That parade is followed by the selection of Miss Colonial Beach. Years ago, one of my best friends, Patti O’Neill, was in that pageant and rode on a float in the parade the following day. I still have some very grainy home movies from that year.
On Saturday, the parade once had floats, school bands, majorettes, clowns and Shriners in their little cars, along with local politicians. Senator Mark Warner has been a regular over the years. The floats are still around, as are the politicians, but school bands aren’t available, and there were fewer majorette groups until a concerted effort was made to bring them back.
When I had my bookstore with Mary Warring’s Potomac Accents store, we won an award for our “float” one year, primarily, I think, because we were able to use—very, very carefully—one of her husband’s prized classic trucks. Trust me when I tell you, the floats done by various businesses and organizations in town are not Tournament of Roses Parade caliber, but they are fun.
On Sunday, as I’ve previously mentioned, there’s a boat parade. And during all of this there are vendors selling arts and crafts and all sorts of food, very little of it healthy, but all delicious.
Events like this unify a community and give it its character. They become the traditions we hold dear.
Alice Rock as the Grand Marshal, 1980s
Fourth of July fireworks, 2015
Motorcycles lining the parade route, October, 2014
THE OYSTER WARS
When walking the quiet streets of Colonial Beach or sitting on the porch watching the watermen’s workboats drift by as the sun rises, it’s hard to imagine that at one time such serenity was shattered by gunfire on a regular basis. What was even harder for me was the realization that, though I was a regular at Colonial Beach in that era, I remembered absolutely nothing about it.
And then, Gladys “Sugie” Green, wife of waterman Pete Green, who lived it and remembers it all vividly, reminded me that oystering went on primarily during the winter months. And, much to my regret back then, I was only a summer kid.
So, though I’d heard the names of many of the key players in this local drama—Landon Curley, William Bozo Atwell (referred to by some as “King of the Oyster Pirates”), Berkeley Muse, Harvey King—the details of what happened during those troubling days were all new to me. It was yet another reminder of why it’s so important to hear these stories while those who lived through the events are still around to share their accounts.
Attorney Michael Mayo, whose father, John, represented several local oystermen when they had legal problems with Maryland patrol boats, offered a unique perspective when recounting his own memories of the era.
Michael and Berkeley Muse’s son were around the same age and were friends back then. He remembers being with his friend in a local store following Muse’s death. Harvey King, the waterman who’d convinced Berkeley to go oystering on his boat pretty much “on a lark” and who had been shot in the leg in the same barrage of bullets, came into the store, saw them and offered his condolences. His remorse was scant comfort to a young boy who’d lost his dad, Mayo recalls.
Michael also remembers how devastated his own father was by the loss of life. John Mayo held Berkeley in high regard and found his senseless death incredibly tragic.
Years later, Mayo, who is legal counsel to the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, saw a presentation by Berkeley’s granddaughter. She had studied oystering for a science project, and made her presentation about the Oyster Wars “dressed like a waterman.” For Mayo it was an especially touching moment, a new generation remembering such a tragic, personal moment from her family’s past.
Today there are very few oystermen left who were on the waters that fateful night in 1959, though there are any number of people around town who can tell bits and pieces of the story. Pete Green, who was with Berkeley in the hours just before they went out onto the water and whose own boat was being chased by the same patrolmen, comes closest to being an eyewitness, though he made it safely back to shore that night hours before his friend was killed.
It was a night that changed lives, altered laws and perhaps even made a difference in the way people came to regard the tasty delicacies from the river that they’d come to take for granted.
A NIGHT THAT ENDED IN A HAIL OF BULLETS:
Pete and Sugie Green
Theirs was a love story that almost never happened. Pete Green and Gladys Merle Warder, known by everyone as Sugie, were in their teens when they met, both of them admittedly very shy.
“I like to say it began when my sister picked him up to give him a ride uptown,” Sugie recalls of the young man who frequently walked past the front porch of her family’s summer home on Lafayette Street. “I was not quite sixteen.”
She was the daughter of a Washington, DC, police lieutenant in the Ninth Precinct who had once worked as a mounted police officer. Pete was already working several months of the year as an oysterman, following in his father’s footsteps. His best buddy and later his partner on the water, George Townsend, began dating Sugie’s sister.
“We went together for five years,” Sugie recalls. But when Pete received his draft notice, she refused to marry him before he left.
At least some of her
