Copyright 2006 Lebanon Daily News
All Rights Reserved
By CHRIS SHOLLY
The Lebanon Daily News (Pennsylvania)
LAWN, Pa. — Elsie Reynolds has a healthy desire to help people.
The 75-year-old Williams-port native spent most of her professional life as a registered nurse, retiring in 1994. Then, she took up training to become an emergency medical technician.
“Whatever I did (after retiring), I wanted to help other people,” she said.
Reynolds is a volunteer at Lawn EMS in South Londonderry Township. When she’s not working as an EMT or otherwise helping out at the ambulance company, she’s tending her garden, selling apples from her orchard, embroidering or camping.
She retired from the Hershey Medical Center, where she had worked as a registered nurse for more than 20 years.
As she drew closer to retirement, neighbor Jean Garrett and Reynolds’ son, Don, persuaded her to become an EMT. At the time, Don was a deputy EMS chief at Lawn, and Garrett was head of the group’s Ladies Auxiliary. Later, Reynolds herself became vice president, then president of the auxiliary.
Although her nursing skills gave her an edge in EMT training, Reynolds said the two jobs differ greatly. An EMT looks at patients from an entirely different viewpoint as a nurse.
“There are some things you can’t do (as an EMT),” she said. “It’s much different than working in the hospital, where you have all your supplies, or all you have to do is push a button and you get help,” she said. “As an EMT, you have to work independently with a group and make decisions quickly for the good of the patient.”
Reynolds spends two days a week from 5 a.m. until 6 p.m. manning the Lawn station.
“Some weeks I do not see any patients, and then there may be times when I see three a day,” she said.
When she’s not on duty, Reynolds helps out at the Lawn station in some way, from trimming the shrubbery to making chicken corn soup, a cooking project the company completes twice a year. She and the other volunteers also make the company’s well-known spaghetti sauce, which, like the soup, they sell twice a year.
Like Reynolds, her husband, Lawrence, has a medical background. They grew up in towns in northern Pennsylvania that were five miles apart, but they first met through friends in New York. They moved to Lebanon County from Flint, Mich., in the early 1970s, after Lawrence accepted a position as a biological photographer at the Hershey Medical Center.
“One of the stipulations was, if we moved back to Pennsylvania, was that he would build me a house,” she said.
He did, she said, but “it took a couple of years to find a location.”
The couple live along Colebrook Road in South Londonderry, where they tend a vineyard and an orchard of apple trees.
“We started planting the orchard immediately, even before the house was built,” she recalled.
The orchard now has about 200 trees, with a dozen varieties of apples. The land also boasts a few plum and pear trees.
For the past 20 years, the couple have been selling their apples at a roadside stand in front of their home.
“We just found that even with six children, we had surplus,” she said. “It isn’t anything you make money on.”
Reynolds also tends a garden with sweet corn, peas, lima beans, tomatoes, squash and pumpkins, all of which she also sells.
“We always had a garden,” she said. “Both his parents and my mother had a garden, so I expected to have fresh fruits and vegetables. I love working in the garden. I like to plant and watch things grow.”
But Reynolds leaves the weeding to her husband.
“I like the results of weeding, but I don’t particularly care for weeding,” she said, laughing.
The couple also enjoy camping. Last year, they returned to a lakeside camp in the Hudson Bay area, the same camp where they spent their honeymoon, she said.
And now, after three and a half decades in Pennsylvania and 12 years of busy retirement, Reynolds said she understands the secret to life.
“Keep going and take an interest in things,” she said, “and take an interest in what you do and the people around you.”