An Angel from Hell’s Lane

Rodney Dobson was born just outside of Ridgely on a stretch of road once known as Hell’s Lane, now called Nine Town Road. “The Lane”, as he calls it, was a small Black community built up around the local chickenhouses for the hands needed to work them. The house Dobson was born in sat right at the corner, the first one on the Lane.

Talking about the houses on the Lane, Dobson said, “You could see right through them.” He chuckled as he recalled them being called “may-blow houses,” because they “could blow away at any time.” Dobson grew up there with five siblings, three girls and two boys, all six of them raised by a single mother. His mother’s name was Doretha, though everyone called her Minner. His father left in 1948 shortly after Dobson was born. He’ll tell you there was a running joke that “after my father seen me he said ‘oh Lord’, and left town.”

With his mother working long hours, much of Dobson’s upbringing fell to the women around him. His grandmother, Florence Wyatt, lived right down the road. His beloved schoolteachers, of which he can name every one, molded him into a well-mannered young man. But Dobson was clear about who truly brought him up: his oldest sister, Janie. “She raised me,” he said somberly. Janie passed away last October.

Janie cooked, cleaned, and fetched water for baths while their mother left early and arrived home late thanks to long days at the chicken factory. “All the food and stuff that I ate, Janie cooked,” Dobson said, “We ate chicken every night because when my mom came home from work, she’d have two or three chicken legs rolled up in her apron…and that’s what we had.”

Breakfast wasn’t as fond a memory. “To this day, I won’t eat oatmeal,” he said. That’s cause by age 11, he was getting up before school to milk cows on Mr. Charles Dean’s farm, and by the time he got home to get himself ready for school, Janie’s oatmeal had turned hard as a rock on the gas stove. “And there was no microwave,” Dobson remarked.

Dobson remembers life on Hell’s Lane: playing outside with his siblings and cousins, spending days in the woods climbing trees and building canoes, being so hot in the summer he could barely sleep, receiving his first portable radio, and seeing his mother’s swollen hands – bleeding from the chicken bones cutting her as she manually extracted guts from their carcasses. White folks rarely came to the Lane, unless they were a select few friends, and Black families mostly stayed within their own community. Dobson said that those from the Lane who didn’t work in the chicken factories often worked at Salusbury Brothers vegetable processing plant, on what is now Cow Barn Road.

Dobson began school in 1954, coincidentally the same year the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He attended the all-Black school in Ridgely on what is now Hannah Henry Way. School was a place of warmth, both figuratively and literally. His first grade teacher was Miss Hannah Henry. He explained that pretty much every Black child in northern Caroline County was taught by Miss Hannah, and that she became a mother figure for many children whose parents worked long hours. He also had to go to school in the winter if he didn’t want to freeze, as he was strictly advised not to stay home and “burn all this little bit of wood up” during the day.

Dobson also remembers the realities of segregation in Ridgely. At Holsinger’s, he said, Black customers were not allowed to enter through the front door. Instead, they had to go to a side window, ring a bell, and ask for what they wanted. They could then congregate under a tree, which was planted, according to Dobson, specifically for this purpose. “That’s where the blacks would stand around or pull up their cars and hang out,” he said. Mr. Holsinger put the table there to give them somewhere to sit.

Dobson recalled some ugly moments from the early 1960s, when ill-intentioned white people would drive through Hell’s Lane shouting slurs, “hootin and hollarin” from their cars. He also remembers passing comments from the folks in town, like “get on out at the Lane where you belong at”, and the understanding that Black residents were to walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk. Despite these fleeting memories, Dobson doesn’t feel his childhood was defined by hardship.

He worked on the Dean farm until he was old enough for seasonal work at Fox’s Cannery. Later, he started working at Salusbury Brothers. Dobson attended Lockerman High School and graduated in 1966 as part of the last class to graduate before integration. After graduation, he did what many young people do: he left.

He said he “went to the city”, which here means he moved to Wilmington, Delaware. At first, he stayed with his sister, then eventually rented a room from a nice little old lady on Second Street. In Wilmington, Dobson worked short stints at several places, including National Vulcanized Fiber and Strawbridge’s. “See, in ’66,” he said, “5 bucks an hour was big money baby. I was calling the boys back home tellin’ them I’m making 5 dollars an hour!”

