Now, she volunteers one day a week at the county's TESS (Takoma-East Silver Spring) office, making sure that applications for those programs that she used to oversee end up in the right place. She also helps "with whatever comes in the door" -- whether that means helping immigrants understand a letter, or making a phone call to a doctor.

Born on Long Island, N.Y., Harris, 68, attended the State University of New York at Cortland. In her sophomore year, she met the man whe would later marry, David Harris, then a senior at Cornell University. After he graduated in 1959, he moved to D.C. to take a job with NASA; she followed in 1960, finishing her studies at American University, where she majored in elementary education -- a field, she said, that everyone advised her would provide a "good, steady job."

She liked kids -- and, she pointed out, "there were not that many [careers] that girls really thought of back then."

From 1961 to 1962, Harris taught second grade at Weller Road Elementary School in Montgomery County, until leaving to raise her children, Stephen and Ruth. But, she returned to work while they were still young, as an on-call substitute teacher, then as a part-time teacher's aide. By the time her children were in middle school, she decided it was time to go back to work full time.

Teaching opportunities were scarce at the time, and Harris decided to look for a "people-oriented" position.

So, after talking to a woman at the state unemployment office who was helping her look for a job, she realized she wanted to do the same kind of work that that woman was doing.

What motivated her, she said, was growing up in a comfortable, middle-class home and knowing that her parents had not had the advantages she had when they were young. Her mother, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Russia as a child, and her father had married during the Depression, and struggled to make the stationery store they ran in Harris' hometown of Cedarhurst, N.Y., a success.

"They struggled. I didn't have to. It's pay back," Harris said.

Harris was first hired for a state welfare-to-work program to help welfare recipients find work, and worked her way up to become a supervisor.

Although she has been retired for almost 10 years, Harris could not give up the work that she loved so much. The office where she volunteers draws many immigrants, many of whom speak little or no English. She puts the little bit of Spanish that she speaks to good use helping the Hispanic immigrants in any way she can.

"It's very gratifying to me, people are very appreciative," she said. "I feel like I'm paying back. I'm lucky."

Even when she is not volunteering, she tries to work with people as much as possible. She is on the board of Tikvat Israel Congregation in Rockville and chairs the synagogue's Hazak (seniors) group. When she is not busy with her two book clubs or exercising, she likes to garden at home, spend time with her dad (who, at 101, lives at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville) and her children and two grandchildren "when they show up from Milwaukee," and travel with her husband to such places as Israel and Europe. -- Sarah Freishtat

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Name: Sara Harris

Hebrew name: Sara Rivka

Birthday: Oct. 16, 1939

Lives in: Silver Spring

Synagogue: Tikvat Israel in Rockville

Favorite Jewish holiday: Passover

Favorite Jewish food: brisket

Favorite Jewish celebrities: Mel Brooks and Neil Diamond