In a large, quiet room, Ed Monroe stands in front of clocks telling the time in Manila, Moscow, Bombay and London, and holds at arm's length the thin paperback that got him started.
"I've gone aboard ships and had people hold this in their hand, and want to know where these groups are," he says defiantly, not a little upset. "And I've had to tell them they don't exist anymore."
The book, the 1989 edition of the International Christian Maritime Association Directory, lists the groups that assist and welcome foreign sailors at all of the world's great ports. But while the book lists several organizations for Baltimore, none is still active.
Baltimore's port has fallen victim to the same trends that have dogged other old East Coast ports -- intense competition, world recession, decline in international trade, and an increase in technology and automation that bolsters efficiency even while leaving many laborers out of work. Roughly 3,500 longshoreman were employed at the port in the mid '70s, compared to about 1,800 today.
While the port has rebounded in the past two years, sailors don't have the visibility around town they used to, and the port has come to seem less and less central an institution for most Baltimoreans.
Last year, Mr. Monroe, an Episcopalian deacon nearing his 22nd year as a firefighter, decided it was time to change things.
Fifty-six hours a week, Mr. Monroe saves homes from fires. Every Sunday, at Our Lady of the Redemption in Locust Point, he saves souls. And, in whatever time he's got left, he saves foreign sailors from loneliness and despair.
An unglamorous working-class hero, Mr. Monroe runs the Baltimore International Seafarer's Center, a literal and figurative port in the storm for foreign sailors. From work on ships such as Venus Diamond, Asian Breeze, Alabama Star, Ocean Ace, the sailors can find temporary respite at the center the three to five days a week it's open.
They want to shop
"Most of the time it's not very exotic," Mr. Monroe says of his work at the center. "They want to go to East Point Mall and buy shoes or jeans or something."
Most visiting sailors are from the Philippines or Eastern Europe, and may be at sea a whole year without returning to their home port. Most of the welcome centers in Baltimore had been tied to the churches of ethnic groups, which now bring few sailors to the port. As a result, most of these centers -- Norwegian Seamen's Church, Danish Seamen's Church -- have faded.
Sailors come into Mr. Monroe's center most frequently to make long-distance calls home. "The most important thing they can do in Baltimore is to come here and make contact with their family," he says.
But things can get more complicated.
Sometimes sailors have problems with their captains. Other times, ships begin to break apart at sea. Mr. Monroe remembers when a Russian sailor died with $1,300 in cash on him; the deacon worked to make sure the money got to his family.
The center itself is a humble sight -- three small rooms on the second floor of a squat, red-brick Terminal Office Building. A Ping-Pong table rests in the center of the largest room, and behind it soap, shaving cream and toothpaste sit on shelves along the wall. Baseball caps and T-shirts hang from pegs. The living room next door offers a television, VCR, books and magazines. Small wooden statuettes of sailors with pipes and
white beards stare out at visitors.
Center fills a gap
The center fills a gap because neither justice nor a sympathetic ear are easy to come by at sea, sailors say. "If you have a problem at sea, you need to work and work," says Samuel Malmis, 43, a radio officer originally from Pagadian City, Philippines, who has spent the last nine months at sea. "Sometimes we need some practical advice." The best thing about the center, says the husband and father of three, is its "bringing our family nearer to us."
Mr. Monroe got the idea for the seamen's center after taking a Caribbean cruise with his wife and parents in 1991.
"I talked to some of the crew about their jobs," he recalls, ". . . about how hard the work was and how long they were away from home." The sailors told Mr. Monroe they relied on seamen's centers at ports -- usually supported by municipalities or collections of churches -- to make them feel at home and to help them contact their families.
'They were all gone'
When Mr. Monroe returned to Baltimore, he looked into the local seamen's centers. "And the more I investigated the more I found there wasn't anything going on anymore. And when I started calling them I found out they were all gone.
"I either had to forget about it or start something, and I decided to start something."
