Peninsula In Passage

Annette Tonkin Moring is Earl Eberwine’s granddaughter and remembers – My granddaddy Earl would take me to the cannery where the women in their hairnets would be packing. One woman there would put a pinch of salt in each can. I played in the empty cardboard boxes - can still remember the smell of cardboard and glue. I would only eat canned spinach although now I have a great appreciation for fresh. My grandfather used to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner with my grandmother

Annette Tonkin Moring

his assistant in the kitchen. We all had dinner around the table with nice china and silver. Grandmother did the cleanup. My grandfather loved salt and he made the best hamburgers in a cast iron skillet coated with salt. He did chicken on the stove top – it smelled and tasted so good. He would also take dogfish we caught and cut them into dogfish steaks. My grandparents had a river porch – on the river side of house and we’d eat out there in good weather. Once my grandfather got up from table, never stopped chewing, went to the door, opened it and shot a squirrel – our dinner for the next night - with his shotgun, came back and finished eating. My mother was Elizabeth Ashburn Eberwine who married William Tonkin in 1949. I grew up in the same house, built in 1951, I live in now. My mother, like her mother before, would lie down for a nap every day. Her father would come in the house saying “Doll Baby I brought you something for dinner.” My brother was four years older and he and I would get into a little boat with a 5½ hp Evinrude motor and wouldn’t get back until just before dark. We water-skied up and down Bennett’s Creek. We had ponies and horses. I went to Western Branch High School with Gin and John Harlow’s three sons. She met her husband, Mike Moring, when she was in nursing school and he was in the rescue squad with John Eberwine and others who started the squad in mid 1970s. Now he’s an assistant structural engineer with city of Norfolk and she is a nurse for gastrointestinal and liver specialists in Harbour View.

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