Nanny, I love you and miss you

Ethel Marie McAfee Steiner, my Nanny, was born February 3, 1935. She was the oldest of six, four of whom have passed away. She helped raise her younger siblings as is often the case. She played basketball in high school and wore her aunt's Army fatigues. She often snuck her garter snake in as well. In 1952, at the age of 17, Ethel was a cancan dancer for about a month. She and five other girls practiced for over a month leading up to Greensburg Pennsylvania’s Sesquicentennial celebration.  Prior to performing, she lost about 20 pounds from how much they practiced. They performed every night for a week. On the last night, it was like a real western show. A couple drunken men jumped up on stage wanting to dance with the girls. They were shown off the stage.  Around the same time, she also started to volunteer at her church as a Sunday school teacher and work at a soda fountain situated between two movie theaters. While nothing terribly eventful happened in either position, she recalled one instance at the soda fountain in which she forgot to put a banana in a banana split. The customer did not want the banana-less split and so she was able to enjoy it herself. Ethel graduated from high school in 1952 as well. She worked for one week at Robert Shaw making thermoses but they let her go and told her to come back when she was 18 because 17 was just too young. When Ethel was 18, in 1953, she went to Connecticut for a summer and worked on a tobacco farm. Approximately 100 girls lived in a converted warehouse which had a very large sink which they operated with foot pedals. The girls rode school buses from the warehouse to the farms and back every day. The bus drivers were good people. They brought bushels of ripe tomatoes every day for the girls to munch on during the road back from the farm. At the farm, the girls didn’t work in the fields. They stayed up in the barns where they sewed the tobacco leaves into long lathes. The boys then took the lathes up to the rafters of the barn where they dried. The boys also delivered the leaves from the fields to the barn and occasional left disgusting surprises in the leaves in the form of feces. Apparently, boys have always been gross. During this time, Ethel contracted tobacco rash which itched like crazy and required daily applications of calamine lotion all over her body. Upon returning to Greensburg, Ethel started working at Jeannette Rubber Works making life rafts for the Army. The Army was a tough customer. If one of the rafts had a leak, they sent back ten. The rafts constructed were roughly eight feet in diameter. The employees at Jeannette had to glue in the floor and install the supports for a canopy. They also had to clean the big steel tables in the factory with muriatic acid without face masks which they learned years later was hazardous to their health. Ethel worked there for a little more than a year before starting at Bell Telephone when she was 20 years old in 1955. She worked in the commercial office in the billing department using an addressograph machine. With an addressograph machine, she typed the names and addresses of customers onto metal plates which were then used to stamp the envelopes. The job started in Pittsburgh so she took the train in everyday. As kids do, they often threw rocks at the train from an overpass. Once, a rock hit the window where she was sitting but because of how fast the train was moving, it only cracked the window rather than flying in. It was around this time that she found a special interest in a regular bus driver for the youth group. His name was John Steiner. On one trip in particular, John found himself buying two rings, a $10 one for himself and a $14 one for Ethel. She married John on July 20, 1957 when she was 22 years old and still employed by Bell Telephone. About a year after their marriage, Bell changed locations from Pittsburgh to Greensburg which was much closer to home for her. Around the same time, Ethel gave birth to her first born, John Jr., when she was 23 years old. She was staying at her mother’s house leading up to the birth because her husband was hospitalized for a hernia. He was on the floor right above hers while she was giving birth. On the day of delivery, she told her mother that John Jr. had been kicking her all night and her back hurt terribly. Her mother informed her that it sounded like she was in labor. She was right. Ethel’s brother, Jim, took her to the hospital and stayed with her. The nurse came in several times asking if she was sure she was in labor because she was the quietest woman on the floor. She had some paid maternity leave but didn’t take very much time off from work as her husband was still hospitalized and they had a newborn to care for. In 1960 Ethel left Bell Telephone to stay home with her children. She had been a pregnant Christmas angel before her second son, Ronald, was born in that year. Eleven months later, she gave birth to Mark in 1961. They didn’t have to pay for Mark’s vaccinations for the first year of his life due to a clerical error at the doctor’s office. At the age of 26 and with three small boys, the youngest of which being only 3 months old, Ethel and John moved across the state from Irwin to Stockertown.  