THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606120035
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Obscure Tour
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 58 lines
BEHIND A tree-lined sidewalk in front of a neat row of white houses on Norfolk's Burksdale Road sits a 12-foot lighthouse on dry grass.
There isn't any water in sight. Not a drop.
Paul Holloway, a retired sailor, built his model of Cape Henry's lighthouse last June. ``Me and a lady friend went down the coast lookin' at all the lighthouses, and I got bit by the bug and I made a small one,'' Holloway says. ``Once I started I got a bit carried away.''
Just slightly.
In the machine-shop in his back yard, he's built a solid aluminum model of the lighthouse on Bodie Island, a swirling black and white model of the one at Cape Hatteras and a model of Cape May's. He also built several others he's either given away or sold.
All his lighthouses are equipped with flashing lights and each lighthouse has distinctive colors so that a sailor coming out of a fog can recognize where he is, Holloway says.
When most strangers catch a glimpse of the eight-sided Cape Henry model with its alternating panels of white and glossy black enamel looming up in front of 714 Burksdale Road, they put on the brakes for a look. And often a second look.
``That gets a lot of eyeballing,'' says Denny Bowman, Holloway's next-door neighbor. ``I see them look this way. Then they slow down and snap their head back around. Some go around the block to get another gander at it.''
Holloway, who's a Norfolk deputy sheriff and also a baliff at the Circuit Court, often talks to the lighthouse gazers and takes them inside, past the mailbox modeled after the landing craft he piloted in Vietnam, to show off the rest of his collection.
Leading up his staircase are pictures of lighthouses along the North Carolina coast. On his living room wall is a collection of miniature lighthouses he bought at a dollar store.
Hanging nearby is a ship's wheel circled with brass plates chronicling his tours of duty, and an anchor he made out of ship's line. Miniature sailors are scattered throughout the room on tables and shelves.
One visitor didn't want to leave.
``One man tried to buy my house just for the lighthouse,'' Holloway says. `` I told him no. He said I'll buy your house - I'll give you cash money if you include the lighthouse.''
Holloway likes to relax at night in the swing sitting off to the left of his lighthouse. And there, in front of his green-shuttered white house, by his blooming wisteria he watches the soft white light that blinks gently every evening from dusk until midnight.
``I spent 28 years in the Navy, and every time you'd come home from overseas what you'd look for was the Cape Henry lighthouse, 'cause then you knew you was home and it was only about five more hours to go.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Gary C. Knapp
Paul Holloway's backyard lighthouse, modeled on the one at Cape
Henry, turns heads on Burksdale Road in Norfolk.
KEYWORDS: MODEL LIGHTHOUSE by CNB