ORAL HISTORY:
Lloyd Kellam Recalls Growing Up in Cape Charles (Pt. 1)

Lloyd Kellam remembers "the way we were" in Cape Charles. (Photo: Connie Morrison, Eastern Shore News)

Lloyd Kellam remembers “the way we were” in Cape Charles. (Photo: Connie Morrison, Eastern Shore News)

November 23, 2013

(EDITOR’S NOTE:  The Cape Charles Historical Society has for more than a decade been recording oral histories of the area’s earlier days.  In 2002, as one in a series of lectures sponsored by the Cape Charles Library entitled “The Way We Were,” Cape Charles native Lloyd Kellam shared the following account.  In 2012, funded by a grant by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the recording, along with 14 others, was transcribed. The Historical Society has now made it available for readers of the Wave. All the transcriptions are also available for reading at the Museum.  In Part 1 below, Mr. Kellam recalls the German P.O.W. camp in Oyster, as well as the day a Cape Charles policeman accidentally shot and killed Mrs. Barban.  Mr. Kellam, now 79, is a long-time pharmacist who reopened his Shore Pharmacy this year in Exmore.)

My name is Lloyd Kellam. And those of you who lived here knew me before as “Brother.” Some guys in here knew me as “Sly.” Those were some of my nicknames. Everybody here during that time had a nickname, and I mean everybody! I can’t think of some people’s real names!

But anyway, it’s hard to do this, but it’s easy. One of the reasons is that I’ve had this love affair with Cape Charles all my life. And I just can’t seem to shake it, it’s like a good woman, I guess. But my thoughts of Cape Charles are maybe not the same as yours because you’re going to see my memories through a child’s eyes. I think my thoughts begin when my father went in business downtown and stopped when I went to college. Daddy opened his business in Cape Charles downtown in 1938. We had an apartment over the store. A lot of things I’m going to tell you, you’ll have to visualize. We had an apartment and when we were in the living room we looked out and saw the ferry traffic. We saw the steamers. We saw the ferries’ comings and goings. [Read more…]

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