Sandbars, Sandlots, and City Streets: Growing up in the Old South (1957)

By Chris Jones and Katherine Jones

Sandbars, Sandlots, and City Streets; takes its title from some of the powerful influences that shaped and continue to shape our(mine and Katherine's) lives:

Sandbars (The Eastern Shore of Virginia and its environs)...where Katherine was born and lived the first twelve years of her life; where her brother was born; where I met the woman ith whom I have spent the last twenty-six years; and where, as a school teacher (father and husband), I found both personal and professional fulfillment.

Sandlots (Baseball)...my first love (and close to the top of Katherine's loves). We write about the fields upon which we played; players we met, ballparks in which we sat; our respect for the Game's history; and how a Southern family tried, unsuccessfully, to save baseball's greatest shrine,

I grew up in an era when the Game looked, felt, and was played very differently.

City Streets (Richmond and our Ancestry)...for a long time, Richmond stayed unchanged and very Southern. The town my grandparents, parents, and I knew, is rapidly slipping away.

This part of the Book alsofocuses on four very Southern women, all of whom had, and continue to have, a tremendous impact on me, and through me, on Katherine and her brother, Tom.

Elon (Etc.)...Katherine attends Elon University and will graduate in 2014.I graduated in 1980 (when it was Elon College).Elon, along withsome "random writings," make-up the final section of the Book.

We hope you find it a good "read."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479750962

Chris Jones

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

PART I SANDBARS

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Onancock, 1991 (CMTJ)

THE SHORE AT FORTY

The summer of 2006 marked the fortieth anniversary of my first visit to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. At the age of eight, I had never experienced the euphoria and awkwardness of first love.¹ The Shore qualifies as my first serious love affair.

In those days, Route Thirteen was a three-lane death trap and the America House, now Sunset Beach, was welcoming its first guests.

Mom had visited the Shore by ferry, back in the fifties. Dad’s decision to cross the Bay was a direct result of the recent explosion of impersonal high rises in his beloved Virginia Beach… the beach of his youth. A place, just a few years earlier was, along with the Ocean View and Buckroe waterfronts, full of family owned restaurants, two-storied clapboard motels and hotels (places like Cheers, where everybody knew your name), wooden roller coasters, batting cages on the sand, and one of Mom’s and Dad’s honeymoon destinations back in 1956. When the Drifters sang Under the Board Walk, everybody knew what they were singing about. And so did they.

Dad was so disgusted and out of his element, that when the opportunity to cross the Bay presented itself, we took it… and never looked back (August 1966).

During one of our early visits, I commented that I would always come back to the Shore. Mom and Dad told me that the Shore was a place for the very young and for those whose youth was behind them (translation: us); that the bright lights, loud music, and the crashing surf of Virginia Beach (Myrtle and Daytona, too) would eventually lure me away from the subtleties of the Chesapeake and the Eastern Shore. They were right… to a degree.

From 1974 to 1983 (with only a few, but very important exceptions; and those girls know who they are), I succumbed to those Atlantic passions. High school and later college fraternity and sorority weekends; and beer blasts were easy temptations. Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach was an East Coast version of American Graffiti; endless cruisin’ flavored with salt and honey. I gained a few things there, but lost a few more.

And on late nights, when the music, lights, and girls had dimmed, I would stand at the water’s edge and peer into the darkness and know that the smell of pine and the gentle breathing of the Bay were out there, vital, just beyond the blackness; waiting.

In 1985, I accepted a teaching position at Chincoteague High School, and the Eastern Shore reentered my life as a tangible, dynamic entity. I heard the ripples, smelled the pine, swam in the channel, read about and explored all the old neighborhoods, labored by the Atlantic, for five summers, with the National Park Service… wild ponies, sand fences, and bikinis, and began to understand the true meaning of passion. For the next seventeen years, that definition and all its connotations, found itself into all my lessons, from Beowulf to Rupert Brooke. My students will understand.

I began teaching at Nandua High School in 1988. It was (and is) the finest high school I had ever seen. The principal was, in every sense of the word, in charge. My colleagues, mostly locals, taught, not as a last resort, but as a first. They were, and remain, family.

Cape Charles (twelve miles up the Shore) in 1966, when I first knew her, was still in economic free-fall, romantic though it was. The Chesapeake, whose shallows stretched out forever, was visible from Bay Avenue; and the beach, decorated with broken shells, pieces of china, and general debris, was still perfect for football games with the local boys. The old gazebo still vibrated with echoes of melodies played at turn-of-the-century band concerts… Casey would waltz with the strawberry-blond, and the band played on; but north of the town, developers have desecrated former fields and amber waves of salt marsh with million-dollar pastel cracker boxes, turning the waterfront into a bay front Levittown.

