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Lenore Wolfe makes a phone call from her home in Los Duranes to make sure she gets picked up and taken to her physical therapy session. Wolfe, who turns 92 on Saturday, has been a longtime advocate for early childhood education, and still works about 40 hours a month on that cause.

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Even though she will turn 92 this month, some of Lenore Wolfe's favorite people are still under the age of 6.

That's not surprising. Wolfe has spent her life with young children — first as a teacher, then as a trainer and early education specialist and always, even to this day, as an advocate for their development.

Anyone who surmises Wolfe has lost her drive just because she has reached her 10th decade would do well to consider:

Wolfe celebrated her 90th birthday in Washington, D.C., where she became the oldest person ever to deliver a speech to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. (They gave her a standing ovation.)

Wolfe still works about 40 hours every month for the city's Childhood Development program, observing in classrooms and giving feedback to teachers. And to their teachers.

Wolfe even got up early a few weeks ago to visit the Roundhouse in Santa Fe where, hardly slowed by her wheeled walker or recent back problems, she lobbied for expanded funding for New Mexico's new pre-school education program.

"She's the only woman I could say is one of the most dignified I know — but is more like the Energizer bunny than anyone I've ever met," says Catherine Loughlin, a retired University of New Mexico education professor who met Wolfe almost 50 years ago while training her for the state's first Head Start program. "From the beginning it was clear: She knew kids, she was full of energy — and she drove like a mad woman."

Now, however, as Wolfe sits in the living room of her adobe home, she looks almost childlike. Her stretchy purple pants and white ribbed turtleneck are appropriate for recess. Her fluffy, white bob invites your hand like the staticky hairs on a little girl's head. A sleek Siamese cat — her third; she has outlived the other two — swishes around her sturdy rubber-soled shoes, which dangle above the well-worn wood floor.

But the tales she recounts make it clear she is, in fact, a very old soul.

"She can look at what's going on in a classroom and because the teachers honor her experience, her manner and her expertise, they'll listen to her without taking offense," says Jorja Armijo Brasher, division manager of Albuquerque's Child and Family Development Services, who first met Wolfe as a 5-year-old, tagging along to her own mother's classes. "It's like having the grandma, the elder, to pass on the message to society."

But, of course, Wolfe was once just a little girl herself. And that is when it all began.

She grew up up in Tulsa, Okla., under the guidance of her "conventional-for-the-time" mother and her doting and adored father, a lawyer turned judge who was "always looking for the easiest way out — but never finding it."

Despite growing up in the Depression, she remembers her childhood fondly. Riding a bus to the end of the line to gather bags of pecans with her father. Climbing up the apple tree with an armload of books to her secret "trove" on the roof. Selling cookies her mother made to pay for her "elocution" lessons.

Most of all, sneaking back into the primary class at Sunday school, long after she'd passed on to a higher grade.

"We always lived around lots of little kids," says Wolfe, who has a brother three years younger. "I always loved little kids. Still do."

So there was no question what she wanted to do after graduating from high school. But "the family money ran out" after just one semester at teacher's college in Illinois so Wolfe returned to Tulsa. She worked in the dimestore, eventually marrying an aspiring musician she met at a friend's house.

She and her husband moved to New York City — he to attend Julliard, she to work in a day care and take classes at the famous Bank Street School, at the time the most outstanding early childhood education institution in the country.

"I knew then it was what I had to do," she says. But her determination was almost derailed one day when, after she'd been kicked in the shins repeatedly by a little boy, she kicked him back. Hard.

Shamefaced, she told her instructor at Bank Street: "I'm sorry. I'm a failure. I have to quit."

"You must not quit," the teacher admonished. "You've just taken him to stage one. Now you must get him to stage two, or three, or four. Then he'll be able to live in this world."

"So I stayed," Wolfe says. "And I learned."

