It was Wayne Kennedy who taught him physical education. “Oh, the fun we had,” Steve recalls with a touch of nostalgia. “He inspired me. He was a huge mentor to me. I was a fatherless kid, and he was an important male figure.”
Steve went to college at Virginia Tech, then came home to Colonial Beach. “Wayne found me on the boardwalk one day and said you’d best get over to the school and sign a contract to teach elementary school PE.”
His wife, Ann, was from Aiken, South Carolina, and, just like Charlotte Kennedy, she wasn’t at all sure about making a life in such a small town.
“She changed her tune,” Steve says simply. She’s had an amazing career in the environmental field and was later chief of staff at Dahlgren’s Naval Surface Warfare Center. “Now she’s a die-hard fan of Colonial Beach.”
Superintendent Dr. Warner breaks ground for new school
Their three sons all graduated from high school at the beach and went on to college, two to Virginia Tech and one to Radford. One works at Dahlgren and commutes from Richmond. The other two work and live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
One of the things Steve loves is how important school games are to the whole community. Even those without kids on the teams or in the school come out to support the Drifters. If Wayne asked someone to work the snack bar or man the gate at games, they rarely said no.
Coaching didn’t end with the close of the school year. They offered summer basketball and baseball camps, summer leagues and Saturday morning leagues. “We’d take the kids to Virginia Tech or James Madison University,” Steve says, “to expose them to the opportunities that could be theirs through sports.”
They embraced special needs students, too, giving them roles as managers on the team. One young man, Jarod Flores, was designated as a special representative who was assigned to pick up trophies. In the state championship, Steve was told only the head coach could accept the trophy. “I picked him up, took him to center court and gave him the trophy to raise. There was a picture in the paper of him holding it. He was beaming. It made his life.”
Moments like that just added to the important role and mystique that high school sports played in town.
“We had stability with our program,” Steve says. “Wayne was athletic director for thirty-eight years, boys’ basketball coach for twenty-three years, football coach for seventeen years and boys’ track coach for ten years.”
Wayne shares credit with Steve, as well. “It was important to have Steve at the elementary level. He could light that fire, see the future Drifter in them.”
They name principals and superintendents who believed in their programs, who worked to help find jobs for the kids who needed them, who raised money or even stepped on the pitcher’s mound to throw at batting practice.
Longtime school superintendent, Dr. Donald Warner, was so caring and supportive, Wayne recalls. “He was such a motivator. He deserves a lot more credit than he’s ever been given. I’d wake up and think, I just can’t wait to go to work for that man.”
“I’ll second that,” Steve says.
It was Dr. Warner, in fact, who spearheaded a fundraising drive to build a new high school. There were bake sales, softball tournaments, car washes, pledges, basketball tournaments, restaurant nights and donations to support the proposed school. “Students collected one million pennies [$10,000] to make Dr. Warner’s vision a reality,” Wayne recalls. The accomplishment was recognized regionally and nationally for the creativity of their efforts.
Team members and supporters take such pride in their past as a Drifter, they come back to town. They want to be a part of that tradition.
“I tell the kids I stay in touch with that there’s a Drifter fraternity,” Steve says. “It’s the greatest association of friends you’ll ever have.”
AFTERWORD
So, there you have it, a little glimpse into my world and an introduction to just a few of the neighbors who make Colonial Beach, Virginia, into one of the most unique communities I could ever imagine living in. Some people are larger than life. Others are soft-spoken, but have made their presence felt in different ways.
There are those who enrich the lives of everyone around them with their community spirit of volunteering or giving, who quietly assist those in need or join together in times of trouble with an outpouring of support. This small community, some eighty miles from Washington, but filled with military veterans, rallied in an amazing way after 9-11, providing money and other assistance to those affected by that national tragedy. Members of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church took the train to New York to provide assistance in the heart of the disaster area.
Whether the suffering is large-scale or small, there’s usually a neighbor willing to rush in and help.
After so many extraordinarily unique periods in the town’s history, the evolution continues to determine exactly what identity Colonial Beach will have for the future. Way back when the town’s fate was in the hands of lifelong locals like Boozie Denson and Gordon Hopkins, there was always a sense not only of who we could become, but who we had been. Today’s town leaders, often “come-heres,” with no long-term roots in Colonial Beach, sometimes lose sight of the past and its importance or of the critical need to respect and preserve it, not only in our buildings, but in our values.
When I had my business, I operated with one major self-imposed rule (aside from good customer service), and that was to keep my nose out of local politics. I knew there was no quicker way to lose business than to take sides. But when town leaders in 2002 and 2003 were determined to sell prime waterfront property, including our town green, to a developer to build condos, I tossed that rule out
