In her 46th year of helping schoolchildren cross the same busy intersection, 71-year-old Marlene Keyser has lost count of the accidents and near misses.
Many times, speeding drivers have come to a screeching halt mere inches from her legs, honking, cursing or making hand gestures.
“I learned, after all these years, you just keep your mouth shut or you say, ’Have a nice day,’” she said with a laugh as she stood on Furnace Branch Road in Glen Burnie.
Miss Keyser recently saw a car try to drive around a school bus turning into the North Glen Elementary School parking lot. The car sideswiped the bus and sped through the crosswalk without stopping. When the car was gone and the children were safely across the street, the first thing Miss Keyser did was run to the bus, hop up the steps and check inside.
“The kids were a little shaken up, but they were OK,” she said.
A lot has changed on Furnace Branch Road since the 25-year-old stay-at-home mother began her first day as a crossing guard Sept. 1, 1960. She was among a crew of 36 women and three men. For a few years, the women wore skirts, even in freezing temperatures.
Drivers were a little more polite back then, Miss Keyser said.
But the area around North Glen Elementary has grown.
“The traffic has tripled,” she said.
That hasn’t deterred her from doing her job, however.
From 1960 to 1980, Miss Keyser had perfect attendance at the intersection, never missing a single shift at either of the two crossings she manned each day. She could have transferred to a different location had she wanted but said she has enjoyed watching entire families grow up. Miss Keyser is on her third generation of families. She even escorted a future police chief and future County Council member to safety.
“Cal Ripken has nothing on her,” Anne Arundel County Police Chief P. Thomas Shanahan joked during a ceremony last month honoring Miss Keyser for her service.
Officials said she is the longest-running current employee of the county.
She even stopped traffic for a family of ducks that would march across Furnace Branch Road in a line. A neighbor would let the ducks out of the yard sometimes, and Miss Keyser would blow her whistle and stick her palm out to halt drivers for the feathered creatures.
She had to watch out for dogs years ago, before leash laws were enacted.
And one day in 1969, she even saved the life of her future son-in-law, pulling him from the crosswalk and out of the path of a speeding driver. Donald Patterson still lives down the street with her daughter, Christine.
From her post, Miss Keyser also has to play unofficial security guard for the school. She remembers one time when two men tried to pick up a little girl after school.
The girl screamed and cried and said she did not want to go with them.
Miss Keyser confronted the men and stopped them from picking up the girl. She found out later that one of the men was the girl’s uncle and was sexually assaulting her.
“Unfortunately, you do have to watch out for these things,” she said. “But it’s part of the job. If I didn’t like it so much, I wouldn’t be here.”
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