School crossing guard hanging up cap|[12/12/05]

Published 12:00 am Monday, December 12, 2005

Some people, after 37 consecutive years of quiet days at work, might hope for a little excitement.

For Kathy Carter, though, after decades of standing in traffic to direct oncoming cars and school buses, excitement would be far down her list.

People do get angry, said the longtime Vicksburg school crossing guard, and have a tendency to drive too fast. Every driver thinks he or she should go first. Sometimes there’s a honk. But in 37 years at four intersections, no one – not even an inexperienced student driver – has ever had so much as a fender-bender under her direction.

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Not bad for someone who once couldn’t have navigated a car herself through the traffic she was directing.

&#8220When I put in my application, I didn’t know how to drive and I didn’t own a car,” said Carter, who will hang up her cap and bright yellow vest when school dismisses for Christmas. &#8220Yet I was directing traffic.”

Carter has another distinction. She was the first black person hired as a school crossing guard. In 1967, there were few minorities employed on public payrolls except as custodians.

But she has been out there, visible, first on Confederate Avenue for Ken Karyl Elementary traffic, then at Grove Street Elementary. Eventually, she moved outside North Vicksburg High when it was on Baldwin Ferry Road and now works at Baldwin Ferry and Mission 66, up the hill and probably the busiest of all school crossings.

Carter reared two daughters and a son in Vicksburg schools – they walked, she said – and directed some of the city’s first integrated buses. Ken Karyl no longer exists. The former North Vicksburg High School became Vicksburg Junior High and Warren Central Junior High is on the same street.

From her perspective, the biggest change over the past four decades has been the number of cars and buses she waves by every day. Vicksburg’s population hasn’t grown since 1967, but the number of residents who own a car – a group that has long included Carter – has. Today, when she stops a lane on Mission 66 to allow an ever-growing series of buses exiting the junior high schools onto the road, the line sometimes builds to more than a dozen cars in the minute or two before Johnson, like raising a flood gate, waves them back along their way.

&#8220It’s just horrible traffic. So many cars, so many buses,” she said. &#8220Every which way on Mission you have cars going to the Catholic school, cars going this way, that way. … When I first started, there weren’t so many cars.”

What hasn’t changed is the daily routine: Carter still gets up every day to be at her intersection when the first cars start rolling into the schools at 7 a.m., and makes it back in time to guide the buses out at 3:30 every afternoon. Some days are brutally hot, some very cold, and some just miserable.

&#8220Some days if it’s just pouring down rain, it’s all in my face and I can’t see,” she said, noting the last strong rainstorm she stood in a few weeks ago. &#8220It was blowing in my face. It was just blowing rain. It was hard. It was really a downpour.”

But Carter makes it out, every day, a task that hasn’t been any easier as she’s gotten older – especially when she also holds a full-time job as a sales associate at McRae’s at Pemberton Square mall, a job she’ll keep after she retires this month.

&#8220It’s a challenge, and I’ve been doing it for so long,” said Carter, who takes a late lunch break at McRae’s to be able to perform her afternoon duty. &#8220It’s really getting stressful…it’s just time for me to retire.”