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Ellie and Doc Caruthers pose |
leanor Mae Crary Caruthers, the 79-year-old manager of a 14-room motor court in Colonial Beach, usually arrives at work by 7 a.m. from her house next door.
Her summer morning ritual is decades old. She turns off the old neon sign that has glowed all night on Irving Avenue and the yellow night light on the porch of the office. She removes the "No Vacancy" sign from the screen door. She picks up The Free Lance-Star in the driveway between the motel's two buildings.
She sits down in a wooden chair in front of Room No. 8 nearest the street. No. 8 is now used for storage. The chair has two broken slats in its seat. She leans the chair back against the wall, puts her feet on the rungs and opens the paper.
The front desk of Doc's Motor Court is open and ready for business.
Joggers and walkers on the street greet her with a "Good morning, Ellie." A neighbor pulls his golf cart into the driveway for a chat. A weekend resident comes by a few minutes later to show off his new bicycle. Lawrence "Pee Wee" Atwell, another man-about-town, rides his old bike up to her command post and tells her his big news: His regular bike has a flat tire.
The first guests to check out that morning were the last to arrive the night before. From California, the couple is looking for a new home in the Northern Neck. The man hands Ellie the room key.
"It's just crazy out there," says the Californian. "Nobody wants to know who you are. All they want is your money. I like it here. It looks like a nice, slow, comfortable life you've got here."
"Hey, Mom, how you doing?" says another guest. He hands her a dollar bill for a bag of ice and walks across to the office to get it from a freezer. "See you Labor Day," he says a few minutes later, when he hands her his key.
"We're not satisfied. We want our money back," jokes another customer.
"You haven't given me any money yet, you crackpot," Ellie jokes back.
The phone rings. She scurries across the driveway to the office and comes back a few minutes later. "It was a woman calling about a reservation. She and her husband stayed here on their honeymoon in 1979. I found their original registration card. I'll be able to give the card to them when they come and the same room.
"I'd never have met any of these people if I hadn't run this motel," Ellie says. Credit that to the "handsome devil" she met on the beach out front 57 years ago.
His name is Herbert Veolo Caruthers, but Ellie and everyone else call him "Doc."
Doc's father and grandfather were both King George County physicians. Doc's father, Dr. Veolo Oglesby Caruthers (1886-1950), moved to Colonial Beach in 1923 and started a new practice. His office was in the basement of a Sears-Roebuck house on the riverfront. Next door was a strawberry patch, where an old hotel had once stood.
Doc says Colonial Beach was "backwater and country" when he was a boy. Everybody and every place had a nickname. Doc's friends were Snooks, Jim Boy, Monkey Doodle and Twiddles. They called their neighborhoods Cow Town, Silver Star, Fur Coat Lane, Classic Shores and Crow Hill.
Doc's father was also an entrepreneur. He and his brother-in-law Thornton Coakley operated a drugstore and soda fountain at the boardwalk. Dr. Caruthers also built a two-story pavilion on a fishing pier in the Potomac River in front of his house.
The pavilion had a tavern, slot machines and a dance hall. As a teenager, Kate Smith sang there when her family vacationed at the Wolcott House hotel. A hurricane wrecked the pavilion in the 1930s. Doc remembers his Baptist mother clapping her hands in delight when it washed away.
Doc was 19 in 1946 when he and two friends, James "Jimmy" Gouldman and George "Weed" Melson, drove to Florida. "At every place we noticed motor courts. They were the latest thing. We stayed in them going down and coming back," he says.
Motor courts tended to be cheaper than hotels. For people seeing the U.S. in their Chevrolets, motor courts also offered the huge convenience of a parking space for the car outside each room.
When motor courts became two-story, they started to be called motels, Doc says.
Back home, he persuaded his father to help him build a motor court in the strawberry patch next door. It cost $25,000 for the two buildings and $5,000 for the furnishings.
Contractor Shirley Gray started building it in 1947. It opened May 31, 1948. It was the first motel in Colonial Beach. A room for two cost $6 a night.
Ellie was a nurse from Washington. She worked at Gallenger Hospital, which later became D.C. General, where many of the city's indigent were treated.
"I loved it so much that I worked double shifts. I think I thrive on excitement. Patients would come in half dead, and it was a wonderful feeling to see them walk out well. It was very hard coming to Colonial Beach and leaving my job," she says.
Ellie was visiting Colonial Beach with her family in the summer of 1949 when she met Doc by a lifeguard stand on the beach in front of the motor court. Later, she would take a Greyhound bus from Washington to visit him.
They dated at Joyland, a bingo and dance hall on the boardwalk. They married in 1951 and honeymooned in Williamsburg and Richmond. When they returned to Colonial Beach, Doc handed the motel keys to Ellie and said, "Here, you run it."
The newlyweds moved into Nos. 7 and 8. By then, Doc had started a career at the Naval Ordnance Proving Ground at Dahlgren, where he would work on computer equipment until he retired in 1983.
"Ellie does a much better job at the motel than I ever did. People like her much better than they like me," he says.
"I thought it would be similar to handling patients in a hospital. I started out calling the motel guests 'patients' instead of 'customers,'" she remembers.
Her nursing training still shows. The rooms are hospital clean. "I still go behind my maid Irma and straighten every bed. I guess it's the nurse in me," says Ellie.
