May 13, 2012


Walt Whitehurst was telling stories about his great-uncle Oscar Mosely, who lived out back of the home where he grew up.

We sat sipping apple juice and ice tea in their comfortable house on Princess Anne Road. His wife, Betty, was in the kitchen fixing a three-salad lunch.

“The funniest one is about the lawyer,” she called out from the kitchen.

“Oh, the lawyer,” he said, warming to his task. “Uncle Oscar happened to come upon some sort of conflict, and so he was asked to go to court. So when the lawyer was interviewing him, he said, ‘Do I understand that you said such and such about it?’

“Uncle Oscar replied, ‘I can’t know what you understand, but if you did you ain’t got no understanding at all.’”

Stories about Oscar and many other folks from the little community of Pungo in southeastern Virginia Beach inhabit the new book, Pungo Tales Two: Some Old, Some New, by Walter A. Whitehurst.

As the name suggests, this is the second book about the unincorporated town probably best known for the Pungo Strawberry Festival – or is it the Witch of Pungo? – that Whitehurst has authored. Some of the stories are those told by friends, others stem from eulogies he delivered over the years as pastor of Charity United Methodist Church.

Some are funny, some droll, some as flat as the farm fields that stretch out in all directions in that part of the world.

There’s the story, as told by Chet Dorchester, of the time he and his wife, Faye, had a baby while living in Milwaukee. He tried to call her parents in Back Bay with the news, but it was midnight and he couldn’t get through to them, so he called a neighbor. The neighbor was too sleepy and by the next morning couldn’t remember any of the details.

But the telephone operator – in those days of hand-cranked phones, operators sometimes remained on the line – didn’t miss anything.

When the new grandmother called her, she said without hesitation, “Faye had a baby last night and it was a boy and they named him Chester Donald Dorchester and he weighed 8 ½ pounds.”

Then there’s the story of William “Tug” Jones, as told by Joe Burroughs, a lifelong friend of the author. Joe was then farming strawberries and each spring Tug Jones would arrive with an old school bus packed with laborers to help pick them.

“Tug’s wife, Florence, was also an entrepreneur. She prepared food and took it to sell in the places where the laborers were working. Among the many things she sold, pig’s ear sandwiches were the most popular. . .”

“Joe had a pet dog named Andrew Jackson, who loved to hang around the field as strawberries were being picked. He soon learned that there were lunches on the bus, and he would sneak on the bus and smell the lunch bags. Whenever he found one that had pork shops, he would grab it and run. Then someone would shout. ‘Get that dog. He’s got my lunch.”

Or one about an alligator, a chicken and a goat, as told by Janet Simons.  Her husband, Billy, was close friends with David Kellam, who at one time or another owned all three of these animals as pets.

One day the alligator, which had grown to three feet long, disappeared down the furnace piping in the den of the Kellam house near Princess Anne Courthouse.

“Then a repairman came to do some repairs on the house, and it was necessary for him to go under the house. All of a sudden the people inside the house heard loud shouts and a ‘bump bump’ sound, after which the man reappeared with his head skinned and bleeding from hitting the beams as he was rushing to get out as soon as possible. The alligator had been found!”

There is also: Goldie Bartee, who fulfilled a lifelong dream of  riding a motorcycle – on her 100th birthday – in a church parking lot.

And, are you ready? The chorus of The Pungo Song, “Crossroads of the World,” by Roland Lakey:
         
         
Meet me at the stop light down in Pungo,
          Be there by 8:30 if you can;
          You’ll find this country girl
          At the crossroads of the world,
          Where Indian River crosses Princess Anne.

Walt and Betty spent several years as missionaries in Latin American countries. She taught English and Spanish to elementary, secondary and college students. When they moved to Pungo it was to a house on the farm where he grew up.


(Whitehurst will sell and autograph copies of his book at the Pungo Strawberry Festival May 26 and 27.)


Photo: Betty and Walt Whitehurst during the Pungo Strawberry Festival, 2008. She was Honorary First Lady and Witch of Pungo and he was Honorary Mayor of Pungo. Courtesy of the Whitehursts.