My Uber ride pulls up in a black 2016 Hyundai Genesis with "TOOTEE" vanity plates. The 84-year-old driver, Richard Patterson, is dressed in a black suit and tie.

"It's a profession," he said. "You're giving service, so let's be serviceable."

Patterson loves his work and has no plans for slowing down, even though he's been driving professionally for 68 years. He said it keeps him young, and it must be working. He certainly doesn't look his years.

"I'm having fun, why would I want to quit having fun?" he said. "I'm being productive, I feel like I'm worth something, a purpose of being here."

This is a retirement job for Patterson, but not with retirement hours. He says he's on the road between 10 and 12 hours a day, nearly every day that he's not traveling or working on his "honey do" list at home.

His Uber app shows that in the past year, he's given 3,026 five-star-rated trips, with an average 4.91-star rating and a 100 percent pickup rate. He scrolls through his digital achievement badges earned for excellent service, great conversation and having a "cool car."

"I spent 68 years of my life driving trucks," he said. "I was a commercial truck driver, over 6 million miles. Seen the whole United States and most of Canada, and I've hauled all kinds of freight. Flat beds, low boys, wide loads, high loads, reefer boxes." (That last one is referring to refrigerated trucks.)

But passengers are a different type of cargo. They can listen to your stories and tell their own. For Patterson, driving for Uber is like sightseeing with strangers, all day long.

"I could be sitting at home watching a TV screen and getting bored with the commercials coming, or I got this TV screen here," he said, gesturing to the windshield. "No commercials in it, and I get to see a different view all the time."

Patterson grew up in Oregon and Washington and spent much of his childhood on a dairy farm in Molalla, where chores began at 5 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m.

"That was seven days a week, no sickness, no holidays," he said. "The cows had to be milked, every night and morning, every day, so I grew up with those kind of hours."

Before long, Patterson was driving his father's milk trucks. He hasn't stopped since, driving log trucks and local routes before moving to long-distance work.

"You learn the gratification of being productive at a young age, so it wasn't because of the money, it was that gratification of something being done at the end of the day," he said. "You could look back at your life and say yeah, I did something today that was productive for society."

On a Thursday morning, he starts in Southeast Portland, then makes his way to Milwaukie, back to town, out to the Beaverton transit station and to the Nike campus. By the time he drops someone off, another passenger is waiting for him nearby. It's non-stop. People are headed to work or to the doctor. We meet a French family on vacation, a young man headed to class at PCC.

The "TOOTEE" of Patterson's license plate is his late wife, Lucille, whom he met as a teenager on the family farm.

"The farmhand's wife had a new baby and her sister, who happened to be the same age as me, came out to the farm to help with that new baby," Patterson said. "And pretty good lookin'. So I grabbed ahold of her and held on to her for 62 years."

They married at 18 and raised four children. When the kids were grown, Patterson bought his own semi-truck cab and they traveled together on long-haul drives.

Lucille died in 2012 after a battle with bone cancer. Afterward, Patterson let the kids take what they wanted from the house, sold everything else and moved into his truck cab. He drove long distance for Interstate Distributors until he was 82.

"What my original game plan was when I started downsizing, I was getting ready to get out of here," he said. "I couldn't see a purpose for me here."

Slowly, it becomes clear what he means by "here."

"My purpose was gone," he said. "My wife was my purpose in life, doing for her. When you take that away, it leaves you feeling pretty, well, it just takes that away from ya."

Time passed and things began to get brighter.

"But I got connected up with this gal and kinda got a purpose for being awhile yet, so here I am, still doing it," he said.

This gal is his girlfriend, Maggie Conley, whom at age 80 he describes as his "young little thing." Conley is twice widowed, and her first husband was Lucille's younger brother. She's known Patterson most of her adult life.

"Three years after my wife died, she lost her second husband," Patterson said. "And because we were email buddies, our emails took on a different tone, and we come to the conclusion that we'll just get old together."

So Patterson retired from long-distance trucking and moved in with Conley two years ago. At the time, Conley had a small farm that he helped tend. But when she sold it more than a year ago, he got bored.

He needed purpose.

Last fall, Patterson saw a TV commercial seeking Uber drivers and signed up. He sold Lucille's 2004 Chrysler and bought himself a new car, though he kept her vanity plate – she spelled her nickname "Tootie" but "TOOTEE" was as close as he could get – and the little glass heart that hung on her rearview mirror.

It now hangs from his mirror, a bit of Tootie still with him.

"Well, I really don't need nothing to remind me," he said. "She's with me all the time."

That new Hyundai now has 66,000 miles on it, pretty much entirely racked up through Uber. About every four months, he said, he earns enough driving to take Conley on a cruise. They've traveled to Panama, French Polynesia and Belize. He's booked a three-week tour of Costa Rica for November, a trip to Orlando in February.

Patterson says driving gives him a purpose, a reason for being here.

But really, it's what he's driving for, what he comes home to, that keeps him going.

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-294-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com