Some Steamship William B. Mather volunteers disgruntled after Great Lakes Science Center merger
February 22, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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Jim Nichols | Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sixteen months after the Great Lakes Science Center took the helm of the Steamship William G. Mather Museum, the ship’s new owners are maneuvering along a new course.
Initially, at least, the floating museum’s voyage is proving a bit rocky: A post-merger culture clash with the new owners has some longtime Mather volunteers abandoning ship.
The science center has a grand vision for converting the 83-year-old retired freighter it acquired in October 2006 from a museum of lakes shipping to an interactive 618-foot-long wing of the parent institution.
The Mather’s new role will be a celebration of much broader connections between humans and the Great Lakes, said Bryan Kwapil, the science center’s vice president of operations.
The transformation starts this spring, when work begins on a $2.7 million, glass-enclosed walkway connecting the shore-side science center to the acquisition moored 100 yards to the north. Then, in a year or so, the science center will launch a fund-raising campaign to pay for a host of new lakes-oriented exhibits, Kwapil said. The Mather will house those in the cavernous bulk-cargo holds that once carried 14,000 tons of iron ore per voyage.
“Our goal is to . . . use it to help the public understand their relationship to the lakes,” Kwapil said. “You won’t have to be a Great Lakes shipping enthusiast to go enjoy the Mather.”
But some of those enthusiasts are longtime leaders of the Mather’s crew of volunteers, and they are in mutiny. Some of the longest-serving volunteers say museum managers have hijacked not only their prized vessel but also their culture.
A handful who collectively spent tens of thousands of weekend and evening hours there have quit in protest.
By the time the ship’s tourism season opens in May, all but a few of the 25 or so enthusiasts who have been most active in restoration and maintenance will have quit, said volunteer leader Bill Durica of Bay Village.
“If . . . they had deliberately set out to destroy the volunteer relationship, they couldn’t have done a better job,” said Durica, whose volunteerism started two years before the Mather opened as a museum in 1991.
The Harbor Heritage Society, a nonprofit organization that gave the freighter to the science center, tallied more than 250,000 hours of volunteer time and valued it at $2.7 million. Without that free support, the science center will ram into astronomical costs for upkeep, the disgruntled ex-volunteers believe. Then, they fear, the Mather may sink in rough fiscal waters and wind up being scrapped.
“We’re concerned about the future of the Mather,” he added. “At some point, they may have a connector from the Great Lakes Science Center to Pier 32 and not have a Mather there.”
The Mather’s 55-year ore-hauling career ended in 1980. The idled ship deteriorated in Toledo until Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. divested its shipping business in 1987 and donated the Mather to a nonprofit group to become a floating maritime museum. It opened alongside the East Ninth Street Pier in 1991 and moved to its current location behind the science center in 2005.
The volunteer enthusiasts - “boat nerds,” they call themselves - stepped in well before the ship opened to visitors. They set about restoring the boat and its innards with absolute devotion to historical accuracy, and they scrounged authentic salvage parts from all over the Great Lakes basin.
“We took a lot of pride in it,” said Ed Gerber, a retired engineer from North Olmsted and a 19-year volunteer. “We beat our knuckles bloody, and it was fun.”
In homage to that handiwork, a small but devout number of maritime buffs come from all over for a rare opportunity to board a ship that exemplifies the dwindling relics they ogle.
Still, the Mather foundered financially. It attracted only about 20,000 visitors a year and depended on unpredictable grants for most of its $600,000 annual budget. The science center’s budget in 2006 was 13 times larger, and the ship’s board - including Durica - acknowledged that the merger that October was a rescue.
But he and Gerber believe the science center’s staff should have “come in with hats in hands” to curry favor with the volunteers. Instead, science center staff told them to apply for the volunteer jobs they themselves had created and performed.
“After 17 years, they were asking for references,” Durica fumed. “It was an insult.”
Ex-volunteer Rex Cassidy said that when the ship’s paid staff of five was fired last summer, the volunteers learned it through a note left on their mess table. The final insult, said Cassidy, came when the science center announced it would close off the ship to volunteers as well as visitors at the end of the 2007 season.
In November, Gerber decided he was being treated like a disposable docent. He quit. Others followed.
“It’s like, ‘This is my boat, and you took it away from me,’ ” Gerber seethed recently.
Kwapil said the disgruntled who resigned are exaggerating the number of others leaving: Only five volunteers out of more than 100 have resigned, he said, and he expects few more to leave. Otherwise, though, Kwapil said he sees no need for a point-by-point rebuttal of the criticisms.
He lauded the “marvelous job” volunteers have done and said he understands fears and culture clashes are inevitable when two institutions merge.
“Our goal is not to do a pristine restoration of the ship. That was the goal of those volunteers,” the operations chief said. “We knew not all of the volunteers were going to be happy, because they were not going to have the same level of autonomy.”
But more than a year of planning went into the merger, and the covered walkway is about to be built, Kwapil added. So “the idea that the Mather would be casually discarded just doesn’t make sense.”
“These few individuals like to think they’re the heart and soul of the Mather and the ship won’t survive without them,” Kwapil said.
“Well, that ship’s been here longer than any of us, and it’ll be there long after we’re all gone.”
