BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Mary Yeiser

Love flowed this week for Mary Yeiser, a woman best remembered as one who lived kindly.

She died at age 76, after a life of good deeds and quiet compassion. The most public of her work was done for Camp Stepping Stones, Cincinnati Country Day and Planned Parenthood. But across the Tristate and well beyond it, Mrs. Yeiser is remembered for her private works, her hidden garden of goodness.

For Mary Yeiser was a stepping stone.

A stepping stone has no interest in being a destination. Its sole intent is to be a support along the way and, when things work well, to send some traveler in the right direction.

For more than 30 years, hundreds of young Tristate men and women found their way along Mary and Charles Yeiser's path.

A simple beginning

The journey started out simply enough. As legendary high school coach Frank Shands recalls, in the late 1950s, his DePorres High School basketball team had soundly trounced Cincinnati Country Day.

Mr. Yeiser, CCD's headmaster, was impressed with the sportsmanship and dignity of the players from DePorres, a West End Catholic school. Was there a way he and his wife could help them along in life, he asked their coach.

''I told him what they needed more than anything else was education and jobs,'' Coach Shands remembers.

So began a beautifully simple and unbureaucratic effort. Coach Shands recommended young people. The Yeisers helped them along to college. Stepping stones.

Sometimes there were significant scholarships for multiple years. Sometimes, simply book money and art supplies. Checks went off to Miami University, Harvard, medical schools, pharmacy schools, barber schools. They went off in the direction the young people were already headed. Stepping stones aren't signposts. They don't point out the way, they pave it.

''It was always, 'We're going to help you do what you say you need to do.' That was the wonderful part - it was always my say,'' remembers Clifton J.M. Jones, a scholarship recipient who is now an accountant. ''The trust levels were sky high.''

Faith in others

Mary Yeiser was the very unadministrative administrator. She oversaw a no-nonsense application process. She kept the rules simple. And she had utter faith in the recommendations of Coach Shands and, later, Willis Holloway, an administrator in Lincoln Heights Schools.

A student did not have to be a straight-A scholar. He or she did not have to be class president. Or a star athlete. Or poor. The scholarships went to middle-class families, downtown families, suburban families, white families, black families.

The only real criterion, Coach Shands says, was that, ''they went to help the parents and kids who were helping themselves.''

It was an investment with a funny sort of return. However great or small the dividend, it was meant to be sent off to strangers, people the scholarship recipients would meet in their lives to come.

Beyond that, there were no forms to fill out, no pledges to sign, and no thanks expected. Once a year, the Yeisers would throw a picnic in their Indian Hill backyard. Frank Shands would grill the burgers and hot dogs. Mary Yeiser would unassumingly make her way among the young people. And - as was the Yeisers' guiding philosophy - the students would help themselves.

And help themselves they did. And do. Along the way they have paid back the loan, as doctors and artists and accountants.

It has produced a great harvest, this hidden garden of Mary and Charles Yeiser. The bloom goes on and on.

And so, of course, will the memory of Mary Yeiser. For the trademark of stepping stones is that they are embedded forever, deeply and well.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE