Talks with Tim is a weekly Q&A by Tim Grobaty, who has been a columnist in Long Beach for nearly 50 years. If you’d like to suggest an interesting or influential person in Long Beach for this (unconventional) interview, reach him at [email protected].
Everette Hoard has worked aboard the Queen Mary for more than 40 years. He has been the ship’s commodore since 2010.
Tim Grobaty: You have a distinctly Southern accent. I was expecting something a bit more British.
Everette Hoard: I was raised in Alabama. I was born there and left when I was 20, never to return. I never want to experience another summer in Alabama, or another winter for that matter.
Q: I’m going to be asking questions you’ve heard before, but what’s a question you’ve never been asked?
A: Nothing comes to mind, but I can tell you what question I’ve been asked most frequently.
Q: Well, it’s probably one that I’d ask, but go ahead.
A: It’s: Have I seen anything, any sort of experience with ghosts? On the Queen Mary the paranormal aspect is a huge draw. I’ve been on the ship for over 40 years and, yes, I’ve had some experiences. She’s a little haunted. It’s a lucky ship, some 2.2 million have sailed on her and more than 55 million people have visited her in Long Beach. I think she becomes a keeper of human energy and I think that’s what we see. There’s been a lot of happiness aboard the ship, and a lot of success and as humans we have so much love and zeal and maybe we leave a little of that energy on the ship.
Q: How does one go from a small town in Alabama to being commodore of the Queen Mary?
A: I was always in love with ships. My father, Ralph Hoard, had served in the Navy and when I was very young I’d sit on his lap while he drew pictures of ships, and I loved the ocean liners the most. He drew them with two smokestacks and sometimes three. When it was three stacks it was the Queen Mary. If it was two it would be the Queen Elizabeth. I can hear his voice in my head and in my heart, telling me, “These are the finest ships in the world.”
Q: Those were your favorites?
A: Yes, those two. My father bought a set of Britannica encyclopedias, and I immediately got out the volume S for ships. And there was this beautiful photograph of the Queen Elizabeth, and in the foreground was this little boy playing with a toy ship. To me, I was that boy. I carried that volume with me everywhere. I slept with it. I had it until it disintegrated. The same with another great book that I had, “The Mary: The Inevitable Ship,” by Neil Potter and Jack Frost. I wore that one out as well.
Q: So, did you ever get a chance to see the Queen Elizabeth?
A: We tried to see the Elizabeth. We got in the car to go see it at Fort Lauderdale, but when we got to Sarasota the weather turned horrific and we had to turn around and go back. I was disappointed, and then a couple of years later when I was 11, my dad came home from work and he looked terrible, like someone had died. He told me, “Son, I have some bad news.” He was holding a copy of the Mobile Press and he laid it on the table and he showed me that the Queen Elizabeth had burned and sunk in Hong Kong. I was just heartbroken. I gave up on ships for a few years; I just put everything away, all the posters and pictures that I had. But my love for ships came back, and with a vengeance when Dad came to my work where I was tending bar and he said, “Son, how would you like to drive out to California and see the Queen Mary?”
[to breeze across time a little bit, I’ll abbreviate a few steps. Everette was stunned and amazed by the beauty of the ship and purchased armloads of souvenirs from the gift shops. In 1982, he moved with his family to Long Beach, whereupon he made a beeline for the ship and began working in various shops on the Queen Mary, including his first job in the toy and hobby store. He worked his way up to retail director while continuing to gain more knowledge of the Queen Mary that would overfill the pages of his beloved Britannica volume.]
Q: So, get to the commodore part.
A: Around 2010, the managing director approached me about becoming one of the ship’s officers. I told him I didn’t want to do it just as a flunky job. He said, “How about commodore? Would you accept that?” Boy, would I! I had learned how to entertain guests and knew everything about the Queen Mary and other Cunard liners. It was a dream come true for me.
Q: What do you do, since you can’t drive the ship around?
A: The current managing director says I manage the public. My administrative duties come down to mentoring tour guides. I’ve written the tours we use today. I’ve done a lot of media work, a lot of research. I’ve visited the Cunard archives at the University of Liverpool. I’ve married about 600 couples so far.
Q: Are you married?
A: Yes. My wife and I live in North Long Beach where we’ve lived since 1995.
Q: As you probably know, while a lot of people in Long Beach love the Queen Mary, there are also people who wish it would be towed out to sea and scrapped. May I assume you would disagree with that?
A: That would be a travesty to our city. I would hate to be in a city that had on its record destroying the Empire State Building or Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower. Those are just buildings, they haven’t done anything to save democracy like the Queen Mary did. They don’t have the human element that the ship does. She truly, truly is the only thing like it left on the planet. She’s a symbol of what could be built without computers, but with minds and slide rules. Any city that would allow something like the Queen Mary to go away, is not worth their salt, Long Beach is a seafaring town. The Queen Mary is the face of the International City. She’s what our city looks at every sunrise and every sunset.