It is one of the onerous burdens of boomers today — the stuff.
The massive cabinets of Wedgwood wedding china that no one wants. The boxes of clothing and bins of memories. Clearing it out is a liberating process for some. Sad for many.
“Two years. You need two years to do all of it,” said Mary Beth Cox, 79, who just sold her Georgian colonial dream home in Northern Virginia after sorting, donating and tossing the stuff her grown kids won’t take.
They’re moving to a condo in Tysons. “It’s all concrete and glass,” Cox marveled.
Her husband, Tom, has his beloved tomato plants potted and ready to replant on his son’s acreage. He’s wistful about the move. A little apprehensive to be without the sprawling yard, the workshop, a daily mission.
Cox was running the gamut of emotions. Then, she stumbled across a mystery — a box, forgotten in the basement for 20 years.
“These photo albums. I just can’t remember how I got them,” she said on a recent weekday, carefully opening the one with a U.S. Naval Academy crest on the cover to reveal a world of shirtless young sailors, fedora hats, babies, farmhouses, grandmothers and a meeting with Pope Pius XI — all from the 1930s.
Cox owned a shop in Arlington that specialized in military items and memorabilia, naval in particular.
The Ship’s Hatch has been a beloved staple of the Pentagon crowd in Crystal City. They were known for their Top Gun hats for a while. “Even Playboy magazine wrote about us,” she said, about one of those articles that everyone said they bought the magazine for. The White House called them once to buy all their flag pins. They were the go-to for personalized military promotion gifts and awards.
So Cox figured someone must’ve brought the albums to her at the shop decades ago, and she didn’t know what to do with them. So into a box they went.
She got in touch with me with the one clue she had, a name on the album cover — Richard G. Colbert.
It took a quick Google search to find that the striking man (they all looked like movie stars in those black-and-white photos) became four-star Adm. Colbert, who headed a fleet of 50 ships, became commander in chief of allied NATO forces in southern Europe and was president of the U.S. Naval War College.
Even our junk is consequential in the DMV, y’all.
But the admiral died at 58, of cancer. Cox tried to get in touch with the U.S. Naval Academy about donating the photos, but it was an intimidating process that — unsurprisingly for the military — involved a lot of red tape.
“Although there is some historic value to the albums, including an audience with the Pope, I have come to the conclusion that I need to return these albums to his remaining family,” she said in an email to me. “Hopefully some of them are still in Bethesda. I am wondering just how I can reach out to them and help to get the albums back in the right hands.”
On it.
I quickly found the folks who could be remaining family members and sent out emails. Some unrelated Colberts probably sent me right into their spam folders. Not Melissa Colbert, 72, who lives in Silver Spring now, but can never forget her time as a little girl, when she lived in a villa overlooking the Gulf of Naples as the daughter of an admiral.
“We’d hop out on the boat and go to Capri for a swim,” she remembered. “I know I’ll never have a lifestyle like that again.”
So Cox and Colbert arranged a meeting at Cox’s Lorton home and invited me to join.
We spent an afternoon trying to figure out who was in the photos and where and when they were taken.
There were shots from the French Riviera, presumably on the traditional cruise Naval Academy graduates took. Italy. The academy. Classy settings with cocktails in coupes. Sailors in uniform.
The photos were held on pages with corner stickers and had the neat printing of an engineer telling us who was in them: “SHRIMPIE,” “BULL,” “RED,” “BUDDY,” “DUKE” and the “SHIP’S CAT.”
The hypermasculine nicknames were profoundly unhelpful in identifying person and place. (Shrimpie was dreamy, by the way.) There were no dates. Then, finally, a program for a holiday event in 1934.
Colbert had never seen the photos, and she turned the pages to see her dad as a young man and her aunts and cousins as babies and toddlers in Pennsylvania.
“I know some of the family has never seen these either,” she said.
The photos help paint a clearer picture, even in black-and-white, of a father she really knew little about. She grew up knowing he was important, but he wasn’t the kind for war stories at the knee. He was often on a ship, far away. Or distant even when he was on land.
“I was going to marches against the war,” Colbert said, remembering the wide gap between a daughter and her dad.
They shook their heads with a little hint of sadness.
“I just don’t know who wants any of this stuff anymore,” Colbert said, thinking aloud about her remaining relatives.
“Maybe I’ll try the Naval Academy,” she said.