Karen Shaud reflects on life above the Bottle & Cork

It's been more than 50 years since Karen Shaud was last serenaded to sleep by a band playing Brahm's Lullaby at the Bottle and Cork, but she still remembers it clearly.

Her bedroom was on the second floor, right above where the band played, said Shaud, from her home on Rehoboth Bay in the Sea Breeze community just north of Dewey Beach.

“It was just a organist and drums in those days, but I when I heard them play that, I knew it was time to go to bed,” she said.

Shaud’s parents, Harry and Virginia, usually known as Ginger, bought what was Jack’s Café in 1937 and turned it into the Bottle & Cork.

Looking back on it now, opening the bar was a smart business move, said Shaud, but there were times when that was far less clear.

When Shaud’s parents came to Dewey Beach in the mid-1930s, the town was little more than a few houses and her parents' bar. Shaud said south of Dewey to the Indian River Inlet was pretty much marsh.

Reading a quote from her dad in a 1950s news article, Shaud said there was a time shortly after purchasing the property and making the move that her parents began to question themselves.

People thought it was nuts to buy the property for $7,500, and for the first few years it seemed as if they were right, Harry said in the article.

Shaud said her parents got the idea of coming to Dewey after her father had managed a bar in Key West shortly after the end of prohibition. She said her parents were working-class people who liked the idea of living near the beach.

Half a century later, Shaud's memories of her time living above the Bottle & Cork are vivid.

Shaud said one of her favorite things to do was to explore the storage room, especially in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. It was great fun rummaging through all the party favors that were going to be handed out to the customers, she said.

Shaud’s birthday is in July, and twice while her parents owned the Bottle & Cork, it fell on a Sunday, which meant she was allowed to have her birthday party in the bar.

Those parties were highlights of her childhood, she said. The sawdust was thrown down on the floor, the music would be playing in the jukebox and "we would just dance up a storm," she said.

Shaud said as she got older, she and her friends would climb out onto the roof of the bar from the second floor windows and watch customers come and go. It’s possible that sometimes things would fall on their heads, she said with an innocent, "Who, me?" tone.

Not surprisingly, Shaud said, a Dewey Beach bar in the 1930s, '40s and '50s attracted some interesting characters, who occasionally stopped by the house.

People who came to the Bottle & Cork were always nice to the neighborhood kids, Shaud said. Everyone knew each other and protected each other.

She said the town’s lifeguards knew all the local kids, and if the water was rough, they were still allowed to play in the water because the lifeguards knew the locals could handle it.

Shaud and all her friends would spend every day at the beach or exploring in the bay. She said one of their favorite activities was catching a bucket of minnows in the morning and then selling them to Mack’s Bait and Tackle for 50 cents.

“We got a kick out that,” she said.

Living above the bar was fun for Shaud, but for her parents, she remembers it being all about the business. Shaud said her dad was a hands-on owner who kept the place clean and comfortable for guests, and her mother handled the money and did the books so her dad could focus on the bar.

“That’s what they had to do,” she said. “Typical small business owners.”

Shaud’s father had an unusual business practice, she said: he closed the bar at 4 p.m. on Saturdays to clean and restock. Shaud said her dad was meticulous with the bar, but this practice also prevented customers from hanging around and drinking all day.

“They’d come back later in the evening, and the place would be clean and ready to go, and they’d be a little more sober,” she said with a wry smile.

Another trick used by Shaud’s father to keep people from becoming too intoxicated was serving food. They were famous for their ham sandwiches, said Shaud, holding her hands more than six inches apart indicating how high the meat was piled. She said they also offered pickled eggs and little pizzas.

Try as the Shauds might, customers occasionally did drink too much, and in those cases, said Shaud, the cash register always had an extra $5 or $10 so a taxi could be called.

“It was a pretty tightly run organization.”

The Shauds ran the business for two decades before selling it in the mid-1950s when she was 12. Family legend, said Shaud, was that her dad came up from a day's work and told her mother he just couldn’t go back down there.

Shortly afterwards, the bar was sold, but the couple didn't want to leave coastal Delaware, so they moved to Elizabeth Street in the Sea Breeze neighborhood just north of Dewey – a stone's throw away from the Bottle & Cork.

Small business owners at heart, Shaud's parents then opened a real estate business, Shaud’s Real Estate, which had an office right on Rehoboth Avenue, in what is now the men’s clothing store Rock Creek.

Shaud describes the Dewey Beach of her childhood as simply being a different place from today's Dewey.

“When I was young, the kids would just run wild on the streets,” she said of her preteen years. “Then as teenagers, it was like living in almost two different worlds. During the winter it was this close-knit community where everybody knew each other, and during the summer, there would be all these new people coming into town.”

Shaud said the thing that really changed the small beach town was getting central sewer. She said that meant houses could be built much closer together, and it invited other businesses to open.

Shaud said she’s never really minded the changes that have taken place in Dewey over her lifetime.

When people complain that the character of Dewey is being ruined, what are they complaining about,  she asks rhetorically. Answering her own question sarcastically, she said, what's been changed is the old moldy beach shacks built on concrete slabs.

“Change happens. Why get all excited about it?” she said.