Truckin' on the Western Branch

“Growing up, we were poor but had a house on Sunray Avenue and always had a farm where we raised cows, corn, beans, and vegetables,” she said. “My father was a businessman and opened the 19th Hole Driving Range and Charlie’s Place near Ahoy Acres on Airline Boulevard.”

Rohlf went to Sunray Elementary School where she met her future husband, Dennis Rohlf. When they married in 1960, her parents gave them an acre of land not far from her grandmother’s. They built the house where Rohlf still lives and raised two daughters.

“Big rains filled the ditches in front of the house and the kids went swimming in them,” she said.

She remembers the merger that moved Bowers Hill from Norfolk County to the new city of Chesapeake, “The merger was a part of life—now we had outhouses in a bigger city.”

“Bowers Hill used to have a reputation as a rough neighborhood, especially the boys,” she said. “But I’ve enjoyed Sunray all my life—a nice quiet place to live where the neighborhood is still close.”

John Skrobiszewski , a retired Dean of Mathematics, Science and Language Arts at Tidewater Community College, talked about his grandfather, Jan Zawada, who moved to Sunray from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley about 1910 after seeing a newspaper ad offering land for sale. He settled in a one-story house left behind when the lumber company moved out. As the family grew, he raised the house on pilings and built a concrete foundation and first floor underneath to make more room. He led the Sunday prayer services in that home before the first church was built.

Years later Skrobiszewski’s father, Russell Ladislaus Skrobiszewski, a young sailor and Polish, frequented Bowers Hill on leave.

“He knew there would be stills in the canals and lots of winemaking,” John Skrobiszewski said, adding that when his father, who was 32, asked Marie Zawada, who was 28, to go to a movie with him, her father insisted on riding along in the back seat.

The couple married in 1934 and bought 12 acres from the Zawada family when her father died. Russell Skrobiszewski was away in the Navy all during World War II and retired as a lieutenant. John Skrobiszewski grew up on that farm and remembered, my father had a small John Deere and we raised soybeans, wheat, and corn. We had no hired hands. The family—my parents, my two older brothers, Edward and Ladislaus, sister, Marie, and me—did all the work. The youngest brother, Francis, was too young to work. My little sister, Claire, died of whooping cough when she was eight months old, and we all felt guilty for bringing the whooping cough home.

Joan and John Skrobiszewski. Image by Sheally

We had two acres of cucumbers that seemed like two million. (At least one year, Sunray was credited with raising two million pounds of cucumbers.) It was hot and buggy out there. We used a forked stick to move the leaves to find cucumbers. We picked the ones that were too big and put them aside (we could eat them), but all the others we packed in crates. Then we

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