But that new life was interrupted when Dobson received the call from his mom back in Ridgely that he had been drafted into the Vietnam War. In May 1968 he was back home, but not for long, reporting to the draft office, which he said was above the Ridgely post office.

Dobson went first to Fort Bragg, and by October he was in Vietnam. He was 20 years old at the time.

He served in the Army as a clerk typist, helping keep the Army’s records. He considers his time overseas as much less traumatic than it could have been, as he spent six months at Vung Tau Beach, an in-country R&R center. After the onslaught of the Tet Offensive, he was transferred to the 518 Maintenance unit, where he served as the motor pool dispatcher. “One tour,” he said, “that was enough for me.”

Dobson returned home in 1970. After working a couple of odd jobs that didn’t quite work out, he landed a gig with the General Service Administration in September of that year. That agency later merged with the Post Office, where Dobson worked for 36 years. He retired from the Post Office in 2004.

In between those years, Dobson married his now wife, Bernice, and helped her raise her first son while they eventually had two other children, Tammy and Brian. The couple first met in 1967, but dated off and on until they married in 1986. When they reconnected after his tour of duty, she had named that first son after Dobson. “She’s a very nice person in her own way,” Dobson said. He also joked that she “say she’s leaving me every week.” Bernice is from the Dover area, but she knew plenty of people around Ridgely, and Dobson said it did not take much convincing to bring her back. “She was a country girl too,” he said.

After retiring from the postal service, Dobson became widely known as the face of his own hot dog cart, Dobson’s Dogs (“the dogs that don’t bark”). The cart began almost by accident after another man who sold hot dogs asked Dobson to help him move his cart. Dobson ended up spending an hour or two slinging hot dogs that day, and the rest is history.

Dobson first set up at Pine Tree Camp in Townsend, Delaware. “Black people used to come for miles,” he said, “I was selling hot dogs out of this end, corn liquor out of this end, and pints out of this side.” Dobson enjoyed it so much that he bought a cart. His sister Janie, “told me I was a fool,” he said.

The first day he got the cart inspected and ready, he set up in front of the Ridgely Post Office. His first customer smiled and said, “fast and quick.” “And that’s what sold,” Dobson said, “I was tickled to death after that.”

Dobson sold hot dogs for years, traveling from Ridgely to Greensboro to Denton, becoming a familiar face in town. He loved talking with customers and taking their pictures. “I miss the people…I’m a talker,” he said.

Dobson’s son Brian suffered serious injuries in a car accident in 2007 and became a paraplegic. He died in 2015. Their daughter Tammy died a few years later in 2022. These tragedies, particularly Tammy’s passing , “took the fun out of it,” Dobson said. So he closed down Dobson’s Dogs that year.

Volunteerism dots his life story. He joined the Ridgely Lions Club in 1998, served as president and zone administrator, and in 2006 became the first African American district governor for the Lions Club, overseeing nine counties around the Eastern Shore. Today, he remains deeply involved in the Ridgely community. In addition to the Lions Club, he serves with the Ridgely Historical Society, the Hannah Henry Circle, and the Caroline County NAACP. He helped to place a historical marker near the former Black school, supported the naming of Hannah Henry Way, and is currently protecting and preserving a historically Black cemetery in Ridgely that had been encroached upon.

Dobson says his community involvement comes from being “newsy,” his own spin on nosey; wanting to know what’s going on and whether he can help. As a child, he remembered getting candy from Santa Claus and later learning it was the Lions Club providing it. “I wanted to be part of it,” he said, “I like to help people, because somebody helped me when I was coming up.”

Cathy Schwab, a current leader of the Ridgely Historical Society, said “Rodney Dobson is a wonderful historian. He continues to collect and save information that could have been lost in our African-American community. Rodney is always willing to help anyone.”

Now nearing 78, Dobson says what matters most is living well and being proud of who you are.  “Look,” he said, “we’re all good. Everybody’s good. That’s the way I look at it.”