Everyone calls 97-year-old Anna N. Buckwalter "Mom."

For decades, Buckwalter hosted Fresh Air children, as well as foreign students from Lincoln University and Experiment in International Living.

"I've always had an open door. We never said 'no' to people. You're a guest for five minutes, and after that you're a member of the family and you should help yourself," said Buckwalter, a Brethren Village resident who lived in Ronks for 65 years.

She also at various times has been a taxi driver for the Amish and a tour guide.

Buckwalter and her late husband, John M. Buckwalter, began working with the Fresh Air Children program in 1945, hosting a child named Florence Barlow.

Every year, the Fresh Air Fund arranges for thousands of disadvantaged New York City children to have one-week and two-week summer vacations in rural and suburban areas.

Buckwalter became a committee member, committee chairman and helper for the county director. When the director stepped down in 1954, Buckwalter took over the program and ran it until until 1977.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will stayed with her in 1976 while writing about the Fresh Air Children program and later brought his family to spend a day with her.

Will wrote: "She is a plump mountain of good will from her prayer cap to her fast-moving feet. She and her husband John are dynamos in their 60s ('retirement' I believe it is called). She places more than 700 children in homes throughout Lancaster County each summer. She does this from her kitchen here in Ronks, with a telephone that rings off the hook."

The county's Fresh Air Children chapter hosted 1,000 children a year at its peak, but is down to about 300. Buckwalter said more and more mothers mothers work and can't stay at home with the children.

Some children caused problems, of course. Buckwalter said she would have them stay at her home instead of sending them back to New York City before their time was up.

Buckwalter described a conversation she had with one of these problem children: "We went up the street to the post office when Robbie asked me if the porch furniture was left out all night. I said yes. He said if they did that, it would be gone by the next morning. Lessons like that make it worthwhile."

Another one of "her boys" learned to play the piano by ear while staying at her home. "It was the first piano he had played and he figured out tunes," she said. He became a musician when he grew up, she said.

"I have umpteen stories like that," Buckwalter said.

The Buckwalters also welcomed military personnel from Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

Buckwalter became a taxi driver for the Amish for a simple reason.

"They knew I had the car at home and asked me to take them to the doctor or shopping," she said.

Later, just before her husband retired, an Amish boy who had been driving other Amish to work at a trailer factory asked her husband to transport them because he had to sell his car so that he could get married.

The Buckwalters' car insurance wouldn't cover driving the Amish, so he had to get a taxi license.

"It was so expensive (that) he couldn't make it up with eight miles in the morning and evening, so I made up the rest. By the time he retired, we had a full-blown business," Buckwalter said. "We worked day and night, taking them to the hospital for babies to funerals to weddings to Philadelphia and New York City (for their wholesale businesses) and on a social basis to Florida, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio and Canada."

When her husband died in 1985, they had been in the Amish taxi business for 16 years. She couldn't keep up with the $6,000 per year insurance, so she retired.

However, she has one Amish neighbor she would take anywhere, anytime.

Buckwalter lived alone for 16 years after her husband's death. Her Amish neighbor checked on her every day. "She was my guardian angel," Buckwalter said. "She still comes to see me," she said.

Buckwalter kept active by giving bus tours of Amish country.

"I knew stories and all about (the Amish)," she said.

She gave private tours for a while, then joined with Tauck Tours. She did one to six eight-hour tours a week from spring to fall. "I didn't leave the bus except for lunch," said.

At age 90 she became sick and was hospitalized. She went to recuperate at Brethren Village and never went back to her Ronks home. It was then that she stopped giving tours.

Once she recovered, Buckwalter started giving tours for Earl Ziegler at Brethren Village. "We go to the wholesale produce auction in Leola, an Old Order Mennonite Church, Country Kitchenwares, a broom shop, carpet shop and bake shop," she said.

Buckwalter is still giving these tours. She has one more scheduled for May, but that may be her last, she said.

"I tell Earl he better learn the back roads, because one of these times I'm not going," Buckwalter said.

To learn more about Buckwalter, check out the book, "Look Who Just Came in My Door: The Life of Anna N. Buckwalter," by Vivian S. Ziegler.

E-mail: lvaningen@lnpnews.com