Peninsula In Passage

We lived in the old farmhouse that had two big attic closets off the upstairs hallway and we played in them a lot. My parents’ car was a Whippet and I remember my mother getting stuck in a rut on the dirt road to the Planters Club where she took us to swim. I surprised my parents by stepping forward to join Beech Grove when I was only 5-years- old but the preacher said I must know what I was doing and told them to let me join. I went to the crossroads all the time and worked at both Arthurs’ and Brinkley’s stores. Mr. Arthur was the greatest postmaster in the world, opening at 7 a.m. and not closing until 9 or 10 at night and letting us charge the costs. I graduated from Chuckatuck High School in 1944. They were the war years so we had no prom, but a picnic instead. Virginia Arthur Parker was in my class. Planters Club was the social place for parties, dances and weddings.

I started Virginia Tech during the summer I was 16. I was ready to go and the high schools only went to 11th grade then. While I was at Tech, Peggy Savage invited me to a dance at James Madison. She was 21 and I was 24 when we got married. We had two children, Hinton, Jr., and Margaret Duke. After Tech I worked for the National Bank in auditing and was in the Navy as a seaman apprentice. When I got out I worked for U.S. Plywood. I got into the cemetery business by accident. Peggy was out of town at a cousin’s wedding and talked to someone in the cemetery business. She came home and told me that’s what we should do. We built

Hinton D. Hurff at VA Tech

Meadowbrook Memorial Gardens on Shoulder’s Hill Road from a plowed field in 1960. Where Harbour View is now there were a bunch of farms with family cemeteries. We moved a whole cemetery to Meadowbrook. The names of the deceased in the Meadowbrook mausoleum read like a register of families in the area and include D. C. Glover and Chandler Harper. The Hurffs sold after 20 years when he was 53 but he retired for only a year. He went back to work in 1982 as president of Greenlawn Memorial Gardens, just down the road in Chesapeake. He served on the Obici Hospital Board for 23 years, on the Suffolk Industrial Authority’s Planning Committee and as the community’s unofficial ambassador for life.

Hinton and Peggy Hurff at Madison College

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