They took their home, a 10ft wide and 50ft long trailer, with them. Eventually, they traded in the trailer for a double wide that John still lives in. When they settled in Stockertown, the found a new church to go to and once again, Ethel started as a Sunday school teacher. She also volunteered as a vacation bible school leader every summer. At the age of 30, in 1965, Ethel gave birth to her last kid, my father, Jef. A week before they took Ron and Mark out to Greensburg to stay with her mother. The boys took their Santa Claus dolls with them which had very clean, white beards. When they came back the beards were dark grey from all of the coal dust. John Jr. was the only one with a clean Santa because he stayed in Martin’s Creek with Libby, Ethel’s niece. The day that Jef was born she tried to call her doctor’s office. He wasn’t in so they told her to call the hospital because there were doctor’s there who could help her. She did call them and they prepared a room for her. However, my grandparents had different ideas. They had to pay their taxes first and then they sat in the parking lot of the hospital until after noon because they thought they wouldn’t be charged for the whole day if they waited that long. When they finally went in, the hospital staff was relieved. The hospital had been calling their house trying to find them. An hour after they went into the hospital, Jef was born. All of her births were rather easy for her. Ethel’s life revolved around children from the time she was 25. All of her stories are family stories about her boys or her grandkids and all of the children she babysat. When she was 35 years old, her three older boys with some other neighborhood boys soaped the windows of the model home in the neighborhood while the owners were away. The owners returned and the boys all scattered. The boys did the logical thing and didn’t go home, all except one, the brainy  boy, Ron. He ran home, was followed, and subsequently caught. The boys were then made to clean the windows. Ethel laughed every time she told this story. Most of the stories she told were humorous, in fact. In 1971, all of her boys were in school so she sought employment. She found an ad for a babysitter in the newspaper and took up the position. The baby was 10 months old when she started. She stayed with that family for 14 years. Three more children were born and she left when the youngest was 8. When the youngest child was 5 months old, the parents went to Egypt leaving the children with my grandparents for three weeks. Around the time she started babysitting; she also became a Cub Scout leader and started teaching AWANA which was a Wednesday night program at the church. That lasted for a few years but ended before Jef was in high school. There was a State Police barrack in Stockertown which was behind their house diagonally. In the field behind the Steiner house, the police had a helicopter pad which the boys played ball on. When the helicopter was taking off and the boys were outside, the pilot would tilt the helicopter so the boys could throw the balls at the spinning blades and basically play catch with the helicopter. The police men also often came out and played with the boys in the field. They would remove their guns to do so and leave them on the side o the field. Once, a police man forgot his gun and John Jr. returned it to him. They also fished in the same creek as the boys. There was one day when Mark was walking back home from the creek with an 18” fish in his hands. A police officer opened the window and asked Mark how he had caught it. Mark told him he had dammed up the fish in the creek with rocks and simply plucked it out of the water with his hands. The officer slammed the window shut as he had apparently tried and caught nothing earlier that day. Ethel kept the fish in the freezer for years. She also kept the top of Ron's wedding cake in her freezer from the early 90's until Hurricane Sandy knocked out the power in October 2012 but that's another story. When her three older boys were out of high school and she was about 43 years old, Ron was wrestling with Mark because they’re boys and it’s what they do. Ron had Mark in a choke hold but Mark had his hands between Ron’s arm and his neck. That is, until his glasses started to slip off. He pulled his hand out to fix them and in that time Ron choked him out. So, what does Ron the EMT do? He screams for his mom. Mark came to right away so it wasn’t a big deal. The next door neighbors, Donna and Mike, asked Ethel when she was 51 years old to babysit their 2 year old daughter, Kaitlin. Donna was in nursing school and Mike was working. That year, there was a tornado that tore through the area. Mark and Jef were bringing in the patio furniture so it wouldn’t blow away. The dog, Frank, was tied to the side porch and normally couldn’t reach the back patio. However, he was so scared this day that he managed to do it. As Jef and Mark were bringing in the furniture they noticed that it suddenly became much brighter outside. The storm had torn off the patio roof, some of the main house roof, and part of the chimney. It also blew off Mike and Donna’s aluminum patio roof and caused it to hit a power line knocking out the power. Ethel continued babysitting for the couple after they had two more children, Kristen and Nick. Shortly after Nick was born, Mike was deployed to Dessert Storm. Donna was going to quit nursing school so she could stay with the children but Ethel and John insisted she continue going. Ethel took care of her children all day as Donna left before the kids were awake and came home after they were already asleep. In 1990 Ethel was 55 years old, she took up the position of sexton at Grace Bible Fellowship Church and her first grandchild (me!) was born. She continued caring for the neighbor’s children as well as her grandchildren. It was rather like a daycare center where children of all ages from all over the neighborhood were cared for by her until and through elementary school. She was attentive even to the point of matching the colors of our cups to which color Power Ranger we played as that day. She kept us all in line and strongly enforced nap time until you reached the age of 5. She was well loved by all of the children for whom she cared. Even into high school, the kids still went to her house for snacks. Ethel cared for the children of her sons’ friends and sometimes for her great-grandchildren until shortly before she passed. At church, Ethel frequently sang solos and with the choir at Grave Bible Fellowship Church. She had an unmistakable, very strong, vibrato, soprano voice. She reached very daunting motes. She passed away on August 1, 2013. The majority of her life was spent caring for others and had a special way with children. She always had a listening ear as well as a lot to say and was always there when you needed her. She was an admirable woman, full of strength and love, whom I hope I can make proud and emulate in my daily life.