On her 91st birthday, Mary Louise Fleming stopped driving, but she didn't stop doing. The driving license was retired, she says, at the request of her children (some of them now in their 60s), but she didn't give up the volunteer work she'd done at University Hospital for more than 20 years.

        A familiar Friday sight, pushing a wheelchair laden with an outbound patient, a carton of crutches, or cases of cold drinks to restock a refrigerator - Mary Louise Fleming says she reveled in her assignments as “all-round errand girl” and could never fathom why other volunteers didn't seem to enjoy it as much as she did.

        When her physician husband died in his 70s, volunteering at the hospital so familiar to her seemed a logical way to contribute some of her time and talent. She loved interacting with the nurses, the patients, other hospital volunteers.

        “But I ceased going,” she explains, (emphasizing that she never actually quit), “when I was no long contributing anything. I was just taking up space. It was time to find something I could do from home.”

WANT TO HELP?

The Cincinnati Association for the Blind's Personalized Talking Print program is always in need of additional volunteers. You can read a few minutes a day, a few minutes a week, or serve as a substitute filling in for other readers on vacation.   Reading can be done from a touch-tone phone anywhere - at home in your bathrobe, or at your desk with a few extra minutes after lunch.   Following an initial interview, volunteers attend one orientation, and are then trained on the telephone.   To find out more, call the Cincinnati Association for the Blind's volunteer manager, Kellee Cirillo, at 487-4217.

        And at 94, when no one would have questioned her lounging around indulging herself, she is again making a tremendous contribution.

        “This is Mary Louise Fleming in box 301,” announces a strong clear voice on the phone. “And I'm reading to you from the September 2002 issue of the Smithsonian.”

        While arthritis and the aging process have compromised her mobility and manual dexterity, her talent for reading aloud rivals that of any woman 50 years her junior, and Mary Louise is using that talent to benefit subscribers to Cincinnati Association for the blind's PTP system, a voice-mail reading system that enables people with print-related disabilities to access newspapers and magazines from a touch-tone telephone, 24 hours a day.

        Her regular assignment is Smithsonian magazine, although she recently filled in reading the Enquirer's Sunday, and sometimes she reads additional articles for a history buff listener. When her copy of the Smithsonian arrives in the mail, she reads the table of contents on the phone, where it is stored as a voice-mail message on the PTP system.

        Listeners browsing the magazine mailbox (where each message contains the current table of contents for about 25 magazines), can hear Mary Louise's reading, select articles of interest, and send the requests to her mailbox. Mary Louise then responds by reading the entire article into the phone and sending it to the voice mailbox of the listener who asked for it.

        Just as one friend might clip an interesting page from a print magazine to share with another, listeners can then forward “messages” to others on the system.

        “Here's a great article about limericks,” Paul Dressell, a PTP listener and Mary Louise Fleming fan commented recently, as he distributed the article to a half dozen other PTP subscribers.

        Her delivery is accurate, intelligent, appropriately funny - and, despite the PTP reader rule of not adding content, this one is enhanced by a limerick added as a personal postscript from Mary Louise.

        “She's so conscientious,” Mr. Dressell says. “Some people are intimidated by new gadgets or technology. I like the fact that she's a little uncomfortable with this phone technology, but just does it anyway.”

        For her part, she's thrilled that she's found a new niche. “This is something that I found I could do,” she says, “It's a very small something, and I'm willing to do more of it. I certainly enjoy the people I meet on the phone.”

        Asked for any secrets of longevity, she offers, “good genes and roll with the punches.” Perhaps she should also add that, even when 94 years of living brings some inevitable physical limitations, there is always something wonderful you can give to someone else.

        E-mail dkkendrick@earthlink.net. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kendrick

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