DATE: Thursday, March 13, 1997              TAG: 9703130365

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell

                                            LENGTH:   54 lines

LOCAL CHURCHES DREW SOME HEAVENLY FOLKS TO NORFOLK

From Bill Luedtke of Virginia Beach comes a page from his 1944 yearbook when he attended Midshipmen's Training School at Columbia University in New York. In it is a tribute to Grover Oberle, the famed church organist who died Saturday in Norfolk.

``Every Sunday night we marched to chapel at Riverside Church on the Hudson, where Grover Eberle was choir director and chaplain's assistant,'' Luedtke writes.

The Rev. Peyton Randolph Williams brought Oberle to Norfolk as organist for Christ and St. Luke's Episcopal Church.

In the course of a story in The Pilot on Monday the fool reporter - well, it was I, let's face it - misidentified Pastor Williams as Peyton Robertson of Norfolk.

Our public editor set about to clarify the error in a regular confessional list of booboos, but I insisted on rectifying it.

Robertson, a former Marine and headmaster of the Miller School in Albemarle County, is a lay reader at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. I elevated him, briefly, to rector of Christ and St. Luke's. He also is one of the world's best raconteurs.

Preacher Peyton Williams came to Norfolk in 1953 from Christ Church in Nashville, Tenn. He became known here, and everywhere he went, as a peacemaker in bringing restless people together.

In Norfolk he strove to open talks between white and black leaders during the school integration crisis of the mid-1950s.

In 1966, he accepted a call from St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, Wheeling, W.Va. Before retiring in 1974, he was chaplain for two years at the Woodberry Forest School.

But the retirement didn't stick.

For eight years, until his death in 1985, he served mountain missions, Grace Church in Red Hill and Good Shepherd in Hickory Hill, neither of which was large enough to qualify for a full-time pastor.

Nor was that the end of his mission. During the last week in the hospital he told its personnel and visitors that the trouble with the world today was that we just weren't all getting together.

One visitor marveled, ``He just kept on going, burning with zeal.''

And he had preached all along to his own five children. A daughter, Catherine W. Swann of Virginia Beach, is finishing at the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria her first of three years to become a priest.

Her husband Robert commutes to Alexandria on weekends, and she will return home for the summer. She will do clinical pastoral education at Maryview Hospital in Portsmouth.

``It has been very challenging,'' she said, ``but I am looking forward to learning at least three times as much.''

Of her father, she said: ``Daddy looked upon his bringing Grover Oberle to Tidewater as one of the best things he ever did for the area.''

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