RALEIGH - Hazel Watkins nurtured a generation of freshmen with meatloaf, sweet tea and plain-spoken advice -- all dispensed over the crash of bowling pins.

For more than 20 years, she ran the Western Lanes Restaurant, working 18 hours a day to fill N.C. State students with barbecue and courage.

Boys spending their first nights off the family farm, too shy to speak, found comfort on the bowling alley's diner-style stools. Steak cost a dollar. Talk and jokes were free.

Watkins died at 88 late in August, and tributes came from 1960s alumni scattered across the country: a meteorologist in Kansas, a retired FBI agent in Virginia.

"I was rather introverted, and I didn't talk to a lot of people," said Robert Potter, who came from rural Lenoir County to study engineering. "But she talked to me. I liked her quite a lot."

Watkins raised two girls in a house on Hope Street and reluctantly took in students like Potter as roomers. She was amazed that so many needed housing that she never had to advertise. More of them flocked to the house on weekends to watch television, