98-year-old crossing guard is Boston’s oldest city employee
For years, Beatrice Tyler helped students at Timilty Middle School in Roxbury cross the street. The kids wouldn’t have known this, but when their brick schoolhouse was built in 1937, Tyler was about their age.
At 98 years old, Tyler is Boston’s oldest municipal employee, though she hardly brims with excitement at the distinction.
“That’s what they tell me, anyway,” Tyler said. “But it’s just a job.”
Tyler has been on sick leave since 2021 due to high blood pressure. She plans to retire soon after 20 years as a city employee and more than 80 years after she dropped out of high school to work in a factory during World War II.
She already misses it.
“I do miss going out everyday, going to work,” Tyler said. “It gave me something to do. I miss the seasons, being sad in the cold and then happy again in the spring. It was nice.”
Across the decades, Tyler toiled as a seamstress at a textile mill. She welded at a shipyard during World War II and wrangled children at a daycare school. She worked as an elevator operator at Filene’s department store in Downtown Crossing.
But Tyler, a pragmatic and modest sort, said she doesn’t think much of it. Work is work, she said.
“I didn’t do no free volunteering or nothing like that,” Tyler said. “Everything I did during the day to keep me busy was for me.”
Tyler was born Aug. 1, 1924, in South Carolina. She was 3 when her mother died and she moved to Boston with her aunt and uncle shortly after. At 16, she went to work in a factory, where she earned just 20 cents an hour.
“I was stupid. I really shouldn’t have quit,” Tyler said. “But at that time, people were poor. We were poor.”
She married William Kitt Tyler III in 1947. They had one daughter together, Sarah, before they separated after about 15 years of marriage.
In the living room of her quaint Roxbury home, where she has lived for nearly 60 years, shelves are lined with dozens of black-and-white portraits. Her granddaughter, Lisa, and her great-granddaughter, Sierra, have now joined her.
“Living here is very adventurous,” Lisa, 56, said with a laugh. “She takes care of herself, it’s good. Sometimes we can get on each other’s nerves.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Tyler said without missing a beat.
For nearly a century, she has watched Boston transform into a bustling hub. But she doesn’t find it all that remarkable.
“Oh you know, it’s just raggedy old Boston,” Tyler said. “There’s nothing swinging about it. It’s a little crummy, but I have no fault with it.”
Tyler stays at home most days, apart from shopping trips and doctor appointments. Tyler has a petite frame but a magnetic presence, with a resounding voice that fills the room.
She often finds herself staring at out the window, she said, reminiscing of years gone by.
“The people now, they aren’t neighbors no more,” Tyler said. “I don’t even know who they are. But in that time, we used to know everybody in Boston.”
But with a life grounded in family, she has few regrets.
“I had a very happy life, it wasn’t dull,” Tyler said. “I’m here, I’m satisfied.”