Tag Archive for: Resident Spotlight

Peggy and Russell (aka Rusty) Kreiser at Homeland Center

Over the years, Homeland has seen many residents who are husband and wife. There have been siblings, too.

But a mother and son? That is a first since Peggy and Russell Keiser have made Homeland their happy home.

Peggy and Rusty, as he’s known to all, arrived in late 2018. She is well-known in the area for her 65 years as the secretary for 10 superintendents of Susquehanna Township School District, from Joseph Hilbush in 1943 to Susan Kegerise in 2011.

Along the way, her accumulated “claim to fame’’ as she calls it, included:

• Creation of an annual scholarship known as the Peggy Hummel Keiser Scholarship for the Secretarial Sciences, established in 1991 by the Susquehanna Township High School class of 1951.
• Renaming of the high school library to the Keiser-Fearen Library Media Center, in honor of her and “a treasure of a teacher” named Alice Fearen.
• And on her retirement, more years of service in the Pennsylvania School Employees’ Retirement System than anyone else – ever.

Peggy’s storied career started because she and three other Susquehanna Township High School seniors, all girls, were asked to help with secretarial work in the office. Before graduation, she was asked to take the position full-time. That began 65 years of knowing the school district inside and out and watching it grow.

Peggy’s Central Pennsylvania roots run deep. Her maiden name of Hummel marks her as a descendant of the founder of the Hershey-area town of Hummelstown. Plus, her mother was a Lingle, connected to the founding of the charming Harrisburg-area village of Linglestown.

Peggy’s father worked in the office of Harrisburg Steel. By the time Peggy retired, she was back living in the Susquehanna Township home built brick-by-brick by her grandfather, Augustus Alitto. An immigrant from Calabria, Italy, Alitto was one of the stone masons who worked on the Susquehanna Township School District elementary school and the Hersheypark Arena, the original home of the AHL Hershey Bears.

Soon after she started working for the school district, young Peggy was selling tickets at a football game, when she accidentally shortchanged a sailor named Nelson Keiser. They were married the next year and had two children, Sandra and Rusty.

The children attended Susquehanna Township schools, where Sandy was involved in field hockey. Rusty was a special education student who loved sports so much that he got to work with legendary football coach Roscoe Warner.

In 1979, Peggy was thinking about retiring, but one day, her husband called to say he wasn’t feeling well. She took him to the hospital, where he later died. Although it was a difficult time for her, she persevered. Peggy and Nelson had lived in a beautiful home in Susquehanna Township, but it became too much to manage, so she moved into the brick cottage that her grandfather built.

Today Rusty still loves sports, especially the Philadelphia Phillies. He has met the late, great announcer Harry Kalas. He roots for the team through thick and thin.

“They lost last night 15 to 1,” he said the day after a trouncing by the rival Washington Nationals. “But I just like to watch them play.”

Added Peggy, “He’s terrible when he’s watching them. He’s terribly loud.”

The move to Homeland has gone very well for mother and son. When Peggy felt it was time to leave her home, they decided to get a suite for each of them. Their apartments, including Peggy’s bright corner room, are two doors away from each other.

“He knows everybody here,’’ said Peggy. “He loves this place.”

Rusty takes advantage of the full range of activities available. “Bingo,” he said. “Sports trivia. Exercises. I do exercises six days a week.”

She, too, enjoys Homeland, attending holiday parties and special events.

“The people are nice,” she said. “It’s a place of pleasure and convenience. I like it here.”

Homeland Center resident Gladys Patrick again at ‘home’ in Pennsylvania

Head nurse. American Legion Auxiliary president. Hospital volunteer. Tavernkeeper. Traveler. Church leader. Mother of five.

How did Gladys Patrick fit it all into one life?

“I was a great delegator,” she says today.

Gladys was born in Minersville, in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region where her father was a miner. The oldest of five siblings, her mother died when Gladys was 13. By then, the family was living in Philadelphia, where her father supported the war effort working for the Budd Company, a metal fabricator.

At their mother’s death, the children were separated for a time but then reunited with their father. As the eldest, Gladys was the caretaker, cooking and doing the laundry. Soon, however, the children went to an Episcopal orphanage in Jonestown, Pennsylvania. They lived like family with house parents on a farm with the girls learning such things as canning.

“One day, somebody didn’t turn on the gauge on the steamer, and the red beets exploded,” she remembers. “To this day, I can still see that red beet juice all over the ceiling.”

The home offered Gladys a loving shelter. Every day, she walked to school, where she and her fellow “Home Kids,” as the orphanage residents were known, excelled.

“It was a great three years,” she says. “We were so blessed.”

After graduation, someone suggested that Gladys would be a good nurse, so she got her RN at Polyclinic Hospital’s school in Harrisburg. Then came marriage and her first three children; then she and her husband built a home outside of Harrisburg.

“I was pregnant and hammering nails,” she says. She continued working part-time in nursing. She was also active in the local and state American Legion Auxiliary, starting such efforts as her Post’s poppy program for Veterans’ Day.

After she and her first husband divorced, she remarried and embarked on a new phase – running restaurants. She and her husband, Gerald Patrick, bought a Steelton-area restaurant they named Pat’s Grill (now the well-known Herby’s El Mexicano). She was active in the Tri-County Tavern Association, once earning “Tavern Owner of the Year” honors.

