Two Stories of Growing Up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore

The author of this piece, by Tim Neville, in Outside Magazine, was a few years behind me in school in Salisbury. He surprisingly captures many aspects of my childhood in this piece. His memories that I most related to follow below along with my editorial comments:

“I grew up in Salisbury, Maryland, a town so perfectly boring and flat that a highway overpass offered the airiest views around.”

Jeff – in order to prepare for Maryland Cross Country Regionals each year, which would be in a hilly part of western Maryland, my cross country team would run up and down overpasses and the dried up lake bed of Salisbury City Park in an attempt to simulate the hills we would eventually face.

“Salisbury had maybe 17,000 people when I lived there in the 1980s; it sat at the junction of U.S. Route 13 and U.S. Route 50, about two and a half hours southeast of Washington, D.C., on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.”

Jeff – Even though Salisbury was small by many people’s standards, it was, and still is, the largest town on the Eastern Shore. As of 2020, Salisbury was ~30,000 people. It was big enough for me. I lived within 2 miles of everything I needed on a daily basis. My elementary school (Pinehurst) was across the street from my house, my junior and high schools (Bennett), were 1.5 miles away. The pool (Canal Woods), where I spent most of my summers was 2 miles away. The lawns I cut and newspapers I delivered were within 1 mile of home. My best friends Dan Sterling, Keith Demko, Kevin Kennan, Derrick Ollinger, Phillip Basehart, Mark Hancock, and Stew Wennersten, were within a mile. The Giant grocery store, Montgomery Ward’s, and Drugfair were all within walking distance. My church, Asbury, was a mile away, which was awesome since we figured out how to pull the chained doors open far enough to slip one of us in and then let the rest of us in so that we could play hoops in Fellowship Hall. Snake Valley (where we caught lots of snakes) and Kevin’s boat, that we used to water ski on the Wicomico River, with just down Riverside Drive. The library where my mother worked, Wicomico County, was 1.5 miles away and the only movie theatre in town (back then) was just a little farther.

“To us, being at the junction of these highways made Salisbury something like the fluttering heart of Delmarva, the tri-state peninsula where “slower, lower” southern Delaware and the eastern portions of Maryland and Virginia bunch together in a critter-shaped landmass that divides the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean and its barrier islands, with the skinny Virginia part forming the tail. To most outsiders, Delmarva was little more than a place you suffered through on your way to the beach in Ocean City, dismissed by most as a 170-by-70-mile swamp of speed traps and Shore Stops and very old hamlets with names like Pocomoke and Onancock.”

Jeff – Our Boy Scout Council was called the Del-Mar-Va Council after the three states with land on the Eastern Shore. That included almost the entire population of Delaware, 7% of Maryland, and 0.5% of Virginia. The name combo was also in a high school in our county, Mardela (Maryland + Virginia) and the Friday night auction we sometimes went to was in Delmar (Delaware + Maryland).

“Salisbury was and still is a largely rural place, ringed by fields and poultry farms that feed a processing plant run by the town’s most famous celebrity: the late Frank Perdue, the “tough man, tender chicken” king. His downtown operation, a hulking leaden-blue building with giant fans, could be so exquisitely stinky that we kids would hold our breath and pray that the stoplight stayed green whenever we had to pass it.”

Jeff – My Uncle Bob was a chicken farmer in Princess Anne and once outside of Salisbury city limits, chicken houses seemed to pop up every few miles. Frank Perdue (or Perdue Chicken) had a house in the neighborhood of Tony Tank (a mile from my house) that he was rarely at, so we would sneak in to his backyard and play basketball on his outdoor court. And yes, the chicken plant had a horrible smell when we drove by it which just so happened to be next to Route 50, the road thousands would travel every day to get to the beach and back.

“We had a hospital, a small college, and a mall with an Orange Julius——later there was a second, newer mall that even had a Chick-fil-A—but outside of roller skating at Skateland or pounding ill-gotten Boone’s Farm in the woods off Fooks Road, there wasn’t much for guys like me to see or do. We joked that a sign at the western city limits should read, “Welcome to Salisbury! Only 30 minutes from the beach!”

