Scenes like that of gun battles on the river are described over and over by Colonial Beach old-timers who often awoke to the sounds of high-speed engines and gunfire in the middle of the night. Some would even gather on the shore to watch, as if the battles were a performance. But the bullets were real.
Pete and Sugie (center) at prom, 1951
Pete’s boat had been one of four boats on the river the night the Oyster Wars turned deadly. Pete and two others returned to shore when they spotted the Maryland patrol boats, but one defiantly returned to the water. Pete was safely home in bed by the time events took an ugly turn.
Harvey King had been back out on the Potomac for two or three hours when the patrol boats once again cornered him. “He had a real fast boat,” Pete recalls. In fact, by then many of the boats were equipped with high-powered engines and traveled at speeds that the Maryland patrol boats couldn’t match. What the Maryland patrol boats did have, though, were weapons that could fire accurately at long distances and the determination to put an end to the oyster dredging.
On that fateful night, there was a hail of gunfire aimed at Harvey King’s boat. Bullets pierced the boat and some even hit buildings on shore, including a sign at Wolcott’s Tavern.
“They shot Berkeley Muse and got Harvey in the leg,” Pete recalls.
Despite being wounded, Harvey drove his boat back into Monroe Bay—safe Virginia territory—and continued to the dock behind Miller’s Crab Shore. Berkeley was taken off the boat, but it was too late to revive him. “Berkeley was dead on the dock,” Pete says.
Another with memories of that night, Mike Stine, recalls seeing Berkeley’s body on a table inside what was normally the workroom at Miller’s, where oysters were shucked in winter or crabs picked in summer. The place was crawling with Virginia State troopers.
Pete, who’d made it safely back to shore hours earlier, was on his way to his day job at the Colonial Beach Yacht Center when George Townsend stopped him and told him that Berkeley was dead.
A lot of things conspired to create that night’s tragedy. Harvey King tended to aggravate the patrol boats more than most, taunting them with his speed and maneuvering ability, Pete says. More tragic, Berkeley wasn’t even in the habit of going out on the boats.
“He didn’t need oystering,” Pete says. He was doing well with his other businesses. He had land on the river outside of town that he was developing into a community to be known as Berkeley Beach. His brother Corbin completed that development.
On the night he’d died, Berkeley had been hauling topsoil earlier in the evening when he met up with some of the oystermen. He reportedly had a few shots of whiskey with his friends, including Pete, and Harvey King needed one more man on his boat. Berkeley was up for the adventure.
Pete glances at Sugie as he describes that night. If not the turning point for him, it came close to being the deciding factor in giving up the career he loved. “With two children then, I got to thinking maybe it was time to quit.”
Pete went to work at Dahlgren as a painter, a skill he’d also learned working with his father. Eventually, though, after eleven years in that job, he was having medical issues that doctors said were being aggravated by the paint fumes, so he retired. By then Sugie had also been working at Dahlgren for several years. Pete waited for her to retire before they left Colonial Beach for good to finally build their dream home in Florida. It was a long time coming, but a decision neither of them regrets.
They still come north to celebrate special occasions with their four daughters and one son, who are scattered in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. It was on one of those trips recently that they sat down to share their memories.
Pete mentions his children with pride, but there’s also pride and nostalgia in his voice when he speaks of the boats he and George owned together—the Botcha Me and the Splish, Splash—and those he owned himself, the Wanda Ann and the Sugie G.
“We won workboat races with the Botcha Me,” he recalls, describing how the competition came down to his boat and Bozo Atwell’s, the Mary E., which had been souped up with a 630-horsepower Hall-Scott navy surplus motor. “I would slow down to make it look like a real race, so we could put on a show,” Pete says.
While the dangers of being a waterman during the days of the Oyster Wars created tension for Pete and Sugie, they weathered those days and built a lifetime of memories of their own.
Even so, he admits wryly, “We’re real lucky we’re still together after sixty-two years.”
Pete on his birthday
FOOD FOR THE SOUL
In just about every place I’ve ever lived and in just about every fictional small town I’ve ever created, there’s always a restaurant where friends gather. In my Chesapeake Shores books and in the TV series on Hallmark Channel, that restaurant is Sally’s, a favorite of the O’Briens. In my Sweet Magnolias books, it’s Wharton’s.
The original Parker’s Crab Shore
Parker’s Crab Shore
And for me, in real-life Colonial Beach, that restaurant is Lenny’s, or as one of my family members insists on calling it, Earlene’s, because that’s the fictional name I used in Amazing Gracie, which she identifies most closely with Colonial Beach.
As in most communities, different crowds gravitate to different restaurants in those early morning hours when coffee and gossip are essential to getting the day off to a good start. It used to be
