THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 12, 1996 TAG: 9607100120
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: THUMBS UP
SOURCE: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: 115 lines
Shirley A. Tisdale stood on a corner for 24 years dressed in the crisp blue of a Chesapeake police officer's uniform.
She was a crossing guard, shepherding neighborhood children across the corner where Walden Street meets Varsity Drive in South Norfolk, warning them to stay clear of those woods that lay along the road as it led to Portlock Primary School.
Sometimes people hide in there, she would tell them - not good people.
The children would nod and she would send them on their way, small legs and book bags heading off to school.
Parents would drive by and wave to her. Some would stop and talk.
But Tisdale's husband died last fall after a long illness, and her nerves began to get bad.
Charles Ray Tisdale brought her here 42 years ago, two days after the birth of their first son. He took her from the farm in Kentucky and brought her to Chesapeake, where his mother, Mary S. Tisdale, ran Tisdale's Grocery on Ohio Street.
Her husband was her friend, the father of their boys and the man she would work flea markets with on Saturdays.
He used to be 175 pounds. The sickness got him down to 110.
In her house on Earle Street, she remembers those last two years. They were the worst. Coming home from work and never knowing exactly how he'd be.
Tisdale is a short woman with bright eyes and a smoky drawl, half the product of her Kentucky childhood and half the Style Box 100s she lights one after the other. Her skin is tan, but not just from the hours spent in her garden. She's this color year-round, she says. There's some Cherokee blood in her.
Most days are busy since she retired at the end of the school year. She and her family are fixing up the house: rebuilding the front steps, now a pile of bricks, and planning to put on an addition that will push into the back yard.
She cleans sometimes, and she gardens. She has a lot of friends who look in on her, she says. ``And that makes things nice.''
But sitting at her kitchen table just feet from a row of awards for her service, one of which bears her badge, No. 15, her eyes cloud with tears when she thinks of her husband.
``I miss him terribly,'' she says.
Tisdale recalls the feeling of coming home every day and having the fear that it would be the last day she would see her husband. He'd been sick for more than 14 years when Hepatitis C turned into the cancer that claimed him in November.
She met him during the Korean War.
She was the daughter of William and Ida Allen, part of a farming family that lived in the Kentucky mountains. They were 20 miles from Bullet County, a good name for a county in Kentucky. She attended a one-room school house; she quit in the seventh grade to work on the farm, where her family grew tobacco, tomatoes and other crops, and had a host of animals.
He was a 19-year-old soldier. Army Pfc. Charles Ray Tisdale, stationed at nearby Fort Knox. A friend of hers introduced them. They married when she was 15. Her parents consented, but they wouldn't sign the paperwork for the marriage. So her sister did.
They moved to Virginia after their first son, Johnny, was born. It was a 24-hour drive in those days, and Shirley Tisdale cried all the way down here.
Then came another son, Everett Dean.
Charles Ray Tisdale worked at Norfolk Ship Co. He had his first heart attack there, on the job. Then another two months later.
It was 1982. The doctors performed four bypasses. In those days, they didn't check the blood, says Shirley.
She remembers how they worked the local flea markets together for close to 15 years, loading up two trucks with goods and taking them to market on the weekends.
``He could talk more bull at the flea markets,'' Tisdale says, laughing at the memory.
They gave it up as his health deteriorated.
Their boys played football at Oscar Smith High School. Johnny was a running back, Dean a defensive end.
She continued as a crossing guard, the job she started the year her oldest son graduated high school. She ended up crossing many children of the people who graduated with her sons.
She remembers all the faces, she says, but the names get a little tricky.
Like that boy who didn't want to go to class, hiding in the woods instead. Shirley couldn't get him out. Neither could the school's assistant principal. The police eventually showed up.
``That little devil just didn't want to come out of the woods,'' she says.
Many of the faces still think about her.
Mary E. Bell, 59, remembers that nice-looking lady with the glasses at the corner of Varsity and Walden. Tisdale used to cross Bell's daughter when she was going to school, and Bell would walk her daughter to the corner and talk with the crossing guard.
Her daughter grew up. Still, during Mary Bell's morning drive from her Edgewood Avenue home to her Greenbrier workplace, she would sometimes stop and talk with Tisdale, asking how about the husband and children.
Tisdale was always out there, rain or shine, according to Bell. And Tisdale would be the first to tell you that it gets ``cold as the Dickens out there.''
Then there were those two weeks last fall. Bell noticed that a policeman was out at the corner. Tisdale, that nice-looking lady with the glasses, was nowhere to be seen.
After a couple weeks, Tisdale returned.
Bell stopped and asked her where she'd been.
That was when she learned Tisdale's husband had died.
After that, Bell surmises, ``I guess she just felt it was time to quit.''
When Shirley Tisdale left, a co-worker wrote a poem called ``Mrs. Tisdale,'' which in part reads: ``There were days that you were sick or had burdens great to bear, but even through those times you were always there.''
Charles Ray, before he died, asked his sons to look after their mother.
She talks to Johnny every day, she said. Dean, now 41, moved his family here Monday to stay with her. That's why they're going to build on the house.
``Two fine boys,'' says Tisdale of her sons.
The product of 44 years with her husband. With them and four grandchildren, life isn't empty for Shirley Tisdale. Not even in retirement.
But it isn't the same without Charles.
``Sure,'' says Tisdale, ``we had good times and bad times, but he was great. I wouldn't take nothing for him.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by STEVE EARLEY
Shirley A. Tisdale retired after 24 years as a school crossing
guard. by CNB