“He kept promising me he’d stop,” she says.
After Pete’s tour of duty in the service ended, they started going together again and eventually eloped to LaPlata, just across the river in Maryland, an irony since Maryland was where Pete had already had legal troubles and had been charged with harvesting oysters illegally. The dredging of oysters had been outlawed in the river, but Maryland was far stricter about enforcing the law than neighboring Virginia. Virginia watermen, like Pete, often took their boats out at night, hoping to dredge without being detected.
Pete Green and George Townsend
Pete Green during his time in the service
In an article about those early days written only for family and friends, Sugie describes an incident when Pete and two friends from school took out the Melrose. They were soon spotted by a Maryland patrol boat, the Pokamoke. That boat had a thirty-caliber, water-cooled machine gun on the bow, operated by Patrol Officer Guy Johnson. He began firing.
An oyster dredge
Pete’s friend, Weensie Atwell, tried to outrun the Maryland boat, but, according to Pete, “Weensie had neglected to fill the gas tank before leaving the docks and the Melrose ran out of gas.”
Arrested, the boys were taken to Cobb Island and given bologna sandwiches while the officers phoned authorities to decide what to do with them. They were eventually sent home and told to report to Bill Marchant, captain of the Virginia patrol boat. They decided against reporting the incident, according to Sugie’s article, but “they each had a lot of explaining to do to their parents” because they’d been out all night.
Even though she knew of such adventures, Sugie hoped they were a thing of the past. After she and Pete eloped, they spent their honeymoon in Daytona, Florida, and discovered that they both liked being warm in winter. It was years, though, before they bought property on the West Coast of the state in Venice and retired there, years that included plenty of dissension over Pete’s continued work on the river.
Oystering wasn’t something Pete could give up easily. His parents had divorced when he was around thirteen. He recalls that he and his mom didn’t get along all that well.
One day she simply told him, “I’m sending you to live with your father.”
His father was living at Curley’s Point, on the north side of Colonial Beach, and working an oyster boat for Landon Curley. “I packed a bag and went down there. He didn’t even know I was coming.”
Spending his time in that environment, going out on the Margaret with his father, got into his blood, Pete says. By the time he finished ninth grade, he was hooked. “I wanted to go on the river and work.” He played hooky from school when he could, worked with his father for three years and finally convinced Curley that this was what he was meant to do.
“I wasn’t all that big, but he said he’d take a chance on me.” The days were long, the work exhausting. “When I got home, I’d go right to bed. But I loved the river, loved oystering.”
Pete Green’s father
Pete Green on a boat (left)
The first night he took a boat out on his own with his own crew—his cousin Carroll Green and Sunshine Dickens—he came back to Curley’s with eighty bushels. “I remember the dock was all lit up.” When Curley saw their haul for the night, he told Pete he was “a chip off the old block.”
For a young man from a broken home, the environment at Curley’s created a family for him. “Curley was very fair. I thought the world of him,” Pete says.
Pete and Sugie (Gladys) Green
There were always oystermen around, playing cards, gambling and talking. There was dancing, too, and homemade ice cream being churned. The store was open till midnight. Yachts would stop in the summer to gas up. “And we’d go out and fish till daylight,” he recalls.
It all sounds idyllic, and for a time, it was. “The police let up on us, because they needed oysters for the military.” But when the war ended, they began to patrol the river in earnest.
“We started working at night with very dim lights,” Pete remembers.
When they were spotted by the patrols, the goal was to pull in their hauls or abandon them, then head back to Virginia waters as fast as they could.
In Sugie’s article, Pete talks about being out one night on the Little Bill, one of Landon Curley’s boats. They were soon spotted by the operators on one of Maryland’s fastest patrol boats, which lit them with spotlights and started shooting. Pete and his crew did everything they could to evade them. “The boats ran into each other two or three times,” Sugie reports in her article. When Pete finally made it back to the safety of Virginia waters, the motor on the boat was destroyed and he discovered twenty-one bullet holes in the hull and engine. He apologized to Curley for the engine’s destruction, but Curley only said, “At least you brought the boat home.” He had the engine replaced, and Pete continued to operate that boat.
Pete was still young enough the next time he was caught that, with local lawyer John Mayo representing Pete and fellow oysterman George Townsend, along with a Maryland lawyer, they were given a three-year suspended sentence, a five-hundred dollar fine and “they took the boat.”
Pete did give up oystering for a time after that, but once he returned from his service in Korea, he and George decided to go back into business together and bought a boat they named the Botcha Me. They installed a 450-horsepower airplane motor in the boat and became the fastest workboat on the river.
There were other incidents that didn’t end as well. In 1956, three boats from Virginia were side by side
