Truckin' on the Western Branch

Judge James “Jimmy” C. Hawks Jimmy Hawks is connected to a web of kinfolk that includes many of the early families of Churchland and Western Branch—the Carneys, Hawks, Powers, Ballards, Tarts. His mother, Charlotte Carney Hawks, a retired librarian in the Churchland Schools, was diligent about keeping up with the family and left an appreciation of their heritage to her children and grandchildren. Hawks talked about his life in Churchland as he sat in the same chair in which he, as a child, had sat in his grandfather’s lap 63 years ago. His house is on the old family farm property in Green Acres.

I told my mother I thought of her father every time I put a shovel into the earth here and she said, “Oh no, he never got his hands dirty; he was a gentleman farmer.”

This was all rural when I grew up. The dogs could run free, horses and barns were nearby, but for 25 cents you could get on a bus and go downtown for a movie. There were restaurants and stores. You could get your feet x-rayed at Hofheimers—still wondering about that! There were horse shows in a ring behind Churchland Baptist Church. We had the church, school, stores, and a bar down the street.

We used to take the horses from Speedy Waldo’s barn to pasture—rode bareback, jumped the ditch and rode along the railroad track to the pasture where the Churchland shopping center is now.

Jimmy Hawks. Image by Sheally

I lived across from the old Churchland High School in a two-story house probably built about the early 1900s. With no air-conditioning it got hot in the summer, but we had a sleeping porch on the back of the house. As a kid I used to pick up Coke bottles from the high schoolers and turn them in for three-cent deposit. In high school I could just walk across the street to school. My father, Charles Welton Hawks, was in the insurance business with Welton, Dukes, and Hawks. My mother worked in the post office, sold encyclopedias, and worked in the Churchland Elementary Library and later, at Churchland and Wilson High Schools. When I was 12 years old, I got a shotgun for Christmas. Dad was a city boy and didn’t know how to put the three pieces of the gun together but I did. I used to hunt rabbits and squirrels. A good bird shooter is like a baseball pitcher—it’s all natural. I shot the last quail in the field where the new Churchland High School is. Now I’d have to go 20 miles to find a place to hunt. That same year I watched Speedy Waldo’s granary burn down. Sparks were flying, and the football team was there to help the volunteer firefighters when a neighbor told me my house was burning. Sparks had landed on the roof and burned a hole in the shakes, but the only damage was a charred roof. Mary Ricks, hired by my family for housework, was ironing in the kitchen. She was told to leave but refused. “You do your work, I’ll do mine,” she told firefighters as they ran through the house to fight the flames, and she never stopped ironing.

I picked daffodils for Speedy Waldo and got one cent per bunch, with 25 bunches in a bucket. I loved Little League baseball, and when I got my Yankee pinstripes, I didn’t take them off for three days. I learned to sail and as a teenager spent two summers sailing all over the Chesapeake Bay and did four Newport to Bermuda races. Two state troopers—Jack Albert and Bill Miller—lived above A. W. Johnson’s store in apartments. Jack got mugged in Sugar Hill (now Harbour View). The mugger overpowered him and held his face in a mud puddle. He almost died. A posse organized in Churchland to find the mugger who finally turned himself in to Nansemond County, not Norfolk County. There was a lot of excitement over that. I graduated from Churchland in 1965—it was so much fun and teachers were so knowable, I felt at home—this was a small community. After a year at the University of Virginia, I got an apprenticeship with the Virginia Pilots Association. After only a week I was operating a pilot vessel and worked through a hurricane, but I learned it was not the career for me. I went back to UVA and found everything there had changed with the Vietnam War—from coats and ties, no women, and no black students to jeans and sandals.

Jimmy Hawks at the helm

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