Service With a Smile
Bladder cancer survivor Elizabeth Cropper finds similarities between
effective ushering and a good bedside manner
By Jenny Song
Photographs by Alex Webb
CR | Page No. 50 | Summer 2009
On a typical Sunday morning,
Elizabeth Cropper, dressed
impeccably in a white nurse’s
uniform, with a red jacket and
red gloves, warmly welcomes
guests to Ezekiel Baptist Church in
Southwest Philadelphia. Cropper,
an usher at Ezekiel, is one of the
first faces congregants see upon
walking into the church. As she
hands out the Sunday bulletin,
she smiles, flashing her bright
white teeth, and directs people to
available pews. But an usher’s job,
Cropper points out, involves more
than passing out bulletins and
finding seats.
To help the service run as
smoothly as possible, ushers
must pay close attention to small
details. For instance, an usher
makes sure there’s water by the
pulpit for the pastor. If a member
of the congregation looks hot and
flustered, it’s the usher’s job to
gesture to the other ushers for a fan.
If someone looks parched, the usher
signals for a drink of water. During
the course of the worship service,
if a person becomes emotional,
“two or three ushers stand and
make a circle around the person
so he doesn’t fall over and hit his
head or fall on another person.” In
short, Cropper’s job as an usher is to
anticipate others’ needs.
Cropper has been an usher
since she was in her 20s. Now the
president of the usher board at
Ezekiel, she often tells her ushers,
“Let your first impression be your
best.” She equates ushering skills
to a doctor’s bedside manner. “If
you don’t have good ushering
skills,” she says, “you can send
somebody away that came there
for a reason, and they’ll never
come back.”
As a nurse’s assistant at a
nursing home for 40 years,
Cropper knows a thing or two
about bedside manner. “When I
was taking care of patients, I didn’t
neglect them,” she says. “I could
sleep at night knowing I did all I
could do for them.” But it wasn’t
until Cropper was diagnosed
with stage II bladder cancer in
2007, at age 64, that she came
to understand the full value of
a physician’s bedside manner.
Retired and uninsured, Cropper
had gone to a public health center
after noticing blood in her urine.
The health center referred her
to a urologist, who conducted an
exam. “He basically said, ‘You have
cancer and I can’t do anything for
you until you get health insurance,’ ”
recalls Cropper’s daughter Tyra
Artis. The urologist advised
Cropper to hold off on treatment
until she turned 65 several months
later, when she would be eligible
for Medicare.
Not willing to wait and wanting
a second opinion, Artis scrambled
to find insurance for her mother.
She and her brother agreed
they would pay the monthly
premium themselves if they
had to; having their mother
wait until she turned 65 was
out of the question. Artis wrote
a letter to Medicaid, explaining
her mother’s circumstances and
applying for medical coverage.
Medicaid agreed to cover Cropper,
and she underwent treatment
at a large city hospital. After
