The Marsh Road: A.M. Foley

The Marsh Road

by A.M. Foley

As I write this, I’m in the throes of what passes in my house as decluttering. Under the guise of cleaning out old files, I’m actually lingering on memory lane with some unique people I’ve been so lucky as to interview since migrating east of the Bay.

Thank goodness I got to Elliott Island before all the old-timers from the early 1900s passed on. In fact, I came in the 1970s, in large part, just to live among those amazing people. Even here, life was getting somewhat homogenized, probably starting in the 1950s with the island’s first television set. When I got here in the ’70s, WBOC’s Scorchy Tawes still telecast in authentic Eastern Shore dialect, but Salisbury’s other TV reporters spoke the universal media tongue pegged as Midwestern.

Newly arrived on the island, I was welcomed to sit in Nora Foxwell’s store. At first, I had trouble following conversations swirling among my neighbors who met