Her afternoons are often occupied with putting up quarts of tomatoes fresh from her husband's garden or making the tenderest bread-and-butter pickles you have ever tasted.

But in every free moment, often for many hours a day, she quietly indulges her true obsession: pornography on the Web.

Fighting it, that is.

In little more than four years, Conyers, 65, has gone from longtime stay-at-home mother and retired Baptist State Convention secretary to the head of a nonprofit group that targets pornographers and child sexual predators online.

To say that Conyers is an unlikely crusader is a bit of an understatement. The word used to describe her most is sweet.

For many years, Conyers kept a clipping on her refrigerator door meant to encourage her to be more assertive: "If you make yourself a mouse, a cat will eat you!"

"I had never so much as written a letter to the editor in my life," Conyers says in a childlike voice. (One of her friends says she would make a great FBI agent, standing in for girls targeted by child predators on the phone.)

When Conyers retired from the N.C. Baptist State Convention in 1999, she had no intention of using a computer again. "I was a secretary," she says. "I was sick of it."

Then she discovered how others use their computers -- to sell pornographic material or insinuate themselves into the lives of children -- and she logged back on.

A chance encounter

Conyers' education occurred in early 2002, during a visit to her son Glen's house in Hampstead to take care of her granddaughter, Heather, for several days.

Heather, then 14, had finished her homework and was looking up a teen Web site she had heard about.

Heather describes what happened next:

"The page was slowly loading and it was like, all of a sudden there were boobs on the screen. Nothing was hidden. I called out to my grandma."

Conyers rushed over. She was appalled. She made a vow to her granddaughter: "I'm going to do something about this."

Later that year, she formed a grass-roots lobbying group called Protect Every Child to urge lawmakers to form an .xxx domain for pornographic material.

She was neither the first to think of, nor to lobby for, the porn domain. But she collected 9,000 signatures on petitions, got a resolution passed in the state legislature supporting her effort and met with several members of Congress. Conyers -- the "mouse" -- now shows off a scrapbook featuring photos of herself with Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

A bill to create the domain is still wending its way through Congress.

Then last year, about this time, Conyers was invited to speak at Westlake Middle School in Cary with Mark Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old California girl who was abducted by a sexual predator and killed in 1993.

Conyers began researching chat rooms and the way sexual predators use them to prey on troubled children.

In many ways, what she found was more troubling than the porn.

A morphing mission

Since then, the mission of Protect Every Child has evolved.

Over the past six months, Conyers has put together a DVD and other materials to educate children, parents, teachers and even law enforcement officers about the dangers of children visiting chat rooms and hooking up with predators. In July, she applied for nonprofit status.

As the head of a charitable organization, she could no longer lobby, so she turned the .xxx campaign over to Barbara and Gene Black, a couple in Clayton referred to her by law enforcement, and she concentrated solely on Internet predators. (The .xxx effort continues at http://home.earthlink. net/~kidscomefirst)

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