CAPE CHARLES The Rittenhouse Motor Lodge, half-hidden in a grove of pines along U.S. 13, looks like it came straight out of the 1950s.
That's because it did.
Guests park their vehicles right next to the one-story building, just a few feet from the doors to their rooms, which are clean and comfortable but have no phones.
But a stay at the Rittenhouse comes with other amenities. The property is crowded with azaleas and ferns, and owner Robert M. Rittenhouse has carved a walking path next to a stream. The trail leads to an old, track-less railroad bridge -- the only one on Virginia's Eastern Shore, according to a hand-written note clipped to a tree -- and then back to the motel where you can sit on the front porch, listen to the songbirds and breathe in the sweetly fragrant gardenias.
"This is my paradise," said Rittenhouse, who has operated the motel -- and lived in an apartment in its front rooms -- for more than 50 years.
For how much longer, though, he isn't sure.
At 80, his days of motel-managing are dwindling. He's seen the 1,800-acre Bay Creek Resort developed nearby. A Wal-Mart is planned a few miles up the road. The face of the Shore is slowly changing.
"But this," said Rittenhouse of his shaded patch of bliss, "is the real Eastern Shore."
Donna Bozza, director of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Tourism Commission, described the Rittenhouse Motor Lodge as "retro before it was cool."
"It just looks like the kind of place that Lucy and Ricky would have stopped at on one of their road trips," she said. "People love it like they love the Eastern Shore because it's a throwback to a simpler, friendlier time."
Rittenhouse, born and raised on the Shore, built this place after graduating in 1951 from the College of William and Mary. His father, a lumberman, cut the wood. His mother helped him clear the land with an ax and a hatchet. He opened the motor lodge in January 1952 -- "I didn't have a soul," Rittenhouse said with a laugh -- before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which opened in 1964, replaced the ferry from the mainland. He started with 10 guest rooms; now he has 13.
The customers eventually came. Rittenhouse survived competition from chain motels and economic downturns. He taught school to supplement his income. He lost his wife, Flossie, to breast cancer after only 15 years of marriage. He raised their three children and two other boys the family took in. He never remarried.
All in all, he said, he has lived "a Norman Rockwell life."
He's not sure what will become of the motor lodge once he steps aside. His children don't want to take it over. For the right price he would consider selling the place, but he doesn't believe he'd ever sell the name.
"This is me," he said of the motel. "This is all me."
That includes his extensive collection of amber glass from one of his favorite pastimes: prowling antique shops. He's proud to show off photos of Queen Elizabeth II, whom he met in 1976 -- through an old Navy buddy who worked in the White House at the time -- when she came to Virginia for the Bicentennial.
Outgoing and personable, Rittenhouse is glad to sit on what he calls his "magical porch" with new friends or old ones and pass the time in conversation as the traffic of Route 13, the Shore's main thoroughfare, roars past and the perpetual Shore breeze wafts through.
"This is the most wonderful way to grow old," he said. "Can you imagine? I could be living down one of those necks on a porch with nobody."
On summer mornings Rittenhouse can be found, wearing flip-flops and dragging hoses, watering his garden. He's always talking about cutting back the azaleas that have gotten so tall and thick that they've created a lush fortification around the place.
"But then they bloom," he said wistfully, "and I just can't do it."
Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or wlohmann@timesdispatch.com.
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