About this time of year, Peggy Leonard starts getting the calls.

A caller will tell her she is going to have a mammogram on a certain date, and request that the Greenville woman bake a specific kind of pie.

What do mammograms have to do with Mrs. Leonard’s baking habits?

At the Womancare Center of UPMC Horizon in Hermitage, they are an October tradition.

In 2002, the center offered a slice of one of Mrs. Leonard’s pies to every woman who had a mammogram during October, as an offshoot of the center’s promotional slogan of offering state-of-the-art care with a hometown flavor, said Mrs. Leonard’s daughter, Kim Leonard, director of women’s health services at the Womancare Center.

The next year, the center did not offer the pies.

“Everyone was disappointed,” Kim said. “So we did it again.”

Every year since then, Peggy has baked about two pies a day each weekday in October. Jan Zane picks them up from her and delivers them to the Womancare Center, where she works.

“Last year, I made 47,” said Mrs. Leonard, also known as “Ma Peg.”

Mrs. Leonard, 81, said she jumped at the chance to take part in the promotion.

“I have two nieces who are breast cancer survivors,” said the retired emergency room secretary at the former Greenville Regional Hospital, now part of UPMC. “I thought anything that would promote women taking care of themselves would be a good idea.”

She added that her mother had pancreatic cancer.

“I’m very aware of what cancer can do,” Mrs. Leonard said.

Baking is fun and not a lot of work, said Mrs. Leonard, a mother of four, grandmother of 12 and great-grandmother of three.

“I play golf all summer,” she said. “When October comes, it’s not very busy.”