THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 29, 1994 TAG: 9406290356
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
DATELINE: 940629 LENGTH: Medium
But there's a happy ending.
{REST} Beverley Burke-McGhee, who founded five years ago the Norfolk bookstore with the unlikely name, will continue to find out-of-the-way titles for customers. (To reach her, call 627-READ.)
``It gives me so much joy to see people hugging a book they never thought they'd see again,'' Beverley said Tuesday.
And she'll go on doing creative writing and teaching at Tidewater Community College in Norfolk.
A native Norfolkian, she had worked in two bookstores in downtown Richmond while studying at the University of Richmond.
``It had always been my intention to open a bookstore,'' she said.
The year after her husband died in St. Louis, she gave up her job as a technical writer for defense contractors and returned to Norfolk to sell books and stay in touch with her three children in nearby cities.
People who love books ``are neither stupid nor dishonest,'' she discovered. ``I never checked identities of customers from anywhere in the world,'' she said, ``and in five years I had only one bad check.''
People who love to read are wise, Beverley said.
She recalls seeing her father, the Rev. Kenneth Burke of the Burrows Memorial Baptist Church, holding a book in his hand and telling her as a child: ``If you knew everything about this book, you'd know everything about everything.''
She was, she said, born reading.
Well, not quite; but a school-teaching aunt taught her to read before she entered Taylor School.
``I always had books. If you read to your children at birth at the latest, it almost guarantees they will enjoy reading and be good readers. It's the most important thing you can do to start their education.''
As a child, she learned never to leave home without three things: Kleenex, a sweater and a book.
If she's caught in traffic, it's almost panic time until she reaches back in the car and finds a book.
``I'm thinking up a word that means fear of running out of something to read,'' she said.
She enjoyed every minute at the bookshop. It's been a happy place for everybody.
Once, Shelton Croome reprinted copies of posters advertising the old Gaiety Theater, picturing Rose La Rose, exotic burlesque star.
``He did them in the same garage on the same press he had used in printing them in 1942,'' she said.
Those reprints, on sale at the bookstore, inspired recollections. One customer recalled he had asked his father if he could go to the Gaiety.
```Certainly not!'' his father said.
``Why not?'' he asked.
``Because you might see something you shouldn't.''
``But,'' the customer recalled, ``I sneaked into the Gaiety anyway, and sure enough, I saw something I shouldn't. I saw my father.''
That's what she'll miss most, funny stories from her readers. by CNB