Denver Hospital Honors 97-Year-Old Volunteer With 20K Service Hours

For more than three decades, Polly Coleman has been volunteering at the Saint Joseph Hospital Gift Shop in Denver, racking up an astonishing 20-thousand volunteer hours. This week, friends and family gathered to celebrate not only her incredible volunteering milestone but also her 97th birthday.

Polly has dedicated 32 years to the hospital gift shop, which supports the Saint Joseph Hospital Foundation, and shares her devotion with her daughter Dianne and granddaughter, who has been volunteering there since she was 12-years-old and is now the hospital’s Director of Service Excellence. Polly calls working alongside her family “very special” and says she’s been able to keep at it for so long because she loves what she does and because she loves the other volunteers she works with.

The day of her milestone celebration, the birthday gal was met by a cheering crowd of loved ones and colleagues, who were treated to lemon mocktails, a nod to Polly’s tradition of drinking a lemon drop martini every day, which she claims is her secret to a long life. “That’s the secret,” Polly says of her daily martini, “I even asked my cardiologist, he said ‘You’re 97 do what you want to do.’”