Story By R. R. Keene
Photos by Nancy Lee White Hoffman

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He wrote the first check to pay the rent, and his hand didn’t even tremble. He was too busy overseeing the shakedown cruise for his new Globe & Laurel restaurant, which opened in Stafford, Va., June 6.

The restaurant’s proprietor, Major Rich­ard T. “Rick” Spooner, USMC (Ret), trimly dapper with regulation close-cropped white moustache and close-cropped, flat-topped white hair, tells anyone who will listen, “I am the luckiest guy in the world. How many 82-year-old men do you know ever get a second shot at life?”

Perhaps there are a few such individuals, but none quite like Maj Spooner. The 30-year Marine combat veteran started out as a private in World War II, served again in Korea and, later, in Vietnam. He knows all about starting from scratch. “I’m a Marine, and Marines don’t give up!”

For Maj Spooner, such a statement is not a bromide of leatherneck bravado. It is a fact.

Maj Rick Spooner believes it’s important to personally welcome guests and takes the time to chat with them during their visits. His patriotism and encyclopedic knowledge of the Corps are part of the restaurant’s charm.

He was still on active duty in 1968 when he opened the original Globe & Laurel on Broadway Street in the town of Quantico. There are Marines who still recall sitting on crates, quaffing draughts and throwing darts in the original establishment.

“It started as a hobby,” he said. “I enjoyed English pubs. The ones I visited were usually warm, friendly and nobody felt like a stranger for very long. I wanted a pub like that for professional Marines. That’s why I chose the name ‘Globe and Laurel’ [the emblem of the Royal Marines].”

That all went up in smoke in 1973 when a fire left several “Q-town” establishments, including The Globe & Laurel, in cinders. Spooner started over outside Quantico’s main gate on U.S. Route 1 in Triangle.

What formerly had been Jim’s Char Broil­er became The Globe & Laurel, and it became the area’s best-known dining establishment. Every Commandant of the Marine Corps from the 1960s to the present, Sergeants Major of the Marine Corps, and nearly any Marine who’s ever set foot on Marine Corps Base Quantico also stepped across the Tudor-facade threshold of The Globe & Laurel along with veterans of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Also, the nation’s top law enforcement officers, police, deputy sheriffs, constables and agents of all the three-letter government bureaus of enforcement became frequent customers.

Clientele met in camaraderie with their Marine counterparts from foreign nations and international gendarmerie. Mixed in were recognizable names from the civilian world: writers Patricia Cornwell and James Brady, actress Demi Moore and political pundit Oliver North, to drop the names of a few. There were battalions of retired and former Marines, as well as many local families and travelers up and down the Interstate Highway 95 corridor.

They were drawn, in part, by the martial atmosphere, which was more than the “touch of tradition,” heralded on the restaurant’s sign. The bulkheads were bedecked with the dress and field accoutrements of the military and law enforcement, along with shadow boxes and memorabilia from Marine organizations around the world.

Some of the decorative displays took time to put together. Maj Spooner points to the Royal Marine exhibit, which took him 15 years to complete. The U.S. Ma­rines say his best display traces the evolution of the Corps’ emblem from the beginning to the present.
The overheads were coated with thousands of law enforcement patches from across the country and beyond. They were presented by police officers, who established their own rules with regard to displaying the patches.

 

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