Juanita
Smith is a retired Executive Director of Human Resources for the Defense
Logistics Agency; President of Kingdom Building Equipping School, a former
teacher of the East Beach Bible study group and author of the book What I Believe.
Juanita
has a unique connection to what is now called East Beach. More than 60 years
ago as a child, she played on this beach at a time when it was then called
“City Beach”. Her grandparents were beach caretakers who lived in a cinderblock
house behind the chain-link fence that enclosed the beach. Their job was to
open the gate in the morning and close it in the evening after the last beach
goers left. An annual visit to her grandparents’ house was considered her
“summer vacation”. Juanita, her siblings and cousins spent many happy days playing
on the hot sand, splashing in the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay,
crabbing and climbing the large rocks that separated the bay from the Little
Creek Channel where navy ships and commercial boats crisscross daily.
She
is a Norfolk native, who after graduating from Norfolk State University and
working locally for twenty-five years as a civil servant for the navy in Human
Resources, moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where she was promoted to a Senior
Executive Service position for the Department of Defense. After retirement,
Juanita and her husband, Willie decided to relocate to Norfolk, with the
thought of purchasing a condo by the bay.
Their
search for a beach front condo did not go as they planned. They consider it
serendipitous that they discovered a community called East Beach still in the
development stage. A builder friend showed them blueprints of a large brick
house situated on an unpaved street close to the bay. Though it was not quite
what they initially imagined for a retirement home, it felt right and it was
clearly a wonderful opportunity. In a matter of days, they contracted to
purchase it and became the first East Beach home owners.
It
was only after the purchase of their “house by the bay” did Juanita experience
an epiphany. She suddenly realized: “This is the old City Beach, the place
where my grandparents lived in the ’50s and where I, as a child, spent my
summers playing on the hot sand.” The small cinderblock house they lived in had
been replaced by a construction staging area, but the locked chain-link fence,
and more importantly, the memories were still firmly in place. She had come a
long way from summers spent with family on City Beach to retirement at East
Beach.
She says, “Finding East Beach was like going to the
beach looking for a particular grain of sand---and finding it.”
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