Dorothy, opening her black and white, Depression-era, beach house front door, would be struck dumb by Munchkin-Land on the Bay. Sepia-toned Bay Avenue has been repaved as the Yellow Brick Road.

Author’s Note: Mom and Dad had planned to spend the weekend of March 20, 1982 on the Shore, at what was still the America House… (The best laid schemes . . .).* Dad suffered a second and fatal heart attack that Thursday. We buried him Saturday, March 20. He was fifty-nine.

*   from To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

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BTJJ on his honeymoon (Virginia Beach and Williamsburg),

January 1, 1956 (BDJ/his bride)

TO MY DAUGHTER

(during the summer of her eighth year . . . 1999)

Her lips, dried by the Chesapeake

And too much chlorine,

Moisten just enough in the late hours

Of September’s Indian summer;

Katherine’s closed eyes in balmy midnights

Are an inheritance from her Mother.

I watch with goggles, her swimming;

Legs, hips, arms,

Awkwardly evolving into lithe, languid movement.

Later, in cleats and heels she’ll steal home,

After curfew, when the pitcher and third base coach

Are dozing.

She’ll dance in Austrian gazebos

While eager young lads, and fullbacks, and cads

Tempt her with the ancient opportunities.

During her eighth summer, as with her seventh,

And sixth, she sleeps with dry lips

Beside the Chesapeake.

WITH KATHERINE, AUTUMN 1997

²

"Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio…

With no par-tic-u-lar place to go"

(words and music by Chuck Berry… thanks Chuck)

Eastern Shore autumn

Southwest; out of Onancock

The names, in no par-tic-u-lar order

Keep me here…

East Point

Bailey’s Neck

Finney’s Wharf

North Point

and

Breezy Point…

Cashville to Broadway

Bayview Street past Russell Drive and the

Pilot’s wheel,

End State Maintenance and begin the Lord’s maintenance

At the Creek and into the Bay.

Silence in the early morning,

Only the birds and the water, water, water

Tickling the rocks, most still sharp and jagged

But others round as eggs… and baseballs

After a pause, and the return never messes up.

God’s got some good records, she says.³

A COMEHERE? LIKE HELL!

(1966-1999)

The high-rises at Virginia Beach had too much incensed my Father;

It’s sure as hell not the way it used to be, (1940 to 1960). "We’re

leaving!"

August 1966: crossing the Bay the modern way.

I never rode the ferry…

We hit land on Fisherman’s Island, before the trees,

All sand and scrub.

The America House… Red, White, and Blue

If Cagney or Cohan had been around, they’d have stayed there.

Before the pink doors

And RV hook-ups

The marquee reads, Reduced Rates After Mid-Night.

Isn’t it always after mid-night?

I clinch my teeth when I leave and clinch again when I return.

It wasn’t always like this.

Mom and Dad celebrated my twelfth birthday here (1969; and a host of

Others).

And between the beach and rear parking lot was enough level terrain for

Ten playing fields…

Enough room to run deep patterns with my prized birthday present:

Official National Football League…

Before the pink doors.

The Girls

Even at ten, I was achingly aware of her beauty.

A daughter of Oyster

And her parents’ Lunch and General Merchandise.

On the afternoon of that first visit, the thermometer by their door

Read 102… in the shade.

My last look was on the Cape Charles’ boardwalk in 1970.

She was wearing a cowl neck sweater

The wind running its fingers through her hair.

I was pushing thirteen; and Dawn… well…

The Women*

Dolly ran the bait shack at the old ferry landing

Where thousands of flounder must have been magically trapped

By the three-sided prison formed by

The beach,

The landing,

And the ghostly breakwater of concrete boats.**

I never reeled-in a nothin’.

And up the three-laned Thirteen lay Cape Charles

In the days when I could see the water from the street

And the four-columned mansion at the north end of Bay Avenue.***

It listed for eight thousand bucks back then.

The violence and passion of the Atlantic

Did call me for a time, as my parents said it would;

But even on rainy Saturdays

When the rudeness of Virginia Beach turned wet,

She and I would sneak across the shining, big sea water***

And She would take all the things I hadn’t given Her

Among the midnight multitudes off Atlantic Avenue

She was gracious

And…

She remembers.

* I met Cindy on the Shore; which saved me a ton in tolls.

** All these years later, my fascination with the concrete boats hasn’t waned.

*** To a ten-year-old it was a mansion. Now, it’s just a big house.

*** from Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

DEATH ON THE EASTERN SHORE

(1997)

I

Custis said that it was the way

He wanted to go…

Some ancient, decomposing member of

The Wise clan wrote it.

Death was, to Wise, and to Custis,

A white sailed clipper, easing through

The dusky ripples of Onancock Creek;

Parting the waves as Christ must have

Gently moved through the multitudes

Gathered to hear Him teach.

Docking just long enough to board another

Chesapeake soul;

Then