For almost half a century, octogenarian Lois Stackpole-Alley has prepared more than 838,216 meals and she is still cooking up a storm. Lined up, the trays holding those meals would stretch 380 miles roundtrip all from Rockport, where she lives, to Boston, where she grew up.

In her dual roles as Food Service Director at the MCH, a Rockland retirement community, and food provider for Knox County, Meals On Wheels, Lois estimates, conservatively, she has cracked more than 179, 400 eggs (cartons laid end to end, three miles); cooked 358 pounds of potatoes (which would require 1,078 pack mules to carry); used 167 pounds of baking flour (the weight of 15 African elephants) and provided 7,176 gallons of milk (filling 1½ tanker trucks).

And how many people, you may ask, were making all the meals, recruiting volunteers to deliver the meals, ordering the food and handling administrative duties? One Lois Stackpole-Alley for all these many decades. Only in the last two years has she hired three assistants.

On a six-burner Garland stove, twice replaced, with a convection oven more than three decades old, they service 35 residents at MCH and 125 Meals On Wheels recipients daily.

Lois, one of three siblings born to a shoe cutter and meat butcher (father) and homemaker (mother) in a suburb south of Boston, she learned to cook and bake, starting with cookies, at her mother's side.

"One of my responsibilities," she remembers, "was to help make supper for the five of us after I came home from school."

After graduating from high school, Lois enrolled in a two-year cooking, diet and nutrition program at Boston Cooking School. Next, she apprenticed at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston and worked in the gift shop there, where the city's elite shopped for sweets and other baked goods.

Under the tutelage of a Jamaican woman and an Englishman, "both with wonderful temperaments," she recalls, Lois honed the people skills, along with purchasing and inventory control, that have served her so well all these years.

"Above all, I discovered that I had talent," she said. "I learned to trust myself. I was inventive and unafraid to try something new and different."

For her labor she earned $5 per hour, a good portion of it consumed by her commute between work and home.

At 21, Lois married Robert Stackpole, a water company meter reader and repairman, as well as a radio announcer for WRKD, and gave birth to three children. She stayed home to raise them when they were small. Today, one daughter, Connie, is a banker and her son, Robert, is the owner of an excavation business. A third child, Susan, died last year.

Once the children were older, Lois signed on as an ice cream server at Dorman's for several years. At the same time, she privately cooked lunch and dinner daily for a local doctor. Next stop: a summer job at Camp Oceanwood under the auspices of the Perkins School for physically and mentally challenged students. There, she made two meals a day for 90 campers and also supervised a staff of six.

"It was a demanding work situation," she said. "But I loved every minute of it." She stayed 16 years.

Her husband, Robert, died in 1981 and several months later Lois remarried Steve Alley, an interior decorator now retired. But Lois, diminutive (5'3") and fit, soldiers on.

"Fortunately my health is good," she said. "I enjoy working and staying involved and helping people."

Whereas she used to get up at 3:30 a.m. and end her workday at 5 p.m., today Lois allows herself a few more hours of sleep and arrives at 8 a.m.

Help, too, may be on the way with an MCH Meals On Wheels Kitchen Appeal a capital campaign drive to raise money to expand the kitchen. That means room for storage, according to Lois, who said, "We'll be able to prepare food without bumping into each other."

Lois has had a team of dedicated kitchen help and waitstaff in the dining room for decades. Over the past couple of years, MCH has employed a kitchen manager so that Lois is no longer directly involved in cooking the meals.

For all the wear and tear, she looks a decade younger than her 83 years. Of her generous and prolific career, Lois, stout of heart and mind, says, simply: "MCH has been a major part of my interesting life. It's given me the opportunity to contribute, share, and serve others. Many people appreciate simply having someone to listen, talk, and share their joys and trials with. Work gives me something to look forward to every day."

So, too, it could be said, of the people on the receiving end looking forward to the fruits of her labor.

In addition to Meals On Wheels, MCH manages the Methodist Conference Home in Rockland, a low-cost residential facility that is home to 48 older adults and people with special needs. MCH administers three other low-income residential facilities in Mid-coast Maine: the Rankin Center and Stevens House in Rockland and the Knox Hotel Apartments in Thomaston.

The U.S. Census indicates that Maine has the oldest population of any state in the U.S. and that Knox County has the second oldest population of any county in Maine. Today more than 5,000 senior nutrition programs, such as Meals On Wheels, operate throughout the U.S., delivering meals directly to the homes of individuals with limited mobility and serving meals in senior group centers. These programs provide more than one million meals per day that are delivered by more than two million volunteers every year to senior citizens throughout the U.S.

To learn more about the MCH-Meals On Wheels Kitchen Appeal campaign, or to contribute to this effort, contact Executive Director Lee Karker at 207-596-6477 or lkarker@mchinc.org, 46 Summer Street, Rockland, ME 04841.