Nurse began working at hospital during WWII and hasn’t stopped. She’s 97.

Grace Carr was 17 when she left her family home in the coal town of Freeland, Pa., to pursue a dream she’d had since she was 5 years old.

“Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a nurse and work in a hospital,” said Carr, who as a child spent hours wrapping her dolls in bandages and taking their temperatures. “There was never any question that I would do anything else.”

Eighty years later, Carr, now 97, is still at it, working exactly where she started: St. Luke’s Sacred Heart Campus in Allentown, Pa., about 60 miles from where she grew up.

Although she retired from her nursing job at age 62, Carr continued as a volunteer at the hospital, and she now shows up every Wednesday to escort patients to their tests, deliver flowers to rooms and take specimens to the lab.

“From the time she shows up in the morning until she leaves in the afternoon, Grace always has the same happy smile,” said Beth Fogel, the hospital’s volunteer engagement specialist, who has known Carr for 20 years.

“She never shows any weariness and always has the same pep in her step,” she said. “Everyone loves talking to her.”

Carr has logged more than 6,000 hours as a volunteer, taking only a few months off at the height of the covid pandemic.

“I love people, and my health is good, so I’m happy to do what I can,” she said. “If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it. I still look forward to coming in every Wednesday.”

Carr, formerly known as Grace Malloy, started training to become a nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital during World War II in 1944.

“When I went to nursing school at the hospital, we all lived on-site in a home for nurses,” she said. “We had classes for most of the day, then we’d go onto the floors and learn about all the usual things nurses did, like making beds, taking temperatures and helping to keep the patients comfortable.”

In her first year as a trainee, she was paid $15 a month.

The U.S. Army paid for her training on the condition that she serve in the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps and work in a public hospital like Sacred Heart after graduation, she said. The nurse cadet program ensured that U.S. hospitals didn’t experience nursing shortages during the war.

The Sacred Heart Hospital School of Nursing opened in 1916 - four years after the hospital opened - and was one of the oldest nursing programs in the country until the school closed in 1980.

Carr said the Army gave her two cadet uniforms - one for summer and one for winter - and she’d often wear them when she took the train home to visit her parents.

“It was always fun to see everyone’s reaction,” she said. “A lot of people wondered if I was in the Army, so I’d have to explain.”

When Carr’s boyfriend, Edward Carr, came home from serving in the military, they were married in 1947 - the same year she graduated from nursing school.

Carr was then hired to work the night shift at Sacred Heart, which she did for more than 20 years while raising four daughters and a son.

She laughs when people ask her whether she slept during those years.

“I’d take little naps,” Carr said. “Then when my husband came home, I’d let him take over until it was time for my hospital shift to start at 11 p.m.”

“I look back on it now and I think, ‘How in the world did I do that?’” she said. “It wasn’t easy, but you do what you have to. I always felt thankful to be doing something I loved.”

Carr passed her work ethic along to two younger sisters who followed her into nursing. Her daughter Grace Loring also worked at the same hospital, which staffers call “The Heart.”

Loring, now retired after 35 years as a pediatric nurse, picks up Carr at her home in Allentown every Wednesday and drives her to and from the hospital. She said she often wonders how her mother managed it all while she was growing up.

“I also worked nights when I became a nurse, but I was single, and I could just go to bed,” she said. “My mom was there for us after school, she handled the housework and the gardening, and she made matching Easter outfits for us every Easter. She’s stayed busy her entire life.”

Carr has 12 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren, almost all of whom were born at Sacred Heart, Carr said.

Her son-in-law Vincent Burns was also born at the hospital and met Carr hours afterward.

“When I was a student nurse, I was working in the maternity nursery and had to take this adorable baby boy to his mother,” Carr said. “That little boy later married my oldest daughter, Janet, and he’s now 78.”

Moments like that have inspired her to keep showing up week after week over eight decades, she said.

“I’ve been given a lot by the hospital,” Carr said. “So as long as I’m healthy and able, I’m going to keep coming back.”