DATE: Friday, May 9, 1997                   TAG: 9705090688

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY KENNAN NEWBOLD, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   69 lines

FANS OF SMITH & WELTON TEAROOM GET ONE LAST OPPORTUNITY TO RELISH IT

Former customers and employees, family and friends sipped iced tea and lunched on chicken salad and piquant cheese sandwiches in the old Smith & Welton Tearoom on Thursday, reminiscent of the time when sales slips were written by hand and pillbox hats were in fashion.

It was a sentimental afternoon designed to celebrate the history of the building and to welcome its future as Tidewater Community College's new campus library.

``Smith & Welton took care of our tummies, but this new place is going to stimulate our minds,'' said guest speaker Guy Friddell, a Virginian-Pilot columnist.

``It already is reviving downtown Norfolk.''

Dr. Larry Whitworth, president of TCC, has watched the building transform from the Smith & Welton department store to the new Martin Building. Its name is a tribute to the Martin family, who donated the building to the school, and it's the same name that was chiseled into its stone in 1913.

``Today it's the Smith & Welton Tearoom. Tomorrow it will be a college,'' he told the crowd of more than 250 who had gathered to dine on what many remembered as a traditional Tearoom lunch.

Dr. John Massey, the director of Norfolk Campus Development, detailed the tremendous amount of work done to renovate and restore the 84-year-old building after Smith & Welton went out of business in 1988.

The building was stripped to its bare walls. The original marble floors were refinished. The annex was demolished and replaced with a reading garden. And the original moldings made in 1913 were restored and joined with new moldings.

``It's fitting that this luncheon, that celebrates the history of this room, is being held in the campus library, which represents the future of this room,'' Massey said. ``This room's past is seamlessly joined with the future.''

And what a past it was.

Ladies clad in bright spring dresses talked openly and fondly about their experiences at the tearoom. Several were part of the tearoom's local clientele and came every day for lunch and a slice of lemon chess pie.

Martha Beale remembers taking a toothbrush and scrubbing the parking meters and sidewalk in front of the building as part of initiation into a Maury High School sorority.

``It was humiliating because that's where all the boys were,'' she said.

The saleswomen at Smith & Welton were like mothers to Beale, who remembers them telling her, ``Martha, we don't have anything in your size. Go home and wear something in your closet.''

Friddell had similar memories of Smith & Welton employees.

``The waitresses didn't just wait on you, they looked after you. We were a family here,'' he said. ``You could look down from the balcony, watch people shop and feel superior to them. It was a lordly way to eat.''

Ann Dearsley Vernon, director of education at the Chrysler Museum of Art, felt something was missing from Thursday's lunch. She said she remembers a lot more people smoking. Her companion, Stephen Georges, agreed.

``It looked like a little cloud when you walked up the stairs,'' said Georges, a teacher at Lafayette-Winona Middle School.

Never mind that the wait staff no longer wears little pink dresses or that the counter where the perfume and cosmetics were sold is now the library's circulation desk - the building will never change for Richard F. Welton III, president of Smith & Welton department stores.

``Even though the college is here,'' he said, ``this will always be the Smith & Welton building to me.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot

Former Tearoom customers visited the college Thursday to savor

nostalgia, as well as chicken salad and piquant cheese sandwiches. KEYWORDS: TEAROOM SMITH & WELTON

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu