News

Calvert Memorial Hospital - Current News

Showalter to head hospital board (January 14, 2010)

Krug, Cornellier tapped as members

Local Realtor Sally Showalter, a registered nurse for 28 years, has been named chairman of Calvert Memorial Hospital's board of directors. She follows in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, who both served on the hospital board. The other officers for the coming year are Laurie A. Uherek, vice chairman; Gail Gibson secretary and Kevin J. Nietmann as treasurer.

"Sally is well qualified to assume the role of board chair," said CMH President & CEO Jim Xinis. "She's served on the board for seven years and has done an outstanding job leading our board committees on performance improvement and quality. She has the respect and admiration of her colleagues on the board."

Showalter earned her nursing degree from the Henry Ford School of Nursing in Detroit. In 1974, she joined the staff at CMH where she was a nursing supervisor. Her nursing career also included positions at Greater Southeast Hospital from 1985-1993 and Prince George's Hospital Center from 1989-2000.

She has also been actively involved in the community, serving on the Maryland State Emergency Medical Services Board, the Calvert County Emergency Services Advisory Council and the Calvert County Board of Education Citizen Advisory Council.

Bucolic Community, Placid Shorelines Beckon Newcomers

By Carolyn Feola de Rugamas

Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 25, 2007; Page G01

Prince Frederick is still a place of farmlands and quiet Chesapeake Bay shoreline, even as it develops steadily into a Washington suburb. The Plater family, which has been in Prince Frederick for generations, is adjusting, too. But the Platers are not about to change completely.

Roland Plater just built a home on a 30-acre farm in Prince Frederick where his uncle, Wilson Holland, has lived since the 1950s. Holland transferred development rights so he could stay in his home, while Roland would have the right to build and the opportunity to raise his five children on family land.

For Richard and Pat Kelly, the Chesapeake Bay is the perfect backyard. They bought their house in Dares Beach last year and plan to stay. (By Carolyn Feola De Rugamas For The Washington Post)

Prince Frederick, Md.

Boundaries: An irregular area bounded roughly by Hunting Creek to the north, the Chesapeake Bay to the east, Parker Creek and Battle Creek to the south, and the Patuxent River to the west.

Schools: Calvert Elementary, Plum Point Elementary, Mutual Elementary, Calvert Middle, Plum Point Middle, Calvert High.

Home Sales: From Aug. 1, 2006, to Aug. 22, 2007, 92 homes sold in Prince Frederick, with prices from $195,000 to $1,250,000, said Sally Showalter of Long & Foster. Currently, 98 houses are on the market, with prices ranging from $205,000 to $2,894,000. Eleven homes are under contract, with prices from $215,000 to $431,000.

Within 15 Minutes by Car: Chesapeake Beach, Lusby.

Roland Plater and his wife, Dana, began construction of their gabled Cape Cod in November 2005 in an area of the property where Holland had once grown kale and turnips. With the house finished and only a few landscaping details remaining, Roland said: "I'm content. I've planted my roots, and I don't think there's anyplace else I'd rather be."

His sister, Marsha Plater, isn't ready to leave, either. True, her bayside home is on the market, and she has plans to buy another place. But those plans are still vague, and she is certain only that she will stay in Calvert County.

"I will miss the view," Marsha Plater said, looking out the wall of windows of her A-frame home, built in 1985. The home is set back 20 wooded feet from a short cliff above the Chesapeake, and seems designed around that vista. It's the main point of the selling campaign, too. "You're buying the view, not the home," she said. "That's what we tell everyone."

Marsha Plater is moving to live with her husband, Michael Hill, who owns a home in Laurel and works in Dundalk. She has an established dental practice near her home, in addition to her familial ties to Prince Frederick. Given those competing factors, they came up with a compromise, she said: "We said we'd move a little further north somewhere -- in Calvert."

Another factor keeping her in place is Prince Frederick's housing market. Until she gets a good offer on the A-frame, listed at $607,000, the move will have to wait.

"Houses in Prince Frederick are staying on the market longer and prices are coming down, as is the trend throughout Calvert County," said Sally Showalter, a real estate agent with Long & Foster's Prince Frederick office.

In the past year, shopping centers, public buildings, offices and restaurants have been built in Prince Frederick, but home construction is on the decline overall, Showalter said. "New subdivisions have been popping up everywhere, but some of that has slowed as buyers are not as able to sell their existing homes," she said.

Development is also being controlled through the county's Adequate Public Facilities ordinance, Showalter said. "School capacity must be adequate for current and proposed growth, and roads and public safety must also be adequate for the growth created by new developments," she said.

But for Joan Plater, Roland and Marsha's sister, Prince Frederick appears to be developing a little too quickly. She is one of the few family members to leave, though she lives only 45 minutes away, in Bowie, and returns frequently. She said she is struck by how her hometown is shifting from rural to suburban.

"I am amazed, each time I go there, by the explosion of commercial and housing development. When I grew up there, we had two traffic signals in a stretch of about 50 miles, we had to travel at least 45 minutes to shop for school clothes, there was no public transportation, and I didn't know rental apartments existed," she said.

But many newcomers don't seem to notice the development so much. In fact, some say Prince Frederick's intact natural beauty is their reason for coming.

Last November, Silver Spring residents Matt and Betsy Forsbacka bought a vacation home in the bayside enclave of Scientists' Cliffs. The community was founded in 1935 by Flippo and Annie Gravatt, forest pathologists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who wanted to create a retreat for fellow professionals. It remains a protected, private community of rustic cabins and kindred neighbors who call themselves "cliff dwellers."

Matt Forsbacka said he got lucky after a 10-year search for a beach house.

"We did a real thorough survey, and nothing was affordable. We thought, 'This is never going to happen.' So last summer, we decided to just rent a place," he said.

The family chose Scientists' Cliffs as its vacation spot, spending August in an old house between forest creeks and the shoreline. Forsbacka said that watching his two young daughters build dams and splash among the rocks reminded him of his childhood in Alaska, playing in tidal pools.

"We really liked the community," Forsbacka said. "It fit our needs perfectly."

Last fall, Forsbacka learned that a cabin in Scientists' Cliffs had been placed on the market. "It was being sold by someone who didn't have family or someone else to swoop it up. So we decided to make the commitment," he said.

Now the family heads to the beach nearly every weekend, temporarily leaving behind some creature comforts for the sake of relaxation. "There's no TV there; we don't take the paper. You don't hear any noises other than the bugs in the trees."

Noaga Kondombo has come from Silver Spring to Prince Frederick, too -- he is interested in Marsha Plater's A-frame on the bay. He works for a satellite communications company in downtown Washington and seems to be looking for a more complete getaway from city life.

"I need to be close to nature -- that is my first objective," he said. "Downtown, everything is developed. But here, the waterfront gives you beauty to enjoy. Every day, when you have your coffee in the morning, you can enjoy nature. In the city, you sit by the pool."

Pat and Richard Kelly also sought out Prince Frederick for its pristine setting. Natives of Massachusetts, the Kellys came to Calvert in 1992, leasing a home in Huntingtown. Richard Kelly, a federal government employee, did not expect to stay in the area for long. But they liked the county, he said, and soon they bought a home in Huntingtown. And though no home on the Calvert peninsula is far from the water, Kelly said that they were drawn to the idea of living right on the shoreline.

"We looked all up and down the Calvert waterfront. Everything was out of reach," he said.

But in January 2006, they sold the house in Huntingtown and another on the Potomac and rolled everything into a contemporary wood-sided home on a country road at Dares Beach. Now they have a back yard that falls into the bay and vine-covered trees that attract goldfinches, hummingbirds, herons and eagles. "It's like sitting in an aviary back there," Kelly said.

The Kellys might not be as deeply rooted to Prince Frederick as the Plater family. But in their secluded home on the waterfront, they count themselves permanent residents.

"This is it," Richard Kelly said. "This house is the last one."

News

Calvert Memorial Hospital - Current News

Putting Down Roots in Prince Frederick

Bucolic Community, Placid Shorelines Beckon Newcomers