Jeff – the Orange Julius in the Mall was a special treat we only got a few times a year – I would call it an early smoothie. Skateland, the roller rink Tim mentions was where I spent many nights in 6th and 7th grade skating to Bette Davis Eyes (Kim Carnes), Centerfold (J. Geils Band), and Juke Box Hero (Foreigner). It is also where we first discovered arcade games – learning to play Pac-Man, Frogger, and Centipede while losing all our quarters.

“On 50, you could go “across the bay” to Baltimore to watch Eddie Murray and the Orioles, or east to the beach, which could easily become “down to the beach” once you were actually there. As in: “He ain’t home t’day. He’s down to the beach.””

Jeff – By far, my favorite pro team growing up was the Baltimore Orioles. In 1979, I listened on radio when we were up 3-1 in the World Series on the Pittsburgh Pirates, before the Pirates came back to win in 7. In 1982, on the last weekend of the year, we had to win 4 in a row from the 1st place Brewers in order to win the AL East. I listened to every game on the radio with Jon Miller as announcer. Storm Davis, Denny and Tippy Martinez, Scotty McGregor and Sammy Stewart pitched victories in the first three games before Mike Flanagan and Jim Palmer struggled in the last game of the season. But then, in 1983, we had our magical year, our last World Series Championship. (see my favorite Orioles of all time here)

“Has (President Biden) ever tasted Delmarva’s most lovingly stewed spirit animal, the muskrat?”

Jeff – My Pop-Pop, who lived in Princess Anne (technically, they lived in community of Venton,) loved muskrat for his birthday. My Mom-Mom would get it from a friend who trapped it and then she cooked it up. To me, it was delicious, tasted like roast beef, but it took some work to eat, since smaller rodents have a lot of bones to work around.

“what I didn’t realize until decades after I left, is just how unique and wonderful and awesome this cul-de-sac of geography really is. That’s especially true in summertime, when gauzy sunsets turn the rivers as orange as circus peanuts and the humidity gets so thick that you swear you can hear it hit the windshield. This is the land of skipjacks and wet corn bread and an annual Miss Crustacean beauty pageant.”

Jeff – I didn’t understand humidity until I moved to Texas in 2010 and realized that when the temperature was 100F in Waco, it felt like 90F in Salisbury. On Wednesday nights in the summer, my father would join his friend, Lester, on Lester’s sailboat to race competitors in the Chesapeake Bay. We attended the Crisfield crab picking contest and the Delmarva Chicken Festival in Salisbury in some years.

“Sure, there are ticks and chiggers and mosquitos big enough to use forks, but you can swim in the warm “wooder” (water) of a moonlit pond, eat the best damn corn on the cob of your life, and get dizzy among the legions of lightning bugs”

Jeff – I definitely had my share of ticks, chiggers, and mosquitos dining on me in the summers. For Boy Scout Troop 151s’ annual camp week at Henson Boy Scout Camp (outside of Sharptown), we had to find 4 long sticks to lash to our cots in order to hang mosquito netting over us as we slept. In addition, I had a tick find a spot on me one year that shall remain nameless, which neither me nor my father could remove, nor could the the nurse at the infirmary at 11 p.m.. I was driven to the ER at the hospital (PGH) in Salisbury to get it removed. I have been misunderstood or made fun of for over 30 years when I order “wudder” outside of the Eastern Shore. Oh, and we did spend many evenings filling glass jars with lightning bugs in order to light up the night.

“out to the big houses in Tony Tank, always with the top down during the day, the Salisbury sun scorching the vinyl seats to the point that they’d blister your legs if you didn’t cover them with a towel.”

In the 70’s, Tony Tank was the neighborhood of the wealthy kids (until Nithsdale came along in the late 80s.) When we rode in our cars in the summer, we typically used windows most of the time (some of our cars did not have AC) and my father showed us how to use towels to cover the vinyl of our seats that would otherwise fry our skin.