But she encountered another roadblock. Her husband was hospitalized with TB and, not much later, so was she. They were forced to send their only child, Michael, 9 at the time, to his grandparents' home in Santa Fe while they recuperated.

After two years, Wolfe and her husband headed west. They settled in Albuquerque, where she — still without a degree and "pushing 30" — began taking classes at UNM while starting the first of 16 years as a kindergarten teacher at Manzano Day School. In the end, it took her almost 30 years total to earn her bachelor's degree.

Shortly after she reached that momentous goal, Loughlin arrived to create the Head Start program here. She gathered the few teachers with early childhood backgrounds — Wolfe among them — to become teacher trainers.

"Lenore teased me a lot because I was straight out of the Northeast and needed a lot of cultural nudging," Loughlin recalls. "But I knew right away she knew children and cared about children."

Wolfe now says Loughlin was "one of the greatest influences on my life," not only instilling confidence but sending her career toward teaching the teachers.

"I found I was good at that," Wolfe says, adding quickly, "Þ'She said modestly.' And the thing is, when you're good at something and you know it, you can help other people learn."

The first of those people were aspiring teachers in New Mexico's pueblos, whom Wolfe instructed through a position with Arizona State University. She drove — alarmingly fast — between the 19 pueblos in her old Dodge, a big box of lending books known as "the library" in her trunk.

It was an ideal job for the woman who maintains, "in my next life, I'll be an anthropologist." She loved the American-Indian cultures; the people loved her. Eventually she moved on to the Navajo reservation.

During the week she left her husband and son behind on their two-acre homestead in Albuquerque, and she moved into a little apartment on the reservation.

"People would say to me, 'You're there all by yourself?' " Wolfe remembers. "And I'd say, 'Yes, why not?' As soon as (the Navajos) realized I was 'OK,' they came in and out of my apartment all day long."

Yet Wolfe is modest to a fault about her accomplishments. She says she can think of just three children whose lives she changed. When a visitor counters that the figure must be higher, Wolfe demurs.

"Possibly," she says. "But those three, I could name their names."

Eventually Wolfe became the early childhood specialist for the New Mexico Department of Education, creating recommendations for kindergarten classrooms around the state.

As she closed in on her 60th year, she — who had never ventured outside of the United States — caught "the travel bug." It started with a phone call asking if she'd do some summer schooling for children in Katmandu. (She had to put the caller on hold while she got out an atlas.) She taught there for two summers, also visiting Afghanistan, Turkey and the Soviet Union. Later there were trips to Greece and Peru with her granddaughters.

When her friend and colleague Jolene Maes went to teach for a few months in Africa, Wolfe seized the excuse.

Maes — who first bonded with Wolfe over the untimely death of their colleague, Mary Ann Binford, during a conference they all were attending — remembers Wolfe's visit vividly.

"It was the most amazing experience," Maes recalls. "She walked in with her silver hair in front of these 200 beautiful children in Botswana. She didn't know their language, they didn't know hers. There was a hush. And within minutes, she brought them into groups doing finger play and songs. And the children would gather around her and she would communicate with them in a universal way."

At 65, Wolfe decided to retire.

It didn't stick. After volunteering at the Rio Grande Zoo and the Museum of Natural History, she realized she wasn't finished teaching yet. She now realizes this about every six months, every time her contract as a consultant comes due.

When her husband "got religious," they amicably parted ways; her son moved to California, then Oregon, leaving her to live alone, as she still does, in her Los Duranes neighborhood home. However, her three granddaughters have homes on the acreage and they check on her often; there is a family dinner every Tuesday night. Her two great-grandchildren — boys now 7 and 9 — delight her every day.

"It's been such a good time," Wolfe says, summing up the richness of her life with the simplest words. "Each experience has been different and fun. That's the joy. Just finding out it's a pretty good world after all."

Though, of course, we could always make it better, she says. And we should — for the children.

"She has friends of all ages," Loughlin says. "There are still some little kids who think she's their best friend in the world."

And they just might be right.