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Eileen Mead remem

Eileen Mead remembers riots in the Town of Quantico with hippies versus the constabulary, a scrutinize of a enormous problematic creature roaming hither the Marine Corps grovelling and an invite to breakfast in a Dumfries woman's up on while she was reporting on Hurricane Agnes.

Mead worked as a presswoman after the Potomac News in the mid 1970s and anew in the initial 1980s when the speech was published in a storefront that is at once the Dumfries Laundromat in the Triangle Plaza.

The geste round the Quantico ghoulishness came in a the the human race of letters to the speech from Dewey Thompson.

Thompson wanted the speech to inform humans round a organism that he said was eating wildlife in the field.

"Me and Luther Jackson was coon hunting stand up month when we seen a enormous problematic creature round 10 feet record reach up and abduct a coon gone from of a tree and mouthful him predominantly," he wrote in the the the human race of letters.

People at the speech were skeptical of the the the human race of letters from Thompson that went on to speak how carelessly the sighting had alarmed him and Jackson.

But Mead checked it gone from and discovered some Marines who said they had heard curious noises and seen curious sights impending an ammunition storage field on the grovelling.

Upon contacting grovelling officials, Mead was commencement told that word round the creature was classified and following told that the word was not classified but officials weren't answering any questions round any admissible sightings.

"I did all the stories on Quantico Town. I loved the humans down there," said Mead, who was married to John Mead, a Marine Corps policewoman stationed at Quantico who died at 53 from contact to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

When Hurricane Agnes sock success the county, Paul Muse -- the Potomac News publisher at the be that as it may -- sent reporters overnight to eiderdown the effects of the commotion, Mead said.

"Mr. Muse had us all depart gone from and accompany eiderdown articles," Mead said.

Muse himself sock success the streets and rescued a cover shackles from the flooding Occoquan River, Mead said.

"Everything was flooded," said Mead, who had seven children who attended Prince William County viewable schools.

In the prime, Mead caught a suffered found.

"When I went to Dumfries, there was that old fogies lady there and she commonplace me gone from in the shower covering that feeling and she said 'Come in here and I'll allocate you some breakfast,'" the 80-year-old Mead said. "She gave me some breakfast and next said, 'Tell me all round it.'"

During her be that as it may at the speech, Mead well-informed some familiar meet with Ann Holiday, another Marine Corps woman who worked after the Manassas Journal Messenger.

During riots in the Town of Quantico intervening hippies and constabulary, Mead plan she had scooped Holiday on the geste round constabulary cracking down on the hippies.

But Holiday, who again happened to be Mead's neighbor, commonplace Mead's children foreign playing and asked them where their nurse was.

The children told Holiday that Mead was gone from "covering the riots," so Holiday poncho up getting the geste too.

Mead said she cautioned her children round revealing her whereabouts to Holiday in the time to come.

Still, Mead said the meet made the papers preferably.

There were again riots at the Ogygian Lorton guardhouse when Mead was at the Potomac News.

At one nitty-gritty, Mead had to watering-place to using the Freedom of Information Act to addition access to the guardhouse with the men from other field papers covering the riots.

"They told me that I couldn't come across in because they'd sent all the other women up on," Mead said.

Mead again covered upper raids in Woodbridge shopping centers where constabulary went to bust humans who were smoking marijuana and cording drugs outspokenly.

"When they had a sally I'd accompany down there," said Mead, who at once volunteers at the Marine Corps Museum and Heritage Center. "We had a great deal b much of upper worriments in that generation when kids were commencement getting confusing in drugs."

Back next, the Potomac News operated on a shoestring budget and reporters raced each other to the newsroom in the prime.

"We didn't deliver typewriters to accompany hither and we had to be in session on stools. We slapdash to depart to available so we could depart a typewriter," Mead said.

Other considerations made viable in the prime preferable.

"We wanted to depart all of our calls made and the predominantly kit in front they started the presses because we couldn't learn on the horn," Mead said.

Mead at the end of the day left-hand the Potomac News to available at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, where she worked until she retired.

Mead said she enjoyed the be that as it may weary at the Potomac News.

"It was so stimulating," Mead said. "It was kid viable there. We upstanding had a ball."

Manassas Bureau Chief Keith Walker can be reached at 703-369-6751.

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