THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 13, 1996 TAG: 9608130274
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAC DANIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 77 lines
To the uninitiated, Great Bridge Books - a ramshackle building at the corner of Mount Pleasant Road and Battlefield Boulevard - looks like it could use some sprucing up.
To owner Judith Kerr and the regulars who creak open the bookstore's knobless door, the place is perfect in its imperfection.
Too bad, customers say, that it will soon be gone.
The city is planning to widen Mount Pleasant Road in a year, and the new lane will run over a corner of the store's site.
``I have to be philosophical about this thing,'' said Kerr, 55, as she sat in the crowded nook that serves as her cashier's booth, reading room and bookshelves.
``But progress is not always what it's cracked up to be. Progress is good, but it hurts, too.''
The bookstore sits on a shaded green island surrounded by waves of traffic from Johnstown Road, Mount Pleasant Road and Battlefield Boulevard.
The property once housed an ice cream parlor where, Kerr said, you could get the best swirled ice cream cones, sit on a nearby set of bleachers and watch the traffic that once trickled by.
Kerr's building was a paint store beforehand, a dry goods store before that. Always it has served as a locus for Great Bridge.
To this day, mariners docked along the Intracoastal Waterway will walk down the street to pick up a few paperbacks for their trips. It is sometimes their only experience of Chesapeake.
The book shop's floor creaks and buckles. A large square hole in the ceiling near the fiction shelves marks where a leaky roof has won.
The store got its start during some cocktail party banter in 1974. Two bookworms - Michael Bender and Gordon Jones - were commiserating after their wives had issued a mandate: It was either them or their books.
The wives stayed on, but the books won as well. The two men decided to run a bookstore.
Their decision came just as owners of a Great Bridge paint store near Mount Pleasant Road began moving out. Bender and Jones took over the property and opened in February 1975. The store has been there ever since.
In 1980, after Jones began developing what he thought were back problems, Kerr was asked to help out. By 1984, she said she was ``hook, line and sinkered in.'' She bought the store shortly before her friend Gordon died from cancer, 10 years after opening the store.
The lease for the building is a handshake. Rent is ``very reasonable,'' Kerr said without elaborating.
You can thumb a first American edition of Orwell's ``1984'' while petting No Name, one in a series of over-affectionate felines that have resided here. There's a chair in every room. And although some of the faded and ripped wallpaper dates to the building's beginnings in the 1940s, there's still plenty of charm.
``When I first came here,'' said Kerr, ``I thought, `I'm going to make it comfortable for me so that someone can pull a book from the shelf, sit down and read.' ''
Tuesdays are Kerr's busiest days after being closed Sundays and Mondays. The place, although sometimes hard to find, can have up to 25 customers rummaging around the five rooms, trying to find that elusive tome. If she's busy, Kerr's husband Tim - the provost at Tidewater Community College's Chesapeake campus - mans the desk.
But the book store's days are numbered. Mount Pleasant Road is scheduled to become a four-lane divided roadway between Battlefield Boulevard and the Great Bridge Bypass. Bids will be taken in the fall of 1997. Construction will begin soon after. It should be completed some time in 1999.
Kerr is not too dismayed. Although she may close up the present shop next month, she said she will reopen elsewhere or sell books from her home.
Instead of having a going-out-of-business sale, she said, she plans to have a celebration sale. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
STEVE EARLEY/The Virginian-Pilot
Judy Kerr, left, owner of Great Bridge Books, compares notes on a
favorite mystery writer with Linda Gruer, right. Kerr bought the
business from two friends who started the business in 1975. ``I was
hook, line and sinkered in,'' she says. by CNB