Chesapeake City and The Two Marys

Chesapeake City and The Two Marys

American Store (now Town Hall), the town’s most patronized grocery store in the mid1900s. L-R: Betty Jean Needles Watson, Tillie Blendy, Kathleen DeShane, Olive Spear, Anna Merchant, Dorothy Downs, Wilber Needles, Walter Bennett, Harry Potter, Hazel Hessey, and Inset at right: Frank Bristow (who was missing from original photo)—April 1946

Harry Bouchelle’s store, circa 1910. Later it was H. B. Bungard’s and after renovation the building became Walter Cooling’s general store for many years (now called Black Swan Antiques). People L-R: George Metz (blacksmith), Lou Blanchfield, 2 girls: one married Joe Schaefer (John’s brother) and the other married Mr. Mason, Mrs. Bouchelle, Harry Bouchelle, Tucker Steele, Charlie Banks.

Henry Hager’s butcher shop at Bohemia Ave. & 1st St., later the site of Mewhiter’s Drug Store and now a vacant lot next to The Victorian Lady—circa 1910. Inset: Henry Hager, said to have been a large man who delivered meat to both sides of canal 

I was in love with Mary Boyko, plain and simple. She was a blonde beauty who visited my mother from her house across the road from our small farm. I remember how she would help my mother with the dishes—Mom washing and Mary drying. The last time I saw her I was rolling around on the linoleum floor of our kitchen when I heard her say that she was soon to be married and would be moving to California. Oh, sensitive reader, what a falling off was there! For the first time in my life I was heartbroken, but I was to remember her beauty and the sound of her soft, girlish voice forever. As time passed I was to learn that we had had nothing in common—she had been nineteen and I had been five. Yet it’s surprising how the prospect of her not continuing to share my secluded world shocked me at the time and continued to haunt some remote section of my brain for decades.

Sixty-seven years later I thought about the power of that childhood fascination and, obtaining her California number from her sister, I called her. A chill migrated up my spine when I heard that same soft, girlish voice radiate surprise at hearing from a man whom she remembered as a toddler from her teenage years. She said that she would come to see me when she visited her sister in a few weeks, and when she finally did arrive it was something special. Now I was a foot taller than she and we laughed about it. She brought a photo of herself as a girl and one of me as a five-year-old. She was married with kids and I had a wife and a whole tribe of kids and grandkids. We were both happy.

And now, let me take you back to five years after Mary left (when I was eleven) to a time when another Mary entered my life with almost equal impact. She came to live with us unexpectedly, and she was dramatically different from my first Mary. This Mary was a short, energetic, platinum blonde with green, bulging eyes. She was more talkative and expressed herself loudly when the occasion called for it. A chill still bolts up my spine when I recall how that strident, staccato voice rattled my brain. She didn’t dry dishes or have much to do with my mother, but she was a fast runner and to my delight followed me all around the farm. 

Oh, I almost forgot. When she first became a family member she didn’t even have a name, so Pop let me pick her appellation: “Mary,” after the long-departed Mary Boyko.But now I must tell you that Mary II had some curiously bad habits, such as refusing to wear shoes (when I used to put them on her she’d always kick them off). And my but she did make the most annoying slurping noises at dinner, so bad that Mom insisted that she eat out on the porch. Not only that, but she displayed such a lack of hygiene that we all agreed that making her sleep in the barn with the cow would be a much better arrangement. But I liked her, never mind her habit of knocking people off balance when they least expected it. And I sort of admired the unique quality of her elongated chin. Another alarming thing was that Mary had a stupendous appetite during all hours of the day, sometimes eating unsavory things such as certain kitchen leftovers and normally unpalatable items from the garden.

After she got used to living on the farm and after she had fattened up a bit, Pop and I constructed a cart so that we could hitch her up to it with a harness and have her pull me into town, where I would be able to sell our excess corn and tomatoes. I don’t know why but, especially going uphill, Mary would sometimes balk at the strain of having to pull me and a cartload of vegetables, causing me to switch her on the rump to keep us moving.

I mean to tell you, we sold our goods to many grateful Chesapeake City families and businesses. We sold mainly to the South Side but also made our way across the lift bridge to the North Side. I remember how Mary and I talked to Mr. and Mrs. Harry Bouchelle, the proprietors of Bouchelle’s General Store. More recently the store was bought by Walter Cooling and is now owned by Black Swan Antiques.

Back then it was one of the places where townspeople gathered. I recall how, in the mid-forties, certain residents and I would stand in front of the store to watch the Friday night fights on a TV that Walter displayed from his front door. He was attracting customers, of course, even though not many families could afford to buy one back then, mine included. I remember seeing Dr. Davis pull up almost on the sidewalk to watch the fights in the comfort of his car. Surely he could afford to buy a TV, but he must have enjoyed the ambiance of that boisterous crowd of fight fans.

At any rate, years earlier, when Bouchelles owned the store, Mary and I sold our tomatoes to Mrs. Bouchelle, and while there we talked with undertaker, Charley Banks, and George Metz, the town’s blacksmith. After that, Mary pulled me and the cart down Bohemia Avenue to the American Store, where manager, Wilber Needles, bought our produce and where Frank Bristow, the store’s butcher, joked around by insisting that I must have stolen the vegetables. Across the street was the bank, where we said hello to Banker, Fletch Nickerson, and Janet Pyle, the teller.

With still more vegetables to sell, we rumbled down past Henry Hager’s butcher shop (later Mewhiter’s Drug Store and now a vacant lot) and descended to the oldest building in town, the famous Harriott Hotel. Bill Harriott bought some of our stuff, after his son, Punch, sampled a tomato. While there a juvenile Birdy Battersby emerged dripping wet from the canal and tried to ride Mary, who, indignant, reacted by butting him back into the canal, across which he swam back to Canal Street to lick his wounds. Birdy was to become the town’s most famous and well-liked bartender at the Hole-in-the-Wall, that exotic bar beneath the Bayard House.

After that, nearly sold out, we labored across the lift bridge to Schaefer’s North Side store where Kitty Schaefer bought us out and even offered to buy Mary—an offer we both graciously refused. While there we gabbed with Wilson Reynolds and Monica Breza before heading home, stopping only on George Street to wave at Jumping-Jim-the-Barber and to shoot the breeze with Walter Cooling who, with us, was perusing the “Coming Attractions” on display at the Rio Theater. Finally, tired but happy about making some money, we made our slow trek back to the farm.

       After two productive summers of our partnership—and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sympathetic reader—I awoke one fall morning to discover that just like my old Mary, my new Mary left me as well. And you can imagine my sorrow when Pop explained that he took her to live with a farmer who needed the honeysuckle and wild rose bushes cleared from his fence rows. Later I learned of another reason (maybe the real one) as to why she was relocated. In a fit of hunger she had provoked Pop’s acrimony by eating the windshield wipers off of his 1941 Ford. And yet, it’s so sad to realize even now that Mary must have known she was leaving me, because on the previous evening, telling me farewell in that gruff yet endearing stammer, she exclaimed: “Naaaaa-aa-aa-aah. Naaaaa-aa-aa-aah.”