Dan Tabler: A Century of Chronicling Centreville’s History and Living to Tell the Tale

Centreville’s Dan Tabler turned 98 last October, and though he’s not the very oldest of our citizens, there aren’t many people around who have enjoyed a better front row seat to the past century of local history.

A hundred years ago, just before Dan was born in 1924, Centreville was one of the political, commercial, and cultural hubs of the Eastern Shore. There were already paved sidewalks, electric streetlights, and municipal utilities. Industry included a flour mill, a shirt factory, and a carriage shop. There was, as always, our historic courthouse. Churches. Taverns. Hotels. The citizens of Centreville enjoyed both the protection of a long established fire department and entertainment venues that included movie theaters and an opera house. A National Guard armory would soon be built and become home to Maryland’s valiant Company K. Possessing a reputation for ties to old-fashioned tradition and empowered by the financial clout of the area’s robust agricultural production, the Queen Anne’s County seat, with a population of about a third of the current 4,735, was considered to be a pretty typical modern small town of the 20^th century’s first decades.

Dan is originally from West Virginia. His dad had been a bank examiner before the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The family scraped by until 1933 when a friend gave Ray Tabler a lead that there was “a little bank on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that needs an executive officer to get open.” Ray moved here to help reorganize and reopen the Centreville National Bank. Dan and his mom soon followed.

Those years brought many changes to Centreville and the surrounding area. State roads paved over old dirt and oyster shell byways. Historic properties were sold to Eastern Shore newcomers with deep pockets. Watermen and farmers were struggling to make a living and searched for new techniques and markets to expand their customer base. Kennard High School opened in 1936 and for the first time in county history black students were offered an opportunity to expand their education to the upper grades.

Meanwhile, railroad trains, baseball, and writing loomed large in young Dan Tabler’s interests.

In the 1930s, the train steamed into Centreville in the morning and evening. When the kids heard the approaching locomotive’s whistle blow, they’d jump on their bikes and ride to the station so they could help the conductor turn the train back out of town on the roundtable. Dan was one of those kids.

The Centreville Colts joined the Eastern Shore Baseball League in 1937 as an affiliate team for the Boston Red Sox. Dan remembered how the town would shut off the streetlights during night games so both the ballgame and the nearby canning company could keep the power up and running. Dan’s always loved baseball. It became one of the many topics he covered when he started his first newspaper column for the Record Observer at the age of 15.

Dan graduated from Centreville High School in 1941 and attended The Citadel Military College in South Carolina. America entered World War II soon after his 18^th birthday and he was stationed at Camp Lee, now Fort Gregg-Adams, a quartermaster training center. Dan, who always knew he wanted to be a “newspaper guy” was assigned to the camp’s PR office where for two and a half years “I was able to do what I wanted to do,” which was writing about camp life, including the celebrities who came through on USO tours. When he returned to Centreville in 1945, he walked into the editor’s office at the Record Observer and was told, “There’s your desk, sit down.”

Dan became a dedicated Goodwill Fire Company volunteer in 1946. Established in 1889, Goodwill is the county’s oldest existing fire department and Dan has served in many leadership positions over the decades including president and historian. 1946 also happens to be the year the Centreville Orioles, in their one year of existence, won the Eastern Shore League Championship before playing their namesake Baltimore pros in a game that brought out over 1,600 fans. Dan covered and helped call the game.

In 1948, Dan married hometown girl Ruth Butler. Same first name as his mom. Went on to be a nurse and longtime hospice worker.

Their daughter June was born in 1949.

The next half of the 20th Century kicked off in earnest with the opening of the Bay Bridge in 1952. Dan and Ruth’s second daughter, Jan, was born a few months after. In October 1954, Hurricane Hazel hit the East Coast. In the service of his duties as a journalist and fire department volunteer, Dan stayed “on the scene” during this deadly storm. As electrical service flashed on and off and sparks from falling wires lit up the night, he stood out in the middle of Liberty Street, listening to trees falling all around, and for a quick moment wondered, as news reporters and first responders immemorial have, “What in the heck am I doing out here?”

The 1960s were another transitional time for the country, county, and county seat. Centreville’s population was decreasing. Long established businesses closed and a lot of the old landmarks shut down for good. Outdated blue laws were loosened. Civic organizations banded together and with the help of the editor of the Record Observer, Dan Tabler, efforts were made to attract new job creators. A nuclear research corporation flirted with building a facility outside of town at historic Pioneer Point but it was not meant to be.

In 1966, the three county schools for white students and Kennard were consolidated to create Queen Anne’s County High School. Two years later a near-catastrophic fire destroyed four downtown businesses including the shuttered opera house where the blaze started. In both cases, Dan was there.

The second span of the Bay Bridge opened in 1973. Dan was a proponent, saw it as a pragmatic necessity, and editorialized in favor of construction. In 1976, Queen Anne’s County celebrated America’s Bicentennial in a more subdued fashion than some other parts of the nation. Events here tended to focus on history and tradition more than hoopla. Ground was broken on the courthouse lawn for the statue of Queen Anne that would be unveiled by her namesake, Queen Elizabeth’s second child Princess Anne, in the spring of 1977. At the beginning of that year, Dan founded the Queen Anne Journal, a locally focused and written newspaper he would operate for four years. 

Dan returned to the Record-Observer for a short time and then, after working in the newspaper biz full time through five decades, “retired” in 1986. Retired requires quotes as it barely slowed him down. A longtime active supporter of the Queen Anne’s County Little League, the American Legion, the Lions Club, and 4-H, among dozens of others community-minded organizations, Dan has always engaged fully with the world around him. He’s been active in town government and sat on various boards. He volunteered and then worked at the library and was always one of those smiling, helpful faces patrons looked forward to seeing. 

And of course, he wrote his extremely popular weekly Writer’s Notebook column for years, a regular Record-Observer feature that informed and entertained his readers with commentary, musings, and historical tidbits. Made them feel like they were part of Dan’s community, a community that felt like home.

Under a different title and from the perspective that changed through his significant lifetime of experience, it was basically the same column he started writing when he was 15. The same year he decided for sure he was going to be a newspaper guy. After more than 30 years, a career’s worth of work alone, he stopped writing the Writer’s Notebook in the spring of 2020.

“I’ve done it all,” Dan has said in the past. “I’ve served as a reporter, editor, photographer, advertising salesman, delivery man and even helped out on the press sometimes. I was what they called a go-getter.”

“But really,” he told me not very long ago, “I guess I just never wanted to pass up on a good story.”