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Cathy Coy sits outside the State Department building where she has worked with the Missouri division of Family Services for 40 years, having worked with unmarried mothers, adopting families and abused children during her tenure of social work.

The waiting area, seats along walls and tables for filling out forms, looks nondescript in that government-issue way. Fliers vie for attention on a bulletin board, a mosaic of safety-net programs.

In the State Office Building in St. Joseph, sterility comes as part of the decor. It begs for humanity.

Meet Cathy Coy.

True, her title — children’s service worker II — owns a bureaucratic heaviness. And she owns four sets of business cards that describe her alternatively as resource specialist, adoption specialist, social worker and so on, witness borne to the many hats worn in service of the Missouri Department of Social Services.

But nothing about Mrs. Coy suggests an administrative functionary, rigid in officialdom. Instead, having celebrated 40 years with the department last week, the state worker accepts the well-wishes of people, some generations deep, she helped during her tenure.

The business can wear on the spirit. Mrs. Coy chooses to see it as a blessing.

“I like to see the good in people, and there is a lot of good in people,” she says. “Sometimes they just have bad luck.”

A native and still a resident of Wathena, Kan., she followed an older sister to what was then called the Division of Families Services. Beginning in October 1969, she worked as a transcriber of records at a building on St. Joseph Avenue.

That rolled into an assignment with a work-incentive program, her first front-line endeavor helping unemployed individuals transition back into the workplace. After several years, she assumed a role working with unmarried mothers, pointing them to community resources.

“That’s the job I really fell in love with,” she recalls. “A lot of them were dropouts and didn’t have a lot of family support.”

That love of safeguarding the welfare of children would inspire her time with the state. She shifted her caseload to work with foster kids, then later traveled a seven-county region in working with special-needs adoptions.

Mrs. Coy marveled at the “wonderful people” she met at every stop and found satisfaction in the good outcomes. Twenty years later, she still gets calls from the adoptive families, updates on the children.

In May 1999, she started doing child abuse and neglect investigations for the department. It’s heart-wrenching work made bearable by the prospect that children get to a safer place and patterns of behavior change.

“Children often learn what they see in their home,” the investigator says. “Kids end up learning violence is a way of life.”

Sandy Bembrick worked as a teenage waitress in Wathena when she first met Mrs. Coy. For the last 27 years, she has been her colleague at the department. She says laughter induced by her partner never diminishes the seriousness of their work.

“She’s part of a lot of people’s families,” Ms. Bembrick says, adding, “If she believes you’re doing something bad to your child, she can be your worst enemy.”

Ms. Bembrick says people in the social service field value Mrs. Coy for her sound judgment and her doggedness in finding the back door to resources “when the front door might be closed.”

Mrs. Coy says it takes a group effort — the state, juvenile authorities, hospitals, police officers — to make a difference in the lives of some children. She allows herself little in the way of surrender at the considerable task.

“You have to kind of get hardened,” she concedes. “You can’t change everybody. You have to accept that fact.”

The arrival of her 40th anniversary on the job came as news to some in the department. To co-workers young enough to be her children, Mrs. Coy says she “started at age 5.”

As far as the end, Mrs. Coy says she will retire when she stops caring.

In short, there are no plans to retire.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.