Longtime crossing guard takes safety seriously

ON A RECENT chilly, sunny weekday afternoon, the corner of Cottage Street and Bleigh Avenue, in Holmesburg, was nearly deserted.

Students were tucked unheard and unseen inside the Edwin Forrest School, and residents of the tidy rowhouses across the street were mostly off at work.

Elizabeth Biddle waited. She adjusted her gloves and straightened her hat, the prim, white-and-checkered cap of a crossing guard.

Then the swarm descended. Within seconds, the corner was crawling like a beehive.

"Where's the fire?!" Biddle, 53, barked at a tangle of boys barreling toward her.

"How was your day, handsome?" she asked another boy, one of about 500 kids she crosses each day.

From the corner of her eye, she spied a tweener breaking from the crowd to cut diagonally across the intersection.

"You know better!" she bellowed. "Get on the pavement!"

They call her Miss Betty, and she is a pro. She's one of the city's longest-serving crossing guards; she started ushering kids across city streets in 1980, the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Although the world has changed much since then, she said the kids haven't.

"Kids are kids; kids only get away with what you let them get away with," said Biddle, a married mother of three grown children. "Parents are different. Discipline your child!"

Biddle remembered one student she used to shepherd daily across the street who was caught recently urinating against the side of the school. When school officials told the boy's mother, she retorted: "When you get it on tape, show it to me."

Biddle brooks no such sass.

She orders "five-minute fence time" for misbehavers, sending them to consider their disrespect.

She has little tolerance for traffic scofflaws. Park in her crosswalk, and risk her wrath. She doesn't hesitate to blow her whistle, the same whistle her father wore as a correctional officer at Holmesburg Prison decades ago.

She's generous with the stinkeye, too.

"Talking on your cellphone while driving, picking up your kids and then not making them sit in seat belts, driving with a dog in your lap - these things irk me," she said.

But her attitude comes from caring, she said.

"I watched a little boy die 26 years ago" when he got hit by a car on a nearby unmanned corner, she said. "When I got home from school that day, I held my son for 45 minutes, I was so upset.

"I would put myself between a child and a car."

Such protectiveness can provoke "ignorant" motorists, she's learned.

"We get no respect," she said, recounting a recent run-in with a woman who had double-parked to retrieve her child. When Biddle demanded she move, the woman ignored her before finally driving down the street, defiantly steering so close to Biddle that her car brushed her pants.

"And her children were in that car," she said. "What message do you think that sends to the kids?"