Hospital ‘Candy Lady’ has spent more time volunteering than some folks spend at work

Evelyn Patterson’s job would be interesting enough if she wasn’t 91.

She runs a candy cart.

At a hospital.

Her wares are an infusion of color in a gray-and-beige corridor — a spoonful, or two, of sugar to help the medicine go down. She sells 2-cent Tootsie Rolls, 6-cent Fireballs and 8-cent Mary Janes. Name-brand chocolate bars go for 85 cents.

They call her “the Candy Lady.” She has worked at the hospital for 27 years — a full career for some people, a second for her.

She used to be a secretary at Robins Air Force Base. She typed 120 words a minute on manual typewriters. She worked at the base from 1947 until she retired in 1981.

In 1990, months after her husband, Archie, died, she volunteered to push the goodie cart at the Medical Center of Central Georgia.

Twenty-seven years and 44,000 volunteer hours later — 21 years of 40-hour weeks — Patterson is still at it.

She doesn’t pull the all-day shifts she did when she was in her 70s.

She doesn’t go door-to-door to patients’ rooms the way she used to back when the cart had a motor. (“It died in ’08,” she said.)

Even so, Patterson is every bit a fixture at the Hemlock Street hospital.

Two days a week, for a few hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, she sets up shop by the main elevators on the second floor.

“I love my job,” Patterson said the other day, “and I take it just as serious as when I was getting paid. … I am getting paid now, but it’s a different kind of payment.”

While the candy cart provides treats for its patrons — hospital employees and visitors alike — Patterson said it does wonders for her.

“I can come in here not feeling perky, and by the time a few customers go by we’ve got it going on,” she said. “My whole day changes. ... I smile at them and they smile at me.”

Over the years, proceeds from Snickers bars, Lemonheads, Jaw Busters and the like have helped the hospital buy things like overnight easy chairs for in-room visitors to sleep on.

There are vending machines within a few steps of Patterson’s four-wheeled candy cart. But when she is on duty, the machines don’t get much business.

“They still have an advantage,” Patterson said. “They can swipe credit cards. I can’t.”

She was born in Alabama, but her family moved to Macon in 1933. She was 7. Her first job was at Silver’s Five & Ten Cent Store in downtown. She tended the toy counter. She met Archie O. Patterson Jr. there. He worked in the stockroom. He called her “Snoopy.” They began dating and, after he served in the Air Force, they married in 1947.

Archie died in the summer of 1989, and the next year she started work as a candy lady.

“We traveled this hospital from 9 in the morning till 6 in the afternoon,” Patterson said.

One day, she knocked on a door and heard a man’s voice say, “Come in.”

Patterson guided her goodie buggy into the room to see a man standing by the window, naked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “wrong room.”

Another time, in the children’s wing, a boy was pulling a red wagon.

A girl was in it.

Nurses had given the pair some candies, and the two were rolling around the nurses’ station, saying, “Goodie cart!”

They sold their candies back to the nurses and used the money to buy candy from the real goodie cart.

“I guess,” Patterson said, “imitation is the greatest form of flattery.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2017 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Hospital ‘Candy Lady’ has spent more time volunteering than some folks spend at work."