Through this, she served as Polyclinic Hospital’s head nurse, remained active in the Legion, and had two more children. The Patricks owned Pat’s Grill for five years. Then, Gladys was attending a seminar when an announcement over the loudspeaker said she had a phone call. She worried that something happened to one of her children, but instead, Gerry told her he bought a restaurant near Hershey. She thought “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

They owned Patrick’s Hotel for 16 years. They sold it in 1983 and decided to move to Arizona, on one condition. Gladys insisted they spend summers back home in Pennsylvania, where she could see her grandchildren grow.

They moved to Lake Havasu, Arizona, home to the London Bridge that once spanned the River Thames. With family constantly visiting, their home became known as “Patrick’s West.” The couple also embarked on a period of travel that took them to national parks, Hawaii, Venezuela, Ireland, Monte Carlo, Switzerland, and Puerto Rico, where avid golfer Gerry often played the links.

“I’d love to go back to Monte Carlo, but you can’t afford it,” Gladys says.

Gladys grew a garden of vegetables and flowers. She volunteered for golf tournaments and at the local hospital emergency room. She helped run her church’s kitchen and chaired its 100th-anniversary event, making sure that diners ate in style from real china, with real silverware.

After 47 years of marriage, Gerry died from the effects of a stroke, and Gladys moved to Las Vegas, to be near some of her children. But then a granddaughter asked, “Grandma, what really is home?” Gladys knew the answer.

“I’m originally from Pennsylvania,” she says. “I lived here all my life. This always is home.”

The first time Gladys and her family toured Homeland, her great-granddaughter said, “Grandma, when I get old, I’m going to live here.” She celebrated her 91st birthday with family – she now has 13 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren – at the Homeland Diner, a 1950s-style eatery where she wore a poodle skirt. She keeps busy with penny-ante poker, bingo, and exercise classes and ends her days with a glass of red wine before going to bed.

“I’ve had a good life,” she says. “I’m very grateful. God’s given me the opportunity to do what I’m doing.”

And when people ask for the secret of her longevity, she has a three-part answer.

“Number one: The awesome God,” she says. “Number two: My phenomenal, outstanding, loving family. And three: Red wine.”

Homeland resident Carl Barna enjoying the tomato-plant garden.

Carl Barna is giving a tour of the impromptu tomato garden sprouting on the veranda overlooking Homeland Center’s verdant Catherine Elizabeth Meikle Courtyard.

“There’s Bush Goliath,” he says, rattling off the varieties growing in pots. “Then there’s Celebrity. There’s a Roma. There’s one called a Patio tomato.”

Where Carl Barna goes, there’s a project going on. He has spent a lifetime building decks and porches, fixing up homes, cooking, sewing and upholstering, and growing vegetable gardens, especially those featuring his favorite – spicy-hot jalapeno peppers. At Homeland, he pitches in wherever there’s a need and, with his outgoing nature, strikes up conversations with everyone.

Homeland’s little vegetable garden started late this summer, when Carl acquired the tomato plants, plus jalapeno and red bell peppers now growing in a stone planter, from obliging home store managers, happy to see their end-of-season plants going to Homeland Center.

He has thoughts about expanding the garden in future seasons. He could build raised planters for vegetables, and maybe grow fresh herbs for the Homeland kitchens.

Carl is a Harrisburg native, growing up a middle son in a family of four girls and five boys. He played baseball and football. He camped and roamed the woods above his home. By age 13 or so, he was working, carting concrete around building sites for the father of television producer and Harrisburg native Carmen Finestra.

He always knew he didn’t want to work in an office. He graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School in 1972, just as Tropical Storm Agnes was devastating Harrisburg, so he found work clearing mud and debris from flooded stores. Then, Carl found work as a Penn Central Railroad brakeman. It was hazardous work, jumping on cars being separated and classified for the next leg of their journeys. If they were boxcars, he would climb to the roof. At the Enola railyard, his job was to tie the handbrakes to stop each car before they ran out of track. Once a group was secured, another batch of cars might come over the hump, to be stopped by the cars already tied down.

After four years with the railroad, a car crash left Carl with limited use of his legs, but he stayed busy. He worked in real estate, fixing up houses and even erecting a modular home for his mother. Today, he maintains his powerful build by attending Homeland’s exercise classes. Every morning, he does 150 sit-ups and 1,500 reps of a twist with a cane threaded behind his shoulders.

All his life, Carl has learned by doing and by picking the brains of others. He learned to cook from the TV chefs he would watch with his mother. There were the little tricks that made cooking easier, such as using a mustard bottle to squeeze out precise drops of olive oil. He came to appreciate the results of cooking with cast-iron pans, producing broiled pork chops that came out as well as grilled.

Carl brings a cheery attitude to every activity and meal at Homeland, perhaps coaxing a laugh and a little chair dance from someone in an exercise class, or helping a skilled-care resident fill out a bingo card. When he goes to bingo, everyone leaves with a prize. It’s all part of his philosophy to make someone’s day, every day.

“I have fun with everybody,” he says.