The Abingdon Ruritan Club will celebrate its 80th Seafood Festival from 3-8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, at the festival grounds in Bena.
The Abingdon Ruritan Club Seafood Festival is held twice a year on the third Wednesday of May and October.
There are eight people who have been serving at all of the 80 Abingdon Ruritan Club seafood festivals and six of them are Ruritan club members. Those members are Rupert Thomas Jr., Graham Blake, David Dea, Jon Beck, Walter Priest and L.T. Wells. Volunteer Rachel Wells and clam shucker Catherine Smith also have helped at all 80 festivals, rounding out the “Great Eight,” as they are known.
Thomas, Blake, Dea, Beck and Wells all met up at the Ruritan Club last week to look back on the 80 seafood festivals that they served and talked about how far they have come since the very first one.
“We worked good as a group and we had a lot of fun,” said Dea.
“I don’t think any of us would (have) seen what we got here today,” said Wells.
“We have done it for this long and nothing has stopped us yet,” said Beck.
“It’s hard to believe that we have done it that long,” said Blake.
The first seafood festival was planned in 1979 by L.T. Wells.
“Jon Beck and myself, we ran the festival for 20 something years and then some. Two of us ran the festival and now it takes 40 people to do all of the ordering and stuff,” said Wells.
Wells said that it all started with a fish fry that was held at Gloucester Point. Tickets were about $15 at the time and the menu is the same as it was. Ben Garrett told Wells that he should start a seafood festival and that he thought he could do it. Wells said he was unsure at the time. Before he would undertake the first seafood festival, he would go to different seafood festivals to learn what they did so that he could learn from their mistakes.
“When we started, people said we would never get it off the ground,” said Wells.
There were about 600 tickets sold at that first seafood festival.
“500 tickets was the goal and we sold 600,“ said Dea. Wells said that they increased the number of tickets every year and today there are 2,200 tickets to sell.
“We would have never had our first one without Tommy Shackelford, Buck Rowe and Sydney Phelps,” said Wells.
Dea, who has been a member of the Abingdon Ruritan Club since 1966, said at the first seafood festival they had a 16’x8’ wide table and a 2’x4’ frame down the side a piece of canvas over it. He said they did that for the first three or four years.
When the third seafood festival came around, Wells said that someone had suggested that they should have two festivals a year. Since 1985, the Abingdon Ruritan Club Seafood Festival has been held twice every year, on the third Wednesday of May and the third Wednesday of October.
The most memorable Seafood Festival was the one they had in 1994 and all six of them helped pull 175 cars out of the mud.
“It rained and it rained and it rained,” said Wells. Thomas said that Larry Oliver had equipment and helped pull some of the cars out of the mud.
The lingering question is why do they do it and the simple answer is that they do it to support their community.
“Why do we do it? It is all about supporting our community through donations,” said Mary Lou Privott.
The Abingdon Ruritan Club donates money from their fundraisers to multiple local and national organizations and they also give scholarships.
Tickets are available at the following locations in Gloucester: Tillage Automotive (804-642-1814), Whitley Peanuts (804-642-1975), and Hogge Real Estate (804-693-5410). You can also get tickets from a Ruritan club member.
Tickets are $75 which includes all-you-can-eat oysters, fried, roasted, and on the half-shell; clams in a chowder, fritter or on half-shell; fried and grilled scallops; fried fish; hush puppies; steamed shrimp; steamed crabs; Hawaiian shrimp; BBQ with coleslaw; French fries; cake and ice cream; wine and cheese as well as beer, wine, mixed drinks (no shots), soft drinks, tea, coffee and water. There is also free parking and entertainment by the Tidewater Drive Band.