Elkhart ? With income tax season at hand, Velda Sipes has turned her attention to business.

Sipes, who turned 92 this month, keeps a downtown office where she has been doing income taxes since 1961.

Mention her name in downtown Elkhart and the stories stretch from the city office to the high school.

“She’s been around forever,” City Clerk Carolea Wellen said. “Everyone in town knows Velda — who makes it her business that they do know her.”

She plays cards with friends, takes lunch at the Senior Center, works out at the “Strong Women” exercise class, volunteers for the hospital auxiliary and enjoys her church women’s group.

She keeps up with her three daughters, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and, along the way, she has become a breast cancer survivor.

But tax season is a special time.

She has “a pretty good bunch of customers” and they keep coming back, Sipes said.

The second child in a family of eight, Sipes lives with the philosophy that it’s not people’s ages that make a difference, it’s their lives and whether they enjoy what they’re doing.

She likes working with numbers doing taxes.

She keeps up with tax laws by reading, attending seminars and talking to fellow tax preparers. A graduate of a Wichita business school, she opened a tax and bookkeeping office after she and her late husband, Don, moved to Elkhart.

When he died eight years later, she sold out with a covenant that she wouldn’t start back up for five years. But then the buyer hired her to work for him and she was right back in business.

A few years ago, she said “no” to computers, but that changed.

Boosted by her computer-savvy daughter in Dallas, she prepares taxes on the computer and files electronically if that’s what her customers want.

Recently, Betty Sitz, 89, headed for Sipes’ office with her tax papers. Sipes has been her tax lady since 1980.

“I recommend her,” Sitz said. “She’s done an awful good job for me for a long time.”

Rena Brewer hired Sipes to do her taxes when she opened a beauty shop business in 1969 and has stayed with her through the years.

“She’s quite a lady, and she does a real good job,” Brewer said. “I have no complaints.”

Sipes “grabs in a hat” to set the fees for her services.

“A number of my people aren’t really too rich,” she said. “I don’t charge very much, but it keeps enough money in my pocket so I won’t have to depend on my kids or grandkids when I get old … or older.”