Mary Deibler believes in service to others. For 15 years after her retirement, she volunteered at Bethesda Mission, a Harrisburg-based provider of housing and services for the homeless.
“I like to help people who need help,” she said.
She found her niche there at the mission’s youth center, helping in the kitchen and with activities like crafts.
“You can tell when you’re helping them,” she said. “You can tell when you’re doing something for them. I’d say almost all of them are happy that you help them.”
Now that she is at Homeland, she appreciates the help she receives from the staff.
“I like the people, all of them,” she said. “They treat me good.”
Mary grew up in uptown Harrisburg and, for a time, in Lower Paxton Township. She was in the middle of eight siblings – four boys and four girls – and always found time to get outdoors. She played baseball and hiked with one of her brothers at local parks, including Wildwood Park.
Her father was a railroad conductor. Her mother was a homemaker who, later, worked at Pomeroy’s department store downtown.
“I remember the storefronts at Christmastime,” she said. “They had all kinds of stuff in the windows.”
In her late teens, a friend introduced Mary to her future husband at his home in Harrisburg. They got to know each other first, and then they started dating, going to the movies or ice skating at Italian Lake, a Harrisburg city park. They wed following her graduation from William Penn High School.
After their first two children were born, a son and a daughter, they moved from the city to a hunting cabin they bought in Fishing Creek Valley, outside of Harrisburg. It had heat and a wraparound porch where they would sit on the porch swing.
“It was a nice hunting cabin,” Mary said. “The only thing was, it had a bathtub at the end of the kitchen, but no water in the house.”
Mary’s husband, who worked at a plumbing supply warehouse, fixed up the place, adding two rooms, plumbing, and enclosing the porch.
Three more children came along, all girls. The family tended two large gardens, and Mary canned the vegetables and made applesauce.
She also made sand tarts so famously tasty that friends would buy batches.
“They were really thin,” Mary said. “That’s the way they’re supposed to be. I’d roll out the dough, put a cookie cutter on it, and put it right on the cookie sheet. That way, I didn’t mess it up.”
Her youngest daughter, Laurie Daubert, added that her mother didn’t actively teach the kids to cook. “We just lived it,” she said.
Mary also enjoyed working her jobs, including time as a Bell Telephone typist and scooping ice cream at a Howard Johnson’s. For 15 years before she retired, she cooked at her children’s elementary school, where she got along well with all the students.
“She ignored what they were supposed to do half the time and made food the way it used to be,” Laurie said.
After Mary and her husband retired, they got a camper and kept it at a riverfront campground in Liverpool, PA, where he loved to fish. Only a couple of years later, he had a heart attack. As his health declined, Mary was by his side, and he died in 1998.
Soon after, she started traveling with her brother and his wife. They went camping all over the country, including Sedona, Arizona. Even after her brother lost a leg – he was operating a snowblower when a drunk driver hit him – the three kept traveling.
Mary came to Homeland in March 2025. She gets regular visits from her children and grandchildren. Her bright corner room looks out over an expanse of trees, for a view of Mary’s beloved outdoors. One granddaughter even applied a tree-in-bloom decal to the wall. On her birthday in December, her fellow church members visited, and she received 31 cards.
“It’s nice here,” she said. “I like the different things we can do. I like to play bingo and Scrabble. That’s on Saturdays. I played Scrabble before I came here.”
Laurie agrees that the Homeland people make the difference.
“They’re very attentive,” she said. “I’m very happy that my mom came here.”
Homeland Center (www.homelandcenter.org) offers levels of care including personal care, memory care, skilled nursing and rehabilitation. Homeland also provides hospice, home care, home health and palliative care services to serve the diverse and changing needs of families throughout central Pennsylvania. For more information or to arrange a tour, please call 717-221-7900.
