Not once in the 41 years she has worked for J.C. Penney has Reva Stevens been off the day after Christmas.

She’s always been there to wait on the customers who line up at each door to return or exchange gifts or take advantage of the after-Christmas bargains.

“A lot of people get money for Christmas,”Reva says, “and they want to get in on the sales.”

Whatever customers’ reasons for shopping at the store today, Reva will be there to offer her assistance. As the customer service supervisor, she’s usually the one sales associates call when they have a question about a return or exchange.

It’s always easier when customers have their receipts, according to Reva. “If they don’t,” she says, “we will see if we can exchange it without the receipt or we’ll give them a gift card.”

On any given day, Reva, called “Miss Reva” by her coworkers, can be found almost anywhere in the store doing almost anything.

“I help out where I am needed,” she says.“If we have somebody out sick or whatever the case may be, I’m there to fill in. I go through the store and if somebody’s not being waited on, then I’ll stop and help them, just a little bit of everything.

“I’m sort of, I guess, Mr. Rocha’s right hand as he says sometimes.”

Dale Rocha is the 10th store manager Reva has worked with during her time with J.C. Penney, and he can’t praise her enough.

“Reva is the key person in this store,” he says. “Every store’s got to have one, and she is ours. She does everything.”

Part of Reva’s job is training new sales associates and retraining them as needed. She also handles staffing the various departments and moving associates wherever they are needed. She processes defective merchandise and has been known to take items of clothing home to sew on missing buttons and/or wash and repair them so they can be sold.

“That in my opinion goes over and beyond the call of duty,” the manager says. “Plus, she knows everybody in the city. She’s our goodwill ambassador.”

Reva says she’s met a lot of people waiting on customers all these years. Before becoming the customer service supervisor not long after the store relocated from its downtown location to Salisbury Mall in 1986, she worked as a sales associate in several different departments, shoes, boys’ and men’s, lingerie and children’s.

Her favorite, however, has always been the men’s department. “Ishouldn’t say this,” she says, “but men are a little easier to wait on than women are. But really, Ilove all people.”

That’s the reason she’s still working at 70 years of age.

She started to retire several years ago when her late husband, Neville, first got sick. He had congestive heart failure and kidney problems, and she wanted to be at home to help take care of him.

When then-manager Paul Gardner found out, she says he called her at home and said, “Reva, you almost caused me to have a heart attack.”

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” she says.

“He said, ‘I got your retirement package in the mail,’ ” she says. “I told him why, that I felt like I needed to be at home with my husband, and he talked with me and said, ‘I prefer you not to do that.’ He said, ‘Just stay on and take whatever time you need to be there.’ ”

When her husband died in March of 1994, Reva says she was glad she had decided not to retire. “I didn’t need to be at home by myself,” she says.

Though she’s tried to cut back to part-time in recent years, something always comes up that requires her to work a full 40 hours. Reva says she’s quit talking about retirement because she’s said so many times she was going to do it and then never did.

“When the good Lord gets ready to put me out,” she says, “then he’ll get me to where I can’t get up and come out here.”

She has some back and leg problems, “but if I sat down and got stiff and couldn’t go, that would be worse,” she says. “Not many people are blessed enough to be able to stay with a company this long. I do feel very blessed. The Lord has been good to me.”

Her coworkers held a big birthday party for Reva when she turned 65. “I guess that would be one of my best memories,” she says. “They had a wheelchair to push me around in and gave me a money tree with 65 new one dollar bills on it.”

And when she turned 70 on May 8 of this year, her daughters, Linda Rutledge, who lives on Highway 152, and Janice Stevens of Charlotte, surprised her with another big party.

Reva was the only child born to Gracie and Clarence Poore of Sandy Ridge, a little town in Stokes County. Her parents were tobacco farmers, and Reva grew up during hard times with the Great Depression and World War II rationing.

“I learned what it was to do without,” she says, which might explain her tendency to be a pack rat. “I save a lot.”

After graduating from Sandy Ridge High School in 1948, Reva married Neville Stevens of Danbury, who had served in World War II, that same year. They moved to the Franklin community of Rowan County when he enrolled at a mechanics school inSalisbury through the GI bill.

“And we decided this was where we wanted to stay,” she says.

They had moved into her present home on Van Nuys Street when Reva went to work for J.C. Penney, then in its downtown store at 306 South Main Street, in January of 1958. She left in June 1960 when her first daughter was born, returning in November of 1962 with the intention of only working through the holidays.

“I just needed to get out of the house and they were wanting me to come back to help them out,” she says, “and I’m still here all these many years later.”

Reva has seen a lot of changes over the years. “When I started out, we had to figure our own sales and tax and put it in the old manual registers,” she says. Now everything is done with computers.”

And charge cards made a big difference. “When Ifirst started, we didn’t know what a charge card was,” she says.

Styles have also changed. “Everything kind of goes around and it comes back to some of the same things that we used to wear,” she says.

When she first started, Reva says she was taught to go by the golden rule in customer service:“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

That was the motto adopted by Mr. J.C. Penney when he opened his first store in Wyoming in April 1902, and she says she still uses it in training new sales associates today.

Though she’s won numerous service awards over the years, Reva says she is proudest of the two rings she has received, the first after 25 years with the company and the second one after 35. Both have diamond-clad golden rulers on them.

Reva, who has one granddaughter, Lynne Sparks of Salisbury, and a 7-year-old great-grandson, Steven Koontz, says some of the children of her earlier customers now bring their children and grandchildren in the store to shop. “Penney people are pretty loyal shoppers,” she says.

The son of one of her earlier customers started talking to her one day when she was filling in in the men’s department. “He said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ ” she says. “I told him no, I did not. And he said, “I know you don’t because I was a little boy when you were uptown and Mom used to bring me shopping.’”

The man said he remembered Reva because she always took the time to talk to him while his mother shopped. “He said, ‘It made me feel special that you would speak to me and talk to me,’ ” she says.

That same day, Reva says she ran into him and a young woman in the catalog department. When he introduced the young woman as his wife, she told Reva that she had heard him speak of her many times.

“So Ihad made a big impression on him,” she says. “He had his hand behind him and he handed me a big bouquet of flowers and hugged and kissed me and told me how much he appreciated me.

“He still remembered who I was, and I hadn’t seen him in years.”

Reva Stevens facts:

Favorite book:“Actually, there are three of them. They’re all Nicholas Sparks’ books, ‘Message in a Bottle,’ ‘The Notebook’ and ‘A Walk to Remember.’ One is just as good as the other. I think those are probably the best books that I have ever read.”

Favorite movie: “I guess over the years, ‘Gone With the Wind’ would probably have to be my favorite because Ilove the South, anything pertaining to the Civil War.”

Favorite food: “Iguess chicken would probably be my favorite.”

Hobbies: “Reading, sewing, working in the yard. I used to sew for both girls when I was little, but I don’t anymore. Ido mostly repairs and a few alterations. I work with my flowers. I have a lot of flowers outside and inside. I’ve got my patio hanging full of baskets with all sorts of green plants and things. And I still mow my own yard.”

Pet peeve: “Things being wasted, especially at work.”

Most embarrassing moment: “When I’m out with people that I should know and don’t remember their names. That is a very embarrassing moment.”

Proudest moment: “I guess my proudest moments would be when both of my daughters were born or my granddaughter or my great-grandson, either one. I was awfully proud of all of them.”

Laughed the most when:“We laugh here every day. When the store manager (Dale Rocha) gets tripped up, when I can really trip him up with something, Ilaugh the most.”

Would like to be remembered as:“I guess everybody would like to be remembered as being kind and good to everybody and helpful, nice, and I try to be.”