Meet two film fanatics who share a first name and an inexhaustible love for cinema

By Bill Newcott
Photograph by Scott Nathan
From the May 2024 issue

revival-house-robs

The two Robs had a dream. “We wanted to create a religious experience for film nerds,” says Rob Waters.

“Yeah,” adds Rob Rector. “Not just watching movies, you know. A communal experience.”

For the past eight years, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint hanging from Mount Rushmore in “North by Northwest,” the two friends have clung to that movie lovers’ vision. They’ve screened obscure cult classics — to full houses and nearly empty ones — at the Milton Theatre. They’ve braved the perils of COVID-19 to present open-air screenings at Hudson Fields. And they’ve put local filmmakers through their paces with their annual Horror Trailer Challenge.

 

By Lynn R. Parks
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Schell
From the April 2024 issue

vacation-paths-less-traveled

Preston Schell’s 40th birthday was approaching and he and his wife, Kathleen, were trying to figure out how to celebrate. The Rehoboth-area couple — he is co-founder and president of the Ocean Atlantic Companies, a group of land development and real estate firms; she is co-owner of one of those companies, Monument Sotheby’s International Realty — were tired of the typical vacations they had taken and were looking for something unique.

“We’d been going on trips that were oriented toward relaxing, eating and drinking, and we said, ‘Let’s do something more adventuresome, a little more active,” Kathleen recalls.

A parked truck is just the latest witness to our region’s endless development

By Bill Newcott
Illustration by Rob Waters
From the April 2024 issue

Cornfield-Story-April

The source of the melancholy that sweeps over me as I make the turn off Cedar Grove Road onto Mulberry Knoll, near Lewes, is at once obvious and elusive.

At the southwest corner spreads a cornfield — at least, as of this writing. It is midsummer: a time of growth, green and hopeful, the stalks topping out just at eye level. Far, far in the distance, a stand of trees marks the field’s western boundary; a here-and-no-further wall that has, perhaps for a century or so, defined the demarcation between agriculture and nature’s last stand. 

And there, parked diagonally near the intersection, is an old Chevy panel truck, lovingly maintained yet defiantly utilitarian. “247 Single Family Lots For Sale,” a sign on the truck proclaims.