Doc's timing for opening his motor court could not have been better. In the 1950s, a half-dozen piers in the Maryland waters of the Potomac transformed the old resort town into what a magazine called "The Las Vegas of the East Coast." Thousands of people flocked to Little Reno, Monte Carlo and Jackpot to buy liquor by the drink and lose nickels and quarters in the slot machines.
In those famous years, Doc says, "If we didn't fill up by 11 a.m., we wondered what was wrong."
But sometimes, he says, "A man would rent a room for his family for the whole week and lose all his money the first night in the slot machines. They'd leave the next day. It messed up their whole vacation."
Doc now spends much of his time at home in the basement where his father's doctor's office once was. A shelf of old medical texts remains. What was once the doctor's waiting room is now full of the computers Doc uses to create Web sites. His masterpiece may be docsmotel.com.
The site contains hundreds of pictures of Colonial Beach from its earliest days in the 1880s to the present. The old pictures show men in boaters and women in long dresses arriving at Colonial Beach on steamboats from Washington. The present-day pictures show new houses all over town and a five-story condo a block away from the motel. The changes amaze him.
"They've gone crazy building in the last few months. There are new houses all over the place. These houses are for the richy rich. I wonder who's going to buy them.
"There are good changes and bad changes. What's good for one person may be bad for another.
"But you just have to sit back and say, 'Whatever comes I'll take it.' If Colonial Beach changes, it changes, but I like it the way it is," Doc says.
The motor court manifests the way he and Ellie feel about change.
She takes a guest to No. 4. It costs $70 a night plus tax for a single occupant on weekends, $50 on weeknights. She opens the door.
"This is what it was in 1948. This is what it is now. It's always been what it is," says Ellie.
Polished black vinyl-asbestos tiles cover the floor. The walls are painted in a sea-mist green like a 1957 Ford. No motel art hangs on the walls, just a mirror and a 1990 television with a manual tuner.
The shower stall is all aluminum. (Some residents of Colonial Beach complain about low water pressure, but the shower in No. 4 is a nipple stinger.) The room's two double beds are metal, as are two Danish Modern chairs and a single bedside table with lamp.
There's a chest of drawers, a fly swatter, a Gideon Bible and a Star Directory, but no phone. (And not much cell-phone reception either. Ellie advises trying from the one-way street sign by the police station across the street.)
There's an air conditioner, but no heat. It isn't necessary. Doc's is open only from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
There are two electrical outlets, an ice bucket, three plastic cups, one bath mat, two bath towels, two washcloths, two rolls of toilet paper, five bars of Pure & Natural Complexion Soap, two trash cans, two blankets, one closet and nine wire coat hangers.
The simplicity of Doc's Motor Court brings many customers back year after year. The clientele also includes workers seeking a break after a hard day at offices in the city.
Ellie says they are often whipped by traffic jams on Interstate 95 and arrive at Doc's hungry, angry, lonely and tired.
"People are so uptight most of the time at home and work. They come here to relax and forget for a little while. And it's such an impersonal world out there. People like to be recognized. So many Northerners tell me they like to come south because people wave at them," she says.
Some of her guests "unload a pickup truck to stay two nights. But when you come to Colonial Beach for the weekend, all you really need is a change of clothes and a bathing suit," she says.
"You have to be self-sufficient to come to Colonial Beach," says Ellie. "There are things to do in the area, but if you need shops and fancy places to eat and all the various and sundry other things to do and buy, you're not going to come to Colonial Beach. But it's for just that reason that people come here from New York and Washington and other cities. There's no traffic and there's nothing to do."
Virginia Berthold in No. 15 understands. From Charlottesville, she's stayed at Doc's two or three times a year since 1982. She says:
"I just love the sun glistening on the water and seeing the boats and hearing the waves. It's wide open. It's tranquility. If I had my way, I'd come down here twice a month. There's just something about this place.
"I grew up poor on a farm and I don't care about all the fancy stuff. Sometimes when the breeze comes up in the evening, and you can hear people laughing and music on the boardwalk, it's just wonderful."
Like most guests at Doc's, she likes the porch in front of her room. The porches at Doc's are lined with bathing suits and beach towels hung out to dry. Heavy metal lawn chairs painted red, green and yellow invite guests to sit, relax and remember beside the eternity of the river.
Jerry and Cathy DeHaven of Winchester sit in front of No. 2.
He and Cathy have been married 19 years. They've stayed at Doc's many times before.
"I've been coming here for 38 years," says Jerry. "My first wife and me, we were just riding around and found this place. I've been coming ever since. I'm 57 now.
"Cathy and me, we used to come twice a month. This is the second time we've been here this summer. We're coming back for the car show and the bluegrass festival."
Cathy grew up in Bunker Hill, W.Va. The first time Jerry took her to Doc's, she found a new world. "I'd never been to a beach before. I thought it was exciting," she says.
Last year, Jerry and Cathy brought his five children and eight grandchildren to Doc's. The family filled eight rooms. Jerry doesn't swim in the river anymore. He had a laryngectomy 15 years ago. "I'd drown in a minute if I went under," he says.
He says he was embarrassed after his operation, and told Ellie how he felt. "Mrs. Caruthers told me if people didn't like it, tell them to go to hell," Jerry says.
"Everybody I talk to here is real friendly," he says. "I reckon I'll keep coming back until I drop."
FRANK DELANO is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. Contact him at 804/333-3834 or
Email: fpdelano@gmail.com. ROBERT A. MARTIN is a staff photographer with The Free Lance-Star.
