When you’re 130 years old, you start showing your age. Your petticoat starts to droop a wee bit. Your lower regions begin to creak and your parts start to sag a little. But if you’ve got spirit, you adopt the Fred Astaire /Ginger Rogers approach to life. “You pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. And Start all over again.” And that is exactly what the Chalfonte Hotel does each summer. Located at the corner of Howard Street and Sewell Avenue, she shakes the dust off, readjusts her petticoat and opens her arms wide, welcoming guests back for another summer in Cape May. A summer Chalfonte-style.
You know, a grande dame never compromises her standards. The times may have changed, but this lady still preserves a genteel life void of distractions. The Chalfonte offers guests, staff and visitors a chance to go back to a simpler time and she stands proud of the fact that the rooms have no air conditioning, no television, no telephone service, no Jacuzzi. What she does offer is the best in Southern hospitality – good food, a chance to stay a spell and rock on the spacious wrap-around porch and a chance to learn the fine art of conversation.
Her allure is strong and once hooked, people keep coming back. Take for example the volunteers who come from all over the U.S. every spring and fall to participate in the Chalfonte Volunteer Work Weekends. Now in its 23rd year, the volunteers help get the great lady ready and fresh for another season.
Folks like “Mac” MacDonald haven’t missed a year yet. Mac is from Freehold, NJ, holds a PhD in electrical engineering and tends to work on Lady Chalfonte’s plumbing when he comes to town. The two are intimately acquainted that way. Mac even looks like a disgruntled lover when we chat with him one rainy Saturday afternoon.
His long, lean body rests on a chair on the wrap-around porch. He looks about him. “I always arrive a little bit aggravated. And I always leave just a little more aggravated. The job is vastly greater than the work we put into it, but I do as much as I can, as often as I can.”
Oh? She’s a little needy, is she? Our question is, why do you keep coming back? He owned a Victorian house once and became so preoccupied with renovating it, he eventually sold it. Work Weekends at the Chalfonte allow him the pleasure of working on an old house and the satisfaction of knowing he can walk away from it. But he doesn’t seem to walk away for very long. There are eight, sometimes nine, Work Weekends a year. Mac usually attends six or more of them. He especially likes the spring Work Weekends when there is so much to do and so little time to do it. He never returns in the summer for a visit – “too many people.” But he has brought his children along with him over the years to help get her in shape. Now, the children are all grown and either have little time and or living too far way to join him.
He looks up at the Chalfonte as clouds begin to darken again. “The building is really beautiful and Cape May is beautiful,” he says and we know that he’ll be back again. Her allure is just too strong for him to stay away.
Betty Merchak is equally smitten. This is her 29th time – her 16th year coming to Work Weekends and she has kept a diary of every room she has stayed in, chronicling the work which was done to each room. “I started coming here in the 80s with my girlfriends,” she says. She kept coming back when the girlfriends found other ways to spend their weekends and when she married her husband John, he joined her and now, they come to the Chalfonte together.
“I love meeting old friends (who are also long-time participants) and it’s such a feeling of accomplishment to know that I’m helping to keep the Chalfonte going. The first time I came to a Work Weekend, I was amazed at what it was all about.”
People who come to the Chalfonte, be they volunteers, guests or staff all say the same things. They love getting to know Ann LeDuc (who owns the Chalfonte, along with her partner Judy Bartella). “Coming here is like coming home to family,” said one guest. “A family that doesn’t fight.”
And if you pick up her petticoats just a smidge and take a peek underneath, there have been a lot of family members throughout the years, literally and figuratively beginning with Col. Henry Sawyer, a Civil War hero, who built the Chalfonte as a boarding house called, appropriately enough, Sawyer’s Boarding House in 1875. By 1876, he’d changed the name to the Chalfonte (which means cool fountain in French) Hotel. In 1878, (the same year as the Great Fire which reduced the city’s hotel occupancy from 2200 to 200 in just one night), Sawyer decided to build an addition to the boarding house, thus more than doubling the rooms from 18 to 37. Sawyer sold the Chalfonte in 1888.
Between 1888 and 1911 the hotel changed hands six times and was sold at Sheriff’s sale twice. Fortunately for the Chalfonte, the Satterfield family of Richmond, Virginia stepped in and put a stop to all that nonsense. By the time the Satterfields bought the hotel, one of the owners had added yet another addition increasing her capacity by 23 more rooms and enlarging her dining room.
With the Satterfields came stability, sort of. The Chalfonte finally had owners who loved her for what she was – a grande dame with certain temperamental quirks. Susie Satterfield and her husband Calvin, Sr. bought the Chalfonte in 1911. Mary (Meenie) Satterfield and her husband Calvin Jr. bought her in 1920. Calvin Jr. proved not to be the best businessman in the whole wide world and nearly lost her to Sheriff’s sale in 1933 when mom stepped in and bought her back for $200. Calvin turned around and bought it back from his mother’s heirs in 1940. Calvin Jr. died in 1943 and his wife Meenie Satterfield ran it until 1973.
Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Anne LeDuc spent almost all of her summers as a little girl at the hotel. Her mother was a great friend of Calvin Jr.’s. When she got to be a bit older, she worked summers at the hotel and in 1973 she and her colleague Judy Bartella took over the management of the hotel. Ten years later, Meenie was thinking about selling the hotel to some people who needed a boarding house for summer help. Anne and Judy approached Meenie about selling the hotel to them instead and it was a done deal, as they say. Neither Anne nor Judy nor Meenie nor anyone else associated with hotel wanted to see it put into the hands of “strangers.”
The Chalfonte traditions and family connections don’t end there, by any means. When the Satterfields came north for the summer, they brought their staff, including Clementine Young, who worked as the head chambermaid at the Chalfonte for 60 years and who brought with her, her young daughter Helen. Helen Dickerson went on to become the head chef for the Chalfonte. She started working in the kitchen in 1920. Her recipes for Southern Fried Chicken, Buttermilk Biscuits and dinner rolls have been sought after by the likes of Bon Appétite magazine and Phil Donahue. Eventually, Cissy Finley Grant, Public Relations Director for the hotel in 1986, followed her around the kitchen and stopped Helen mid-point to ask her how much salt, how much butter and how can we reduce this recipe from feeding 150-200 to ah, I don’t know, say 4-6 people. For someone who had never before measured anything, it was a hard road to hoe, but they did it. The result was I Just Quit Stirrin’ When The Tastin’s Good, now in its third printing.
Helen died in 1990 but her daughters continue her Southern recipes. Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson continue to rein over the Chalfonte kitchen with the help of Chef Chris Cleary. That makes 86 years of one family cooking the old fashioned way. We could be wrong, but we didn’t see a blender, a Cuisinart or even a small baking pan in the kitchen which has been serving guests for lo these 130 years.
Some of the guests have been staying at the hotel for 60 or 70 years. There is an archived box of letters, dating back to the 50s of guests writing to Meenie Satterfield (sometimes addressed to her Richmond home, inquiring about reservations for the coming summer.)
The lobby and foyers are filled with pictures of Helen, Dot, Lucille, Meenie, Susie and of staff who have worked at the hotel throughout the years. Once someone becomes seduced by the Chalfonte, they rarely leave her for long. Like old lovers, they feel the need to find some excuse, any excuse will do, to keep coming back.
Such was the case with Linda McCrary of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Linda first came to the Chalfonte in 1982 by way of Oklahoma, via Massachusetts. Fifteen years as a social worker had gotten to her and she took to the highway, ending up in Massachusetts. Her goal was to drive down the coastal highway all the way to Florida. While at her first stop, someone told her about the Chalfonte and decided to give her a try.
“I said to myself, this is a place I want to come back to.” And come back she did. The next year she got a job at the Chalfonte and worked, off and on there until 1996. We are sitting at a table at the back of the Magnolia Room, the Chalfonte’s main dining room. It is a room which Lynn named when she was public relations director for the hotel. As a graphic artist she felt the Chalfonte needed a little “branding.” So, the formerly named Main Dining Room is now the Magnolia Room. The cabaret room is the Henry Sawyer Room. The bar is the King Edward Room.
It is now 2006, why has she come back? To help celebrate the Chalfonte’s 130th birthday – a celebration which took place in early June. And to help get her gussied up for the coming summer season. Linda has just assisted the other volunteers organize the Children’s Dining Room (all children under eight years of age are encouraged to eat in this room). Throughout the years, she has come back for visits, sometimes bringing her nieces along for the experience.
“It’s like instant family here,” she says, “And it’s so interesting to see the new people who come to stay here now, especially when they get it.”
Which makes us wonder, what is it that they get? What is getting it?
Debra Donahue, director of public relations and marketing for the hotel, says, “The Chalfonte is kind of like Fawlty Towers meets the Golden Girls head on fast.” “Getting it,” she explains, is getting the fact that it’s better to be on vacation without televisions, telephones and play station. “Getting it,” Debra says, “is that the a.c. that people want is not air conditioning but Actual Conversation and they get the fact that the value in sitting on the porch and reading is greater than watching a rerun. These are touchstones for people of our generation who have never lived in a simpler time but can appreciate what a simpler time must have been like. They get that it’s a quirky place. A quirky microcosm and incredible, if you take the time to get to know it.”
Like all Southern ladies, the Chalfonte continues to celebrate her 130th birthday in the grande style to which she has become accustom – by welcoming all who come to visit. We here at CapeMay.com wish her a happy birthday with the hope of many more to come.
