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HIGH POINT — Hilda Fountain still wears the blue and white pinstriped Red Cross volunteer dress she got upon first signing up to help at High Point Regional Health System 35 years ago.

Adorned with angel and service award pins, the dress has begun to fray in places.

“It’s gonna wear out before she does,” says Bobbi Watkins, the hospital’s director of volunteer services.

Other volunteers say it’s hard to keep up with Fountain, who is 101 today and who could very well be the state’s oldest volunteer at a North Carolina hospital, Watkins says.

“I don’t recollect why I started,” Fountain says. “Just to rub elbows with the human race, I reckon.”

Over the years, she’s carted around the bookmobile and logged in visitors.

Now, she delivers flowers and gifts to patients.

“Oh, aren’t you sweet,” one patient says Friday afternoon as Fountain walks into the room with a basket of yellow and rust-orange flowers surrounded by greenery.

She walks briskly down the bright halls, intent on her deliveries.

A second bouquet goes to a woman one floor up from the first patient. Fountain, an avid gardener, often critiques the bouquets to help patients appreciate what they’ve been given.

In this arrangement, the florist put bright-pink carnations next to dusky-peach roses.

Fountain shakes her head at the combination. But the patient gushes over the delivery and thanks her for removing the card.

Fountain gets just two deliveries in her first hour of volunteering.

“Before the recession, we used to get a lot more flowers,” she says.

Deliveries done, she returns to the greeter’s desk in the front lobby where she chats with Robert and Judy Upchurch, friends and fellow volunteers.

Judy Upchurch says her husband often discusses books with Fountain.

They’re among about 500 volunteers at the hospital.

“To some extent, it gives us some purpose, something to look forward to and a way to feel you’re still contributing,” says Robert Upchurch, 67, who has spent 15 years volunteering at the hospital.

He says that more impressive than the number of years Fountain has served, is that she’s still volunteering at her age.

“I think she’s an inspiration to all of us,” says Judy Upchurch, 65.

Fountain has spent more time volunteering at the hospital than at her last job.

As a probation officer for 15 years, Fountain kept tabs on women who had been given probation instead of prison time, most of them for writing bad checks. But there was also the woman who’d killed her husband with an ax, Fountain recalls.

She still keeps to a brisk pace, tending her own garden and volunteering at church. And she doesn’t let anything bring her down, not even breast cancer.

Her body may have taken a beating from the disease three years ago, but not her sense of humor.

“Of course, I see my doctor in the hall,” she says. “And I’m afraid he’ll send me a bill for those conversations.”

When the hospital moved in the 1980s to its present location, it started its own volunteer corps and required a different uniform.

“They wear those red vests,” says Fountain, who refuses to give up her blue dress. “I don’t look good in red.”

She laughs at her own joke, blue eyes bright with humor.

“She is just so much fun,” says friend and fellow volunteer Kathleen Killebrew. “It’s just nice to be around her.”

Her three adult sons don’t question her volunteering, Fountain says.

“They never expected anything else,” she says. “Because I’ve always been at it.”

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com