Canal Street – Chesapeake City

Canal Street – Chesapeake City

North Side school children boarding the Victory, the temporary passenger ferry from August, 1942, until the car ferry, Gotham, arrived in March of 1943. Many children aboard and boarding lived on Canal Street.

 

Large Canal Street house being razed—Inset: Aunt Kate (Battersby) Lloyd, who cried, “They’ll have to carry me out before I move!”

I wish I could remember what I had done wrong that caused all the excitement in my house on that bitter-cold, late December day. 1942 was about to end; it had been the best of years and it had been the worst of years. Relax, and let me take you back there for a spell. In that year many pleasurable events occurred. Bing Crosby was crooning White Christmas, The Andrews Sisters were singing Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, and Glenn Miller was conducting Moonlight Cocktail. In the movie theaters James Cagney dazzled us in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Bogart and Bergman held us spellbound in Casablanca, and Walt Disney astounded us with Bambi, an animated marvel. On a personal basis I was managing to make it through the first grade, never mind my doubts about completing the second. And my family was happily excited because my only brother was born in October.

On the disheartening side, our nation was at war. The Germans were bombing the daylights out of Great Britain. We were fighting the Japanese in the vicious Battle of Midway. Locally, our lift bridge was destroyed by a freighter on July 28^th and our car ferry didn’t arrive to serve us until March of 1943. Furthermore, for me personally, as I mentioned earlier, our household was in a frenzied uproar one day because of some devilish thing I had done. And it must have been something pretty bad for it to make my mother and grandmother furious with me. Maybe I had hurt my little brother, or maybe I had stoned one of our settin’ hens. But no, wait! I think I do recall now. Granny was babysitting me and my little brother there in the farm house. I was not behaving for her at all. I don’t remember what I was doing wrong, but I recall Granny’s warning: “Boy, if you don’t behave yourself I’m going to go out and cut a switch and go aboard you with it.”

 Well, she did walk outside for a switch so I locked her out in that fifteen-degree weather. It was so cold that two-foot icicles hung from the shed roof, and one even extended from the roof into the frozen-solid rain barrel. When my mother came home with the key about an hour later, she and my frozen Granny screamed their heads off at me.  “You just wait, young man, until your father comes home,” they yelled. “He’ll whip you within an inch of your life.” Granny was especially disgusted with me, crying out, “I just don’t know what to think of such a nasty rascal.” My mother cried, “The very idea! Your father will be home soon. You just wait, buckaroo.”

So when I saw Pop’s car rolling up the lane, I ran upstairs and lay stretched across my bed, sobbing to beat the band. Then all three of them came up the stairs, and I could hear their animated chatter in the hall. Then they came into my room. Pop didn’t say a word, but Mom and Granny were both talking at once. I started crying as Pop stood there, belt in hand, glaring down at me. Then he came towards me and in a flash my mother was next to me. She put her arm around me, looked up at Pop and screamed, “You’re not going to hurt him; you’re not.”

Almost at the same time, Granny lunged in front of her son, grabbing the belt as she said, “Now, Ralph, you leave him alone. He’s suffered enough; leave him be; you hear?” Pop then shook his head and slumped out of the room as Mom and Granny comforted me. As I sobbed softly, Granny stroked my head and whispered, “You rest yourself now, good boy. When you’re feeling better, you come on down and get your supper.” So, understanding reader, from this you can see the kind of hard life I led; how I survived it I’ll never know.

It was ten years later, 1952, when I was 16 and driving Pop’s ’48 Ford that I eyed with special interest the Dungaree Girl of Canal Street. You know about Canal Street, of course, that ran along Chesapeake City’s North Side, the one where so many wonderful people raised their children, worked their jobs, and lived their lives in sight of the vibrant waters of the C&D Canal. Over thirty houses of varied architecture lined the narrow street, and out front, toward the 250-foot waterway, was a steep bank that descended in certain places to sandy shorelines that provided joyful recreation for generations of children. Sometimes joining the fun, I recall sliding down the bank into the water on a piece of cardboard.

But then, in the mid-sixties, all residents of Canal Street were relocated when the Corps of Engineers widened and deepened the canal. Except for the Stapp House and the Snyder House, which were moved to other locations, all of the houses were demolished. Many people were distraught at having to move, especially Aunt Kate Lloyd who, crying, had to be carried off her front porch the day before it was razed. Many Chesapeake City notables were displaced, including one-time mayor, Jim Wharton, Harold Reynolds, Mable Thornton, Eddie Bedwell, and Capt. Albert Battersby, father of Birdy Battersby, who became a respected councilman as well as the town’s most popular bartender.

But wait. Geez, I almost forgot about Canal Street’s Dungaree Girl. So let me return you to 1952, to when I was a teenager with wheels and paying attention to those beautiful and lively girls who flowered that ill-fated street. Why growing up near the water there made them so attractive I’ll never know. There were Betty and Dotty Thornton brightening the East End where Birdy Battersby lived. Other beauties were Ina Lloyd, Betty Dixon, Louise Bedwell and, of course, the enchanting Dungaree Girl.

Cousin Dick Sheridan and I used to ride or walk over the bridge to talk to them for hours, sometimes even amusing them with our adolescent sweet-talk. I first saw the Dungaree Girl astride her bike alongside of George Gorman’s gas station and candy store. And I wish I knew why talking to or even eyeballing her increased my heartbeat the way it did. Maybe it was the delicate way she rode that bicycle when I pulled up next to her and smiled. Maybe it was the way she flickered her eyes at me. There was for sure something elusively special about her. Her eyes, that was it—those eyes that seemed to glance about fleetingly with a kind of equivocal playfulness that appeared sometimes to have me as their focus.

 And yet, now that I’ve thought it over, it must have been the combination of bike riding and eyes, never mind the way she sort of flipped her pony tail, and the way she wore her white socks above her penny loafers, socks that left a three-inch gap of leg below those delightfully faded, rolled-up dungarees. Anyway, after what seemed like months, she agreed to attend a movie with me and eventually she was my date to the prom. So 1952 was absolutely the best of years for me. But when I picked her up I was shocked silly: She was not a Canal Street Girl at all! She lived on Cecil Street.

          But I let it slide and, regardless of her disappointing location, she was awfully pretty when I strode in to get her for the prom, despite the comical prom dress and the doctored hairdo. At any rate, her tentative agreement to go steady has lasted 61 years so far, and when I ask when she can make it permanent she just shakes her head and says: “Give it time! Give it time!”  But you know it’s sad that she doesn’t ride her bike anymore, and I don’t know what happened to those engaging dungarees. But don’t you wish, as I do disappointed reader, that she had turned out to have lived on that historic street, just so, along with the real Canal Street girls, she could say with an emotional catch in her voice: “Where I grew up is now under thirty feet of water.”