20 years on Palm Beach and New York

EVAN WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY Tice residents Christiana Delgado and baby Carlos Sanchez stop to chat with crossing guards Louise Steeves, left, and Carolyn LaCombe. Louise Steeves, in a standard orange vest, with a palm-sized American flag she knitted pinned to the lapel, has returned to her twice-daily post at Palm Beach Boulevard and New York Drive.

This is the beginning of her 20th year as a crossing guard there.

Tice Street also divides the intersection a fifth way, where Steeves and fellow guard Carolyn LaCombe attend to kids going to and from school, or anyone passing across the snarl of stoplights and traffic.

Both are retired grade-school teachers — Steeves from Canada, and LaCombe from Massachusetts.

"The first school I taught in had a potbelly stove in the middle of the floor," Steeves said, as a motorcycle roared by during rush hour.

She walked to the corner last Monday morning as usual, after breakfast and near sunup, from her home at the Tice Mobile Home Court & RV Park across the street. It still was too early for neighborhood basketball players at Schandler Hall Community Park or a morning rush at the Route 80 Restaurant a few doors down.

"I always was an early riser," Steeves said.

Yellow buses made their way out of neighborhoods and onto Palm Beach, but children were mostly out of sight by 8 a.m. Steeves said many kids cross Palm Beach early, to make it to a 7:15 a.m. breakfast at nearby Tice Elementary School.

"Sometimes we teach them how to tie their shoes," said LaCombe, who has been a crossing guard for two years.

The ladies step into the street with children and hold their hand up to the traffic, to keep it at bay even when the light turns green.

"The light will turn green when they're still out there," LaCombe said. "That's when you have to be really pushy (with traffic). Sometimes you get the mothers pushing their baby carriages and kids walking their bikes across."

The families who cross the intersection are mostly people she knows, like Christiana Delgado and baby Carlos Sanchez, who live a few blocks away and crossed the street twice Monday morning.

"You get so you know their faces if you don't know their names," Steeves said.

No children have been hit at the corner since she began.

"A guy on a bicycle got hit one day, but he wasn't a school child," she said. "And he went right up in the air and, I thought, went right on his head. And the next morning he came walking down the street. Apparently, he was OK. He had a patch on his head."

Steeves, 85, said two decades watching over the street corner have gone by with little incident. It's become a part of her life, "like washing dishes or making the bed."

She was originally hired by the Lee County Sherriff's Office, but they sold the crossing guard service to a private company years ago, so the benefits are less.

"The sheriff farmed us out, so we aren't as well off as we were before," Steeves said.

Over the years, Palm Beach added a few new lanes and the area near Tice added many new faces and names. Steeves is moved by Mexicans who came to the neighborhood and struggle to get work, no matter their legal status.

"It's kind of sad," she said. "What if we were in another country and couldn't get work? I mean I understand they're taking our jobs and everything, but they're people. They're human beings."

For a few hours every business day, rain or shine, Steeves and LaCombe are at the corner to usher them across as human beings.

"We have nice raincoats with a hood," Steeves said. "One thing I don't like is the thunder and lightning, but we haven't been hit yet, have we?"

When they're not watching the street corner, LaCombe, 74, likes to spend time with her family — five children, 14 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren — especially if it means watching the New England Patriots. She misses spring lilacs, and also her friends and extended family in Massachusetts.

Steeves, 85, prefers baseball. Her husband passed away in 1996 and she has six children, one of whom lives in Montreal. Her sister and brother live in the Maritime Provinces. She writes them letters, but isn't happy about the 74 cent postage cost to mail them to Canada.

Both ladies live in Florida year-round and miss fall's turning leaves, which should be turning rusty and golden colors in their hometowns sometime soon.

"I took a boat tour on the Mississippi last year to see the leaves, but we went too early," Steeves said.

Maybe she'll catch them next year, when she plans to be back on the corner once again.