OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) – Talk about a loyal employee: Elena Griffing has started her 70th year working for the same San Francisco Bay Area hospital.

Sutter Health Alta Bates Summit Medical Center spokeswoman Carolyn Kemp says the facility has celebrated Griffing’s milestone employment and her recent 90th birthday.

Griffing’s first day on the job was April 10, 1946, when she was 20. Back then, the facility in Berkeley was called Alta Bates Community Hospital.

She worked there with founder and nurse Alta Alice Miner Bates in her early years.

As if her employment longevity wasn’t enough, consider this: She has taken only four days of sick leave in her 70 years of work.

She works in patient relations four days a week and says she has no plans to retire.

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There was a similar story in Junction City a few years ago.

The late LaVerne Allen, retired at Geary Community Hospital in 2005 after 61 years on the job as a nurse at that facility, and earlier at Junction City Municipal Hospital. She had a 63-year nursing career beginning in Norton and Hays before she came to Junction City.

Today a street outside Geary Community Hospital is named after LaVerne, and there is a scholarship, the LaVerne Allen Nursing Scholarship,  that is also named after her.