Cruise artifacts reflect Texas man's passion

The Virginian-Pilot

BEFORE IT CAME to Norfolk, Herbert Beazley collected it all.

He stashed the goods in his Texas home, in crowded file drawers, in the attic, under the bed, and sometimes - perhaps when he knew he was close to the line and had spent just a touch too much money - he had the packages sent to his office in Houston so his wife, Norma, wouldn't see them.

He loved ocean liners. He kept the passenger lists, the posters, the programs, the ashtrays, whatever he could get his hands on.

When Beazley was just a 16-year-old city boy from Houston, he persuaded his parents to let him take a freighter to Cuba. And that was it. He fell in love with cruise ships. Not Navy ships or other watercraft. He loved ocean liners.

"It was a consuming passion," Norma said.

He became fascinated with embarkation notices, souvenir postcards, advertisements, solicitation letters. If it dealt with cruising, he wanted it.

He toured all seven continents and traveled aboard a cruise ship at least twice a year.

By the 1960s he was placing ads in small weeklies like Antique Trader Magazine, looking for the ocean liner paraphernalia someone else wanted to get rid of.

When he found something he liked, Norma knew, because he waved it in her face.

Once, Herbert tried to get his wife involved in the hobby. He said she might like to collect menus because she likes cooking. And sure enough, a few days later, a package of 50 menus appeared. Today, the Beazley collection includes a menu for every night of the year from one cruise or another.

By the time he died in 2001, Herbert Beazley had stuffed more than 10,000 items into file folders and drawers and anywhere else he could find. It was all meticulously catalogued on his computer, which was funny to Norma, because her husband couldn't even keep track of his comb.

Today, the items are thought to be one of the largest privately held collections of cruise memorabilia in the country.

But the story does not drop anchor there. It docks in Norfolk.

Stephen Kirkland, the operations and marketing manager for the city's cruise program, loves history, too. He loves that George Washington surveyed the Great Dismal Swamp, that Jefferson arrived in Norfolk after a voyage to France and that Lincoln came to Norfolk after the Civil War. So when he saw a Google alert about Beazley's cruise collection, he chased after it with the zest of Herbert Beazley himself.

It took phone calls and a trip to Texas, but Norma Beazley and pieces of her husband's collection shipped off to Norfolk.

Today the walls of the Half Moone Cruise and Celebration Center on the downtown waterfront are decorated with just a small amount, less than 1 percent, of Beazley's treasures, on indefinite loan.

Posters of the SS United States, built in Newport News.

A menu showing that on April 27, 1908, the staff served Consomme Sarah Bernhardt for dinner aboard the RMS Eturia.

An original deck chair from the RMS Queen Mary. An original deck chair from the RMS Queen Elizabeth.

A program announcing the emcee of a night's entertainment: Mr. Jack Benny.

The 1935 passenger manifest featuring Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the future Mrs. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Next year, more than 100,000 people are expected to wander through the Half Moone terminal. Norma Beazley is a realistic woman. She knows getting on a cruise is hectic. She's done it dozens of times herself. She knows the tourists won't pore over every word. She knows it's a cruise terminal, not a museum.

But she hopes people can take a minute to share Herbert's passion.

He would've loved that.