John Gregory, 77; Queen Mary’s Shore Skipper

John Gregory, the 34th skipper of the Queen Mary, has died--the only captain of the venerable passenger liner turned troop ship turned tourist attraction who never took the vessel to sea.

Gregory was 77 and a lifelong bachelor who said his only “marriage” was to the ship he boarded in 1980 at a time when the once-vaunted vessel was proving a financial drain on the city of Long Beach.

He died Sunday at Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach of the complications of recent heart bypass surgery.

Colleagues said his ashes will be scattered at sea near the vessel.

“His love for the ship was shown in everything he did,” said a longtime friend and colleague, Craig Post, the Queen Mary’s facilities manager.

“We’ll miss him dearly,” public relations manager Rich Kerlin said. “We were his family.”

Gregory, an ordained minister, performed more than 600 weddings on board the ship annually, Kerlin said.

But he was noted more for his devotion to the ship than for his propensities for the newly married.

Born in London, he was a former European martial arts champion and British air force officer who had retired from hotel management in Europe and was living in Carmel, Calif.

There he was approached by a friend, Dick Stevens, then president of Wrather Hotels. That was shortly after the Wrather Corp. took over what had been called an 81,000-ton monument to mismanagement by critics of Long Beach’s purchase of the ship from Cunard Lines.

That was in 1980 when the once-proud Queen Mary was costing the city of Long Beach and the port where she was berthed about $2 million a year.

In keeping with Wrather’s plans to raise the sinking tourist attraction, Gregory was hired, given a uniform (replete with authentic Cunard braid) and a cabin.

Then, on his own, he perfected an attitude. And for the next eight years he managed to convince the thousands of vacationers and other visitors to the ship that he indeed was the almost royal captain of the Queen Mary.

He became--with his clipped British accent that vacillated between upper crust and East Finchley--”the captain speaking” and was always addressed as such by Wrather employees and shipboard guests, or as he preferred to call them, crew and passengers.

“I am not playing the role,” he told Times columnist Paul Dean in 1986. “I am fulfilling the role. . . . I have become the titular head of this ship because, from the first day, I felt I could bring this vessel, this steel hull, alive.”

His was such a perfect portrayal that many servicemen who had sailed aboard the Queen during World War II when she was being used as a troop ship refused to believe when they returned as visitors decades later that John Gregory had not been on the bridge of that magnificent ship during those troubling and fearful days.