UPS driver Carol Steffen for decades has cultivated her downtown and Main Street customers like the rhubarb she’s grown in her garden: perennial favorites.

Chatting on a rainy day between deliveries at Campustown, she adjusts her glasses, fidgets with an earring and smiles.

“My customers are amazing,” she says, grinning as water drips from her floppy hat. “And I take care of my people. They have my cell-phone number.”

Retiring this month, Steffen came to Peoria in 1969 from Kansas, where she studied food and nutrition, and eventually she found herself a single mom who needed a job and insurance, and a girlfriend told her about an opening at United Parcel Service.

“For 10 years I worked in pre-loading, then I was a vacation driver for years before I got my own route,” she said.

In some ways, she had to prove herself, she says, just before toting packages and lifting them like a longshoreman despite being 4 feet 11½ inches tall. (“I need every half inch,” she says, laughing.)

“Now, I’ve been driving for 27 years, and the downtown/Main street route for 12 years,” says Steffen, who’s 68 ½ years old.

(“Every half counts!” she says).

In Peoria’s UPS circles, her route’s known as “the route from Hell,” she says, because “it’s two-thirds businesses, plus apartments and churches. But I figured out you had to do the businesses and churches first, and a lot of places ended up giving me keys to their buildings.

“We always have fun,” she says, nodding. “I’ve had a huge garden, and I’ve brought bushels of rhubarbs to give to my people.”

The combination of small merchants, student tenants and business professionals has kept her engaged, she says.

“All the lawyers!” she says. “One time I fell and broke my wrist and attorneys told me the best orthopedic place I could go to.

“I’ve been to customers’ weddings, baby showers and graduations,” she adds. “They’re an extended family.”

With five kids and 15 grandchildren in her own family, she and husband John Steffen may travel some.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “I’ve had eight weeks’ vacation for seven or eight years, but…

We are thinking about Fort Myers, Fla., especially between November and April.”

However, with spring comes gardening.

“But I’m retiring finally,” she adds, “ – no more rhubarb freebies!”

Despite that remark, people know she’s an easy touch.

“You need anything, you’ve got my number,” she says, grabbing a manila envelope and headed for a store.