She recalls that customers flew in from Washington on a 1933 Boeing 247 called the Champagne Cruiser. The highly recognizable pink plane landed on a small airstrip just outside of town with its well-heeled passengers. Singer Kate Smith and radio and TV broadcaster Arthur Godfrey were frequent visitors during that era. The people who flocked to town to hear Guy Lombardo, Jimmy Dean and others perform at Little Reno weren’t poor. “They dressed up like they were going to a ball,” she says.
One of her favorite memories is of the time Patsy Cline performed. Sandra was only six or seven and Patsy had a new baby. There was an apartment upstairs at Little Reno and Sandra was assigned to sit with the sleeping baby and run downstairs to get the singer if her baby woke.
A few years later, her mother and father, Retta and Paul Conner, opened a tiny, walk-up pizza place virtually on their front lawn on Washington Avenue, just across from the Colonial Beach Hotel. “They did it so they’d know where I was in the summer,” Sandra says. “It stayed open later than most places in town so people could eat something before driving home.”
For Sandra, the casinos and all of the other Colonial Beach hotels and businesses operated by the Conner brothers and others in their large extended family might have been unusual, but they were still family-run businesses. They took care of their employees.
One man whose family—his mom, grandma and in later years he himself—worked for them was struggling financially. Years later he described to Sandra the night “this big white man [her father, Paul] showed up at their door with money for the rent. He saved my family.”
Sandra says she was so proud when she heard the story. “Dad had been dead for a long time. What a legacy of kindness he left his family!”
The Colonial Beach connection for the Conners all started with their great-aunt who encouraged the young Delbert Conner and his eight siblings in a poor West Virginia family to come to Colonial Beach to work for her at the DeAtley and Ambassador hotels. The Ambassador Hotel became Delbert’s first purchase in town. He paid fifteen thousand dollars for it, according to a report in the Washington Post, but was left with so little cash on hand that he couldn’t pay for the gas hookups for the ovens.
He sold that hotel to his brother, Howard, in 1949 and turned his attention to getting the casinos into town, a business that the Washington Post reported made him “a millionaire several times over.”
It was 1954 by the time Paul and Retta Conner (she was pregnant with another daughter, Paula, at the time) and their daughter, Sandra, arrived in Colonial Beach, qualifying Sandra to many as a “come-here.” She likes to argue with those who label her that by telling them, “I got here as soon as I could.”
She was only five when Hurricane Hazel destroyed several of the casinos, dumping slot machines and liquor into the river and causing a frenzy among people hoping to seize some of the bounty from the water.
By 1958, less than a decade after the first casino opened in Colonial Beach, the movement to force them out had reached a fever pitch and become a political hot potato. Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley was won over by the opponents of the slot machines. He, in turn, won over politicians in Maryland, who banned any casino whose access wasn’t from Maryland. The Colonial Beach casinos, of course, were legally in Maryland waters, but were accessed from the Virginia shore. Even today, those walking onto the Riverboat, which is the newest incarnation of what was once Reno, find a clearly marked dividing line between the two states just beyond the front door. It’s possible to buy lottery tickets for the respective states on either side of that line.
After the slot machines were banned, they were loaded onto boats and taken upstream to a new location owned by the Conner brothers—Aqualand—at the Maryland base of the Nice bridge across the Potomac. The entire Jackpot casino was transferred to a barge and floated to its new location, as well.
Still operating with a belief that children should be welcome as well, Delbert created a Storybook Village and a zoo at the new location.
Though the casinos closed, family members—Sandra’s great-aunt Mary Curry and her husband, Leo—ran Reno, the Black Cat and the Colonial Beach Hotel for years, maintaining a Conner presence in town.
In general, though, the prosperity of the gambling era dwindled away. Hotels and motels closed. Business along the boardwalk died. Eventually the increasingly run-down structures were torn down. What had once been the thriving Little Reno casino became first Reno, and more recently Riverboat, which ironically depends at least in part on an off-track betting license from Maryland for its success.
When Maryland recently revived casinos in some off-track betting locations, there was talk that Riverboat might be among the chosen spots. When it was rebuilt after being damaged by Hurricane Isabel, a second floor was added for just that purpose, but thus far it has only been used for private events. Once again, the issue was hotly debated around town, reviving talk of the “element” it might bring to the beach.
For Sandra, whose memories of the time are far more positive, it was motivation to change the record and remind people of all that was good in that long-gone era.
She says that local historian Joyce Coates showed her a photo of a slot machine being operated in a Colonial Beach store well before the first casino came to town. And there were newspaper reports about college kids who came to Colonial Beach to party and caused their own sort of havoc before the first gamblers ever arrived. Ellie Caruthers, who worked for a physician in town at the
