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He may be approaching his 10th decade, but George Rogers still hasn't lost his spark or his style.

On a recent Wednesday morning Rogers, 87, arrived for his volunteer shift at RAM House dressed in an olive drab knit sweater over a red-and-green striped tie, pleated burgundy slacks and gleaming light brown tassled loafers.

Though it was still early, his attitude matched his natty attire -- he chatted with everyone he met in the hallways, calling them all by name.

Rogers works as a desk volunteer and, once a week, approves crisis assistance applications sent up from RAM's financial aid office.

"He came here a little bit before I did," said Jo-Anne Woody, an administrative assistant who works with him. "He used to work down in the kitchen, then he graduated to us."

The desk volunteers, she explained, collate applications against records, fill out checks, call the electric company and make pledges.

"Of course it's a great help to us," she said.

"It's a job that I enjoy going to," he added.

Rogers also works two nights a week as a dinner host at Remington's restaurant at the Wyndham Roanoke Hotel, and he stays active in his church, Williams Memorial Baptist.

"I've just never been a person that wants to sit back and have nothing to do," Rogers said. "I just can't be sittin' in my house by myself."

As an antidote to that fate, Rogers has stayed busy, apparently for most of his long life. One story about his first job -- working as a pantryman and a waiter on a dining car for the Norfolk and Western Railway -- illustrates just how long he's been at it:

"We were coming back from Norfolk and stopped in Petersburg," he recalled of his first year on the trains. "I heard a guy on a platform say the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor," a name that was, at the time, unfamiliar to the young waiter.

Aware of all the ports in Norfolk and Newport News, Rogers remembered thinking, " 'I'm glad we got out of there.' I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was."

Rogers stayed with the railway for more than 20 years, riding the dining cars to Bluefield, Va., Cincinnati and Birmingham, Ala., and he said it was the best job he ever had.

"It was something I enjoyed doing and it kept me away from home," he said, laughing. "My wife was glad to see me when I left, and she was glad to see me when I came back."

He'll still spin tales of boarding the trains that pulled into Roanoke from New York at 5:30 a.m., and having breakfast served by 7, and of getting off work and walking up Henry Street with his friends and co-workers James Hall and King Stoval, and his brother Harry -- all of whom are featured in an exhibit on the N&W railroad workers at the Virginia Museum of Transportation.

"I always liked the railroad, but I knew I was going to have to give it up when they cut the passenger trains," he said.

In the early 1960s, he took the Postal Service exam and moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked the night shift as a special delivery carrier.

"I had a wife and two children by then," he said. "Things were pretty expensive."

He took a second job, serving lunch as a waiter at the Capitol. He later added a third job on the breakfast shift at a nearby hotel.

Even for a self-professed workaholic, that schedule got to be too much, and he and his family eventually decided to return to Roanoke. Back home, he took over Route No. 1721 out of the Melrose Post Office, an assignment he held for a decade and a half.

"I worked Melrose Avenue, Moorman [Avenue] ... part of Orange Avenue," he said. The Northwest Roanoke resident even delivered the mail to his own house.

In the fall of 1984, he retired from the Postal Service, but it just didn't take.

"I stayed retired about two weeks and said, 'I've got to find something to do,' " Rogers remembered. "I couldn't stand being idle."

His search for further momentum led him to a job in the catering department at the Roanoke Marriott. Bypass surgery sidelined him for a week in 1985, a period that he said was "the longest I've ever been out of a job since I started."

The Marriott became the Wyndham, but Rogers is still there. Clad in a black tuxedo, he works as a host two nights a week. "I'll pull out a chair for you, give you a wine list and a menu."

Mark Barker, a former advertiser and public relations specialist from Florida, is a friend of Rogers'; they met when Barker was visiting his son at Washington and Lee University.

"We wound up with a room in Roanoke," Barker said. "When we went down for dinner, he greeted us and we just got to chatting and the story came out about him being a waiter on the trains."

Barker, a train enthusiast, said, "I thought he was just a very interesting man with a very interesting life. I learned a lot about the railroad."

"Every job I've ever had, I've been on my feet," Rogers said, but declared, "I've gotten to the age where I can't carry trays."

The statement isn't a complaint, though, because even though he isn't doing heavy lifting anymore, Rogers said he's happy just to still be going, to make the occasional road trip to Maryland with his girlfriend, to volunteer where he can and tend to his yard, with its magnolia and maple and pin oak trees.

"For the things that I can still do, God has blessed me and I thank him every day. He's allowed me to do a good job. I appreciate what he's done for me and continues to do for me."