Port ministry faces an uncertain future after chaplain's exit

NORFOLK

Six to seven days a week for 40 years, J. Harold Buckwalter would visit a ship calling in the port of Hampton Roads.

He would meet the crew and offer them Christian fellowship as well as trips to the store or just downtime away from the ship. It's a calling that dates to 1826, when an unknown minister first rowed out to the sailing ships in the harbor and began tending the needs of a different kind of flock - merchant seamen.

An incurable log keeper, Buckwalter chronicled the names of those he met each day. As a chaplain of the port of Hampton Roads, he said he "met, dialogued with, served, loved at least 80 different nationalities."

But no more. At the end of March, Buckwalter, 76, retired to care for his wife, Twila. He was the last of four chaplains working for the Norfolk Seamen's Friend Society since the late 1960s.

There is no one to replace him yet, but he's confident the work he spent such a big part of his life doing will continue.

"God will keep the lights on and keep it going; he alone knows the resources," he said.

The ministry has faced hard times before. It collapsed in 1933, a casualty of the Depression.

In 1968, Bill Keene, a U.S. Customs inspector, breathed new life into it, Buckwalter said. "Being a customs officer, he was boarding the ships and saw the need."

That year, the society bought a house on West Olney Road in West Ghent, a block or so from Lambert's Point D ocks.

The following year, Buckwalter, a 36-year-old Mennonite minister from Chesapeake, joined the society's ministry.

Serving mariners from all over the world might seem an unlikely career path for someone who has never lived more than a few hundred yards from the house he was born in, on a country lane off Mount Pleasant Road.

He said he has lived the life of a missionary whose mission came to him.

In its heyday in the 1970s, '80s and into the '90s, the rooms at the International Seamen's House would fill at night with crews from Russia, China, Spain and Sri Lanka, among other places. They would play music, watch TV, hang out, call home.

Buckwalter said he can't begin to guess how many copies of the Bible he's given away - in Russian, Chinese, Burmese, Japanese, Korean, Serbian, among other languages.

At the end of the day, however, the ministry was all about friendship and meeting needs of all kinds, temporal as well as spiritual.

"We don't hit them over the head with the Bible," he said. "We offer friendship."

Buckwalter and his wife studied Japanese at Old Dominion University, allowing him to develop friendships with crewmen from that country that have lasted for decades.

A framed Japanese wedding tapestry hangs in the living room of his Chesapeake home, sent by a Japanese mariner for the Buckwalters' 50th anniversary.

Buckwalter has not seen him since the 1970s.

"Everything that we see about the port and hear about it - the dollars and the tonnage and the cargo, the economy's impact on the port, blah, blah - what we seem to fail to understand is that the persons who bring it in here and bring it out of here, they're the ones who make it happen," he said.

Buckwalter's work on the waterfront played out against a backdrop of staggering change in the port, which included the containerization of cargo ships and the surge in security that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Before cargo ships became containerized, ships would spend three or four days at the docks, said George Schmidt, 69, a volunteer for about 35 years. "We would have 20 to 40 men in the seamen's house every night."

The t urnaround times of ships now can be as quick as 10 to 12 hours. "Because of containerization, they can no longer come to us," Schmidt said.

For years, the ministry has served the crews from a pier-side annex office - now a small, white trailer - provided by Norfolk International Terminals. As recently as early January, merchant seamen still were free to wander in from their ships to make phone calls to relatives, use computers to send e-mails or call a taxi, but now it often sits empty.

New security rules restrict crew members "to the vicinity of their ship," unless somebody with a federally issued "Transportation Worker Identification Credential," known as a TWIC card, can escort them, Schmidt said.

Those changes and others have made the future of the work to which Buckwalter dedicated such a big part of his life uncertain right now.

As the society's work has gotten harder to perform, it s budget has dwindled, from $150,000 in 1992 to $50,000 or less today, said staff member Sylvia Butler, who is working to keep the ministry alive with fellow staff member Polly Glassburner.

The volunteers who were so plentiful years ago have dwindled to fewer than a dozen, and they aren't getting any younger. Most have been involved for decades.

What's happening to the Norfolk Seamen's Friend Society is happening all over, said the Rev. Lloyd Burghart, executive secretary of the Canadian-based North American Maritime Ministry Association. The association's roughly 140 members in every active port range from large agencies to individuals, including the Norfolk group.

The big difficulty since 9/11 and the more recent start up of the TWIC program is getting access to the crews on the ships and crews' ability to leave the ships, he said. As access to crews has become more restricted, their needs, particularly in the current economy, have never been greater, he said.

"There's very little free time for sailors," Burghart said.

The Norfolk ministry's volunteers visited about 600 of the 2,100 ships that called in Hampton Roads last year, Glassburner said.

Their work at Norfolk International Terminals now largely consists of collecting magazines for the crews of the ships, selling them pre paid phone cards and arranging shopping trips to stores such as Wal-Mart in a few vans owned by the program.

While they serve such temporal needs, what the society needs is a new chaplain.

"We're hoping to get somebody to drop out of the sky," Butler said. "We have wonderful volunteers, but we don't have a minister or a priest, and this is supposed to be a ministry."

Though the rules of engagement have changed, Buckwalter remains optimistic about the work he knows so well.

He recently learned that a local college student in his early 20s had called expressing interest in the ministry to mariners.

Whether he or someone else will provide the energy and leadership so desperately needed right now, Buckwalter's not sure. But he's not losing sleep over it.

"I'm a great believer in miracles," he said.

Robert McCabe, (757) 446-2327, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com