When Caroline Schultz first arrived in Cape May, the assignment felt like a surprise delivery. “It wasn’t even on our list,” she said in an interview with the Herald. “You fill out a ‘dream sheet’—a list of where you’d like to move—and Cape May wasn’t on ours or our backup. It was just like: okay, here you go.”
But the charms of life on the Cape quickly became clear. From golf cart school pickups to dolphin sightings off the ferry, Schultz found something rare in the often-transient life of a Coast Guard spouse: a town that felt like home. “Cape May wasn’t on our radar, but now I wish we could stay and retire here,” she said. “I’ve never said that about anywhere before.”
Schultz, whose husband is a Boatswain’s Mate about to pin on Chief, takes on an expansive volunteer role in support of the Coast Guard mission—she’s a lifeline for other spouses navigating the challenges of military life. As the ombudsman for Training Center Cape May, she serves as a point of contact for spouses in five Coast Guard units. It’s a volunteer position typically filled by a spouse, and the role is one that is rarely recognized, she said.
“If a ship is underway and there’s an emergency at home, I’m the one who can contact the at-sea spouse. I’m the person who helps with what I call the deployment gremlins: accidents that seem to crop up when the spouse is away.”
She helps spouses who feel overwhelmed by the somewhat nomadic life that comes with marrying a coastie. She grew up in a Coast Guard family—her father served, her mother was a military spouse, her brother serves— so she grew up knowing how hard the constant change can be.
“I grew up knowing stuff that other people didn’t know about living in the service,” she said. “But not everyone has that. There are so many people who marry into the Coast Guard or join and just don’t know what’s out there for them.”
She helps spouses find babysitters, connects them with medical resources, financial managers, mental health counseling, child development specialists, and other services provided by the Coast Guard that new spouses might have no idea about. An example: the Coast Guard helps spouses polish their resumes and conducts practice job interviews at the base’s Work Life Services office. That’s a valuable tool in the service, which demands constant movement and change. But spouses who don’t know about the service would never know to utilize it.
That’s part of why Schultz has poured energy into not just the ombudsman role, but also the Guardian Spouses program—an orientation for spouses and partners of graduating Coast Guard recruits.
“When I got here three years ago, it had kind of died out,” she said. “There were only two people running it, and it had become this firehose of information. We saw people come in after not seeing their spouses for eight weeks, and you could just see how overwhelmed they were.”
She, with a small team, re-worked this post-graduation orientation into something digestible and accessible to folks across the country, not just in Cape May. A new orientation website helps spouses understand what resources are available to them as part of their new life in the Coast Guard.
Schultz, early on in her life, swore she would never marry a coastie. She and her husband are high school sweethearts; they met when they were both 14 years old. Her husband decided many years into dating that he would join the service.
“You can join the coast guard or we can break up,” she told him when they both were young. She shared this to say that life takes turns into the unexpected. Like their move to Cape May, circumstances can turn sweet when it was expected to be sour.
This summer, the family will move to Florida—Schultz’s 19th move in 36 years. Her children, ages 7 and 9, have already lived in four and five houses, respectively, but she sees the upside.
“Moving around and meeting new people so often has made them better communicators,” she says. “They make friends easily. They get excited about new places. We get to pack up and have a new house every so often—it’s part of the adventure.”
Still, leaving Cape May will be hard.
“We love it here. My kids found turtles by the bay. We do the Halloween parade at Historic Cold Spring Village. At Christmas, it’s like a Hallmark movie,” she says. “We sold our second car and bought a golf cart. My kids get picked up from school on it.
She’ll miss some of Cape May’s staples, like the Lucky Bones restaurant and the Nature Center of Cape May, which sits right on the Cape May Harbor by Coast Guard housing. But part of the adventure is seeing what’s next. And it’s likely that Schultz will come to love Florida as much as she did Cape May.
But she still isn’t looking forward to buying a second car.
Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or by phone at 609-886-8600 ext. 156