“Some evenings, the whole family would pile into dad’s (car) and take the long way around the Wicomico River by crossing it near Princess Anne via the Whitehaven Ferry, which has been in service since 1685. The three-car boat would dump us off near the Red Roost, a seafood joint inside an old chicken coop, where we’d pick apart piles of steamed blue crabs dumped onto picnic tables covered in newspaper, eating until our fingers were stained red with Old Bay.”

When my family went driving some evenings, my parents would take us over the Whitehaven Ferry. The Red Roost was a special treat when our Canal Woods Swim Team would have a big meet or the extended Doyle family wanted to pick crabs. On a side note, I didn’t know crabs came without Old Bay on them until after leaving the Shore. And if you didn’t know, almost all the Blue Crabs you eat are males (with the Washington Monument on their underbelly), unlike females (with the Washington Capital on their underbelly).

“The Delmarva ground is always so warm and forgiving in the summer, softened either by sand or pine shats—our name for pine needles.”

Jeff – As a Boy Scout, I loved to sleep on white pines needles as they were the softest. Most of the pines at our house were loblolly pines, still somewhat soft, but a massive pain to rake up when they fell.

“In the summer of 1988, I got my first car, a 1964 Corvair convertible stick shift that burned about a quart of oil per tank of gas, which was supposed to be leaded.”

Jeff – I got my first car in the summer of 1986, a 1970 Ford Caprice Classic station wagon with rear seats facing backwards, painted dark green with wrap-around wood grain faded in various places, leaving the car looking a bit like camouflage. Students at high school called it the “Bomb from Nam”.

“I’d cruise along Camden Avenue and Riverside Drive and stop at the docks, where I’d eat Bubba’s tacos on the hood near the ruins of the Jennie D. Bell, the Chesapeake’s last sailing freight schooner, run aground and left to rot in the 1960s.”

Jeff – My paper route included a mile of houses down Riverside Drive, along the Wicomico River, the same road where my high school cross country team would often run. I had a bike with baskets on either side of my back wheel and loved to learn to throw a rubber banded paper as close to the customer’s preferred spot as possible.

“The place felt so cut off from the rest of the world, which it was. It wasn’t until the 1950s and ’60s, after all, that new bridges over the Chesapeake made it easy for most of us to reach the mainland. Families rarely moved away.”

Jeff – The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, because it was so high up, was terrifying to drive over and today has people you can hire to drive you across it. The Bay Bridge Tunnel, at the other end of the Shore, takes you to Virginia over 17.5 miles with 2 1-mile underwater tunnels for ships entering and leaving the Bay going to Baltimore.

“That isolation (living on the Eastern Shore), combined with a lack of new blood, allowed curiosities to grow, just like they might in a pond. Delmarvans were so wary of change that during the Revolutionary War some of them formed the First Battalion of Maryland Loyalists to fight for the crown. During the Civil War, Maryland joined the Union, but much of Delmarva remained sympathetic to the Confederacy, so much so that Harriet Tubman, who was born on the Eastern Shore in the county north of mine, had to keep her Underground Railroad underground even in the Free State, as Maryland was nicknamed in 1864.”

Jeff – Today, Maryland has the 3rd highest percentage of Democrats in the nation (after Massachusetts and Vermont), but the entire Eastern Shore votes Republican, much to the chagrin of my late father, an ardent Democrat strongly engaged in the local Democrat party (he sent me to a Young Democrats conference when I was 14 and had me carrying signs for Monday/Ferraro at the same age! I still have one from 1984 on my car, more in memory of my father than anything else, and the only comments questions I typically get are “Who is Mondale Ferraro?” p.s. it is true that Harriet Tubman’s birthplace was in the county above us on the Shore (Dorchester) and the county above that, Talbot, in the town of Easton, is where Frederick Douglass, the “African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author” was born on the Eastern Shore.

Jeff – Speaking of history, my father grew up on the Shore (in Princess Anne) and my mother did too, starting in high school (in Centreville). They met in Ocean City, MD, when my father was working at the what was then the first hotel in OC, The Atlantic (still there today!)

Not sure if anyone has made it all the way here, but whether you did or not, I enjoyed reading Tim’s piece, especially since he is about my age, and his memories were great guides for my reflections on growing up on the Shore.