Kevin Riordan: Crossing guard for 26 years finds it isn't so easy to stop

Sharon Kirscht uses the present tense when talking about the job that cancer finally forced her to give up.

"I love being a crossing guard," says the lady who helped Gloucester Township's children get to and from school for 26 years.

"You watch them grow up," Kirscht explains. "You become a second mom to some."

That's no small accomplishment in a diffuse swath of suburbia like Gloucester Township, where postwar housing developments and prewar hamlets blend on either side of the Black Horse Pike.

Kirscht is one of those essential people who make a community more than a collection of homes. Her post at Station and Melvin Avenues in the tidy Glendora section has hosted countless conversations over the years.

Recipes have been exchanged, emergencies (flat tires, lost keys, late babysitters) have been handled, and friendships have been made at Kirscht's corner.

"She knows everybody," says resident Suzanne Vangronigen. "She's part of our lives."

Now 63, Kirscht grew up in Cinnaminson and moved to Glendora nearly four decades ago. She taught kindergarten and first grade in Pennsauken but left the classroom to devote more time to her own three kids.

The crossing-guard job was perfect - a block from home, with weekends and summers off. And she could use some of her teaching skills, too.

"It's basic child psychology," she says. "I've always believed that if you want respect, you give respect. I never had a problem with any of the children up here in 26 years. Of course, it helps I know their mothers. In fact, a lot of them I crossed when they were going to school."

Kirscht spotted the children who needed, say, a winter coat; she knew which families were struggling. One Christmas, a set of five siblings "all got sweaters from the crossing guard," she says. "I love to knit and crochet."

Kirscht doesn't need to read reports about working moms, single-parent households, or unemployment; at Station and Melvin, she's met the people behind the statistics.

She's likewise been an eyewitness to all sorts of worrisome behavior. For instance, in traffic.

"I see drivers with a burger in one hand and a coffee in the other," yakking on cell phones as they race to make the green light, Kirscht says. "One was driving . . . while he was putting his deodorant on."

There was also the time when a utility truck took out the street sign at Station and Melvin, when a car jumped the curb, and when the roof of a house "right over there" blew off during a tropical storm. Regardless of the weather ("you really have to know how to layer"), Kirscht was on duty three times a day, five days a week.

"I was healthy as a horse until the cancer hit me," she says. "I was never sick."

Her metastatic breast cancer was diagnosed in November. The disease has invaded her bones, resulting in three fractured vertebrae.

"I've got a broken back," says Kirscht, who now uses a cane but seems . . . undaunted is the only word.

"They were more afraid I would fall this winter and have another fracture, and possibly paralysis," she adds matter-of-factly, explaining why she couldn't return to work this fall.

Police Chief Harry Earle, Mayor David Mayer, and about 100 other folks honored Kirscht at a town hall ceremony in September.

Meanwhile, her daughter, Jennifer Lansberry, is her replacement at Station and Melvin.

"I guess the day I had the most satisfaction was the day one of the students I had crossed since kindergarten graduated from high school, and he stopped on his way home to give me a kiss," Kirscht says. "That was one of the happiest times.

"And last year I started crossing a very elderly lady who walks every morning. She giggled and said, 'I feel like a schoolgirl.'

"She was so upset that I wasn't going to be here any more that she changed her route. Now she walks past my house."