It’s a family affair

Bob and Mary Wood started vacationing at the Delaware beaches in 1966, and 44 years later, they are still coming back.

Coastal Point • Chris Clark
The Wood family has been getting together in Middlesex for 35 years for their annual family reunion, and there are no signs that the tradition will stop anytime soon.“In 1966, another family from our church in Rockville (Md.) – they knew some folks in Dewey Beach – said, ‘You want to go up for a couple of weeks this summer?’ So we went there for six, seven years. We liked it so much down here, we started looking, and we bought the house on the end of the street with another family in 1973,” explained Bob Wood. “Then we decided this is too much fun not to share, so in 1975 we invited my brother from Michigan and my cousin from Newark, Del.”

Thus the first Wood family reunion-vacation was launched in 1975, with 16 family members in attendance. Now the clan has grown to a peak of 38 members who are celebrating their 35th family reunion at the family’s Middlesex Beach home. Relatives travel from California, Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, making their week of family time their top summer priority.

“We had a 50th wedding anniversary a few years ago, and I went to my kids and I said we had to pick between the reunion and the anniversary, which was in California, on the other side of the country,” said Doug Wood, Bob and Mary’s nephew. “They said, ‘Dad, you’re a planner. Figure it out. We want to do both.’ So we took the redeye. You make it work.”

Each morning around 9 a.m., a member of the Wood family carries the family flag down the beach and stakes it into the sand. It remains flying for the rest of the day, until the family retires for the evening.

“It represents all we do — the volleyball we play, crab night and a seagull, for the beach.” said Bob Wood.

When they aren’t enjoying relaxing on the beach, the Wood family spends their week doing lots of other fun activities.

“The guys love to golf, and they’re pretty good. Monday and Thursday morning, a whole bunch of the guys go off to golf,” said Bob. “And volleyball – they’re big on volleyball. They’ve always got that going on down there. Some of them are pretty good, too. I just sit there and enjoy watching them. We set up the two volleyball courts every summer.”

They also enjoy getting together for family meals — which have also become a vacation tradition.

“We’d go out into Assawoman Bay with our chicken necks and a string and go crabbing. It was just sort of family fun. Now we just go out and buy a bushel of crabs and everyone goes out onto the back deck and they just ‘crab’ out,” explained Linda Kindt, Bob and Mary’s daughter.

They even have a themed dinner each year. This year had family members dressing up in sweatbands, go-go boots, a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt, a Saturday-Night-Fever-style disco suit, and as Napoleon Dynamite.

“One year, we did ‘Kentucky Derby,’ and everyone had to wear a crazy hat. This year was ’70s themed because the reunion started in the 1975,” said Kindt.

The family also puts together a complex scavenger hunt for the kids to compete in. This year’s theme is “The Amazing Race.”

“They’ll break up into a couple teams, and we have them going up to the bandstand and getting two strangers to do a line dance on the stage; go to Grotto’s, and they have to eat an anchovy pizza. Then they have to go to the surf shop and buy something under $5 that says their anniversary, because they’re having an anniversary, too,” said Toni Wood, the Woods’s daughter-in-law, of the Bethany Surf Shop and its 30th anniversary this summer.

Four generations of the Wood family have enjoyed coming down to celebrate family for the last week in July. This year, the participants range in age from 11-year-old Alex Wood to 82-year-old Charlie Potts, and Bob Wood hopes the tradition will carry on.

“My mother came the first seven or eight years,” he said. “Each of us had three kids, and all the kids are married. Now they have three in college and four more will be in within the next two years. Within five years, the fifth generation may start coming along.”

The Woods have seen the area change in the years they’ve been coming down to the Bethany area, but in all that time they still feel completely safe and happy.

“The houses have gotten huge from 30 years ago. That has been a bit of a change. But the community has been quiet and relaxed and safe. We don’t feel at all uncomfortable back here. Bethany Beach hasn’t been built up the way other towns have,” said Bob Wood.

“It’s still a quiet bedroom community,” added Kindt. “We really have enjoyed it down here. Family community, that’s what it is down here.”