Mr. Monroe wrote letters to centers in Philadelphia and Norfolk, and visited both ports, as well as centers in Wilmington, Del., California, North Carolina and Newark, N.J. Looking to see what would be feasible in Baltimore, Mr. Monroe found that other ports offer an enormous range of centers -- a trailer with TVs and a microwave oven in Morehead City, N.C., a three-story building complete with restaurant, bar, two apartments for chaplains, and a health club in Newark.
Unafraid of the challenge, Mr. Monroe moved to build a center in Baltimore from the ground up.
At 50, Mr. Monroe seems an unlikely chaplain, an unsentimental, no-nonsense Bowie resident whose New York accent betrays his Long Island roots. As he reclines in jeans, running shoes and a white sweater on one of the center's couches, his gruff style is countered by friendliness and warmth.
"He's always struck me as someone who liked to help other people but didn't want any glory for it," says Dee Vaughan, who volunteers at the center with her husband, Lou, about 16 hours a week. "He's a very warm person. He's easygoing."
Professional and friendly
"Ed's a very good man to work with," says Jim Horan, a Jesuit brother and center volunteer. "He's both professional and a friendly, informal enough guy. He puts himself into his work. And little by little there's a noticeable difference in what we do, what we're accomplishing.
"Probably from being a firefighter, he's a down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts-type person," Mr. Horan says. "They approach emergency situations and they have to make immediate decisions. They work as a team, and they're very practical. He's also humorous. He's a quick wit, he's a laugh. He's sort of folksy."
Sailors response is the pay-off for the long hours Mr. Monroe puts in.
"The idea from the last century that the people on these ships are kind of hard-drinking, hard-fighting, women-chasing men is not really true anymore. It's like cowboys and Indians. It probably never even was that way, but people have written about it and made movies about it and that's what people believe."
Most sailors, he says, are dedicated family men who answer the call of the sea for financial and not romantic reasons. "I think 90 percent of the time the reason is economic -- it's not some fascination with the sea, like the Jack London stories or something."
Mr. Monroe doesn't preach. He offers religious tracts to sailors who request them, but he's no missionary.
"I'm not here to turn anybody into what I am," Mr. Monroe says. "I'm here to meet the needs of people who come in here. As a chaplain, I want to be open to everybody, from the captain to the lowest guy who works in the kitchen."
Mr. Monroe sees the center as a natural match to his firefighting. "[Firefighting] is a job basically where you help other people without asking a lot of questions. If somebody's in trouble, you help them no matter who they are. It's the kind of philosophy I try to bring to this.
"I have a real problem with any sort of means testing as to whether people get help or not. That's not the theological view that I come out of. You know, there's the old Skid Row missions, where in order for people to get a meal you had to attend a service first. That's not where I'm coming from. I'm not sure Jesus asked anybody to prove anything before he helped them.
"From the beginning, my vision was that this place be ecumenical," says Mr. Monroe, who says he wants Catholic, Jews and Buddhists working in the center.
3' But he'll take any help he can get.
Volunteers are needed
"I have a lot of people telling me what a great job I'm doing and that it needs to be done," Mr. Monroe says. "And sometimes maybe giving me money. But that's not enough. We need bodies. Volunteers are what we need."
He wants to set a regular schedule for the center so that sailors can count on the place being open certain days and times every year.
"I would have told somebody they were out of their mind if they told me 20 years ago I'd be doing something like this," Mr. Monroe says.
"I think it's always an uphill fight, and I don't know that it was ever meant not to be an uphill fight. Jesus said to follow him was to carry a cross ourselves. If it was easy, I don't know what meaning it would have.
"I'll be honest, I'd rather be home with my family now. But something, something is inspiring me to be here. That doesn't mean it's always easy.
"There are days, to be quite honest, where I wake up and wish I'd never heard of this."
But: "It just takes helping one person to get past that feeling of self-pity."