he found, he added in one note that the Red Cross center was “the only place over here that even resembles home.” That plaintive comment was all it took to give Mary Virginia a mission. She began raising money to send to the Red Cross, just one of the many volunteer projects she would tackle over the years.
By marrying into the Stanford family, Mary Virginia found herself amid a staunch family of men tied to the sea. Her father-in-law, born in 1877 in nearby Lancaster County, went to sea at the age of eleven as a cook’s helper on an oyster boat.
In 1898 he served in the navy during the Spanish-American War, meeting his wife in New York during that one-year stint. His wife, Maria Rebecha Lucht, immigrated from Germany at the age of sixteen and was working as a handmaiden for an actress at the time, according to Mary Virginia’s great-niece Grace Roble Dirling, whose grandmother was Clarence’s sister. They were two of Captain Billy and Maria’s twelve children.
Captain Billy Stanford
Captain Billy worked on a variety of vessels before captaining a series of schooners on the Chesapeake Bay, taking cargo up the bay to Baltimore and back. Sometimes that cargo was fish, destined to become fertilizer, a smelly business, Mary Virginia says, her nose wrinkling even now.
There are oft-told stories of Captain Billy operating the three-masted schooners on his own, if need be, when his crew failed to show up on time. In 1940, there are even pictures from the Washington Post showing a “crew” of Girl Scouts who worked the boat for ten days.
Captain Billy plied his trade on the waters of the Potomac River, Chesapeake Bay and other waterways for some seventy years. In 1959, he was featured in an article in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, written by Paul Muse. The article showcased his new career as an artist, painting pictures of the boats he loved. He was eighty-one. In the article he is quoted as saying, “I’m going to have to stop giving them away. The cost is starting to add up. It costs fifty-cents for a tube of paint.”
Those weren’t the only items he gave away. In 1940 he made donations of several historical items—a stern carving and carved trail boards from the pungy schooner Amanda F. Lewis—to the Watercraft Collection of the Smithsonian Museum.
Captain Billy died in 1970 at the age of ninety-three.
In the meantime, Clarence and Mary Virginia were making a life for themselves in a small house next to Stanford Marine Railway, where he spent summers repairing boats that docked at the marina or were brought in by local boaters. Winters were dedicated to his passion—building boats. Not only did the latter feed his soul, recalls Mary Virginia, but it was a way to keep his crew working year-round. Ironically, that sideline is what truly built Clarence’s reputation in the boating world. His boats are prized by their owners.
Chesapeake Bay
Stanford built his first boats at the age of fourteen, charging a whopping twenty dollars for a rowboat or only five dollars if the materials were supplied. He’d build the skiffs in his spare time,
