The Chesterfield Inn, October 2010.
The Chesterfield Inn, October 2010.
I was looking on line for some information on the old Chesterfield Inn when I came across your site. Some of the photos brought back great memories.
I made my first trip to the Chesterfield when I was about 10 months old in the fall of 1961. My parents, Bob and Carolyn Bibb, have some old video of me crawling along the beach on my belly as a baby. In the background is the Chesterfield Inn porch (much like in that photo of you in 1962 on the site). We were unable to return to the Chesterfield until about 1970. From 1970 through 1985 my parents made it a point to vacation the first or second week in August each summer at the Chesterfield. Even as I left home to attend The United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1979, I was usually able to link up with my family at the Chesterfield each summer. My parents lived in Ashland, Kentucky, and I had a younger sister named Beth. I believe 1986 was the last time i was able to go because I became an Army office was usually committed to an assignment. I was married in 1987 and actually took my wife with me to the Chesterfield for a visit one time — maybe in 1988 or 1989.…
The photographs of the dining room at the Chesterfield Inn bring back some fantastic memories. I remember Marvin, Phillip, and the Brittains, as well as several of the other waiters. We have family pictures just like the ones you put on the site also. I remember some of the same things you mention….
The food in the [dining room] was wonderful. I remember sitting in the lobby waiting for Mrs. Brittain to come to the top of the stairs and open the dinner seating. We were usually starving to death, dead tired from swimming all day, a little bit sunburned, eyes burning, smelling like salt, and all dressed up (used to be required for dinner). I remember smelling the food and trying to decide what we would eat each meal.
We always met our usual gang that included about six other families (which totaled about 10 kids) each summer and we were the crazy people who decorated the lobby with a Christmas tree and had a Christmas party in August. Sometimes after supper we would build kites or model airplanes at the table in the lobby, or play board cames, or cards. I liked to draw with charcoals/pastels and would sometimes do portraits of people over by the fireplace. As we became teenagers we would take girl/boy walks on the beach and try to sneak to the back porch to hold hands. We thought it was so cool to sit on the back porch and the rocking chairs very late at night.
We always took at least one evening to go down to the amusement park pavilion and get totally stuffed on hot dogs, cokes, taffy, and cotton candy before coming back to the pool to sit on the wall and watch the parade of cruisers out in the street (Ocean Boulevard). Coming from a small town in easstern Kentucky, we were always amazed at the people we saw when we went to the beach. We wore the out of town, military haircut, polo shirts, khaki shorts, and docker shoes that conflicted with the hippie wild culture of the beach.
I remember the precious days (a whole week seemed so long at the time) would start right after breakfast as I raced to the beach — I was usually the first person on the surf. I was the one kid who could not leave the surf until I was forced to come in for meals by my parents. I remember those blue and yellow rafts like in your picture, as I would live on one all day. I remember coming up to the pool at lunchtime to eat bologna sandwiches and cheese crackers with a Sunkist soda from the machines in the center of the newer Chesterfield building. After eating, my mom would make us rest under the palm trees in the back left corner of the pool deck by the diving board. I remember napping in the shade and watching the A-7 Corsair II fighter jets leave Myrtle Beach Air Base for their afternoon sorties. I remember listening to Beach Boys music coming from the street or the hotels next to the Chesterfield.
Pretty soon we would run back down the brick sidewalk between the buildings, across the coarse Bermuda grass, through the walking paths in the berm, to the warm sand of the beach. Many of my friends would stay at the pool or under the umbrellas in the afternoon, but I would always head for the surf. I was a competitive swimmer as a kid, and when I was about 12 I made it a point to swim from one pier (large ocean piers sticking out in the water) to the next, parallel to the beach at about 200 yards out. Many times we would go sailing or surfing with the Britt boys off the beach. One time in the mid-eighties I was returning to the States from an overseas assignment and arrived a couple of days before my family at the hotel about 8 in the evening. I had bummed a ride on a USAF cargo plane into Myrtle Beach AFB from the West Coast. Being rather resourceful, I intended to bed down in one of the third floor storage rooms or maybe in the lobby floor until my family arrived a couple of days later — all without money or permission, of course. Mrs. Brittain caught me in the lobby, and insisted on feeding me supper after hours in the dining room. They found out my parents were not due for a couple more days and they actually took me home to sleep in one of the kid's rooms at their home. It was quite humbling because they treated me like family.
Our family typically stayed on the third floor in the big family of rooms and I remember having to wait on family members to shower in the room. i would sneak down the hall to the shower in the middle of the third floor hallway to take my shower and then sit in the open window over the back porch looking out at the beach until we were all ready to go to supper. There were those little dormer rooms on one side of the hall that sometimes had a chair and table in there where we would sit and talk with our friends. We thought we were getting away with something. Many evenings we would crawl out on the roof of the back porch and lean up against the sun-warmed bricks and watch the sun set.
I definitely spent some wonderful summers at the Chsterfield Inn. The photos on your website were very thought-provoking, so I thought I would just write you a note and tell you thanks.…
Sincerely,
Brooks
(Robert Bibb)
Fort Benning, Georgia
Photograph by Henry H. Mitchell.
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Copyright © 2010–2012 Patricia B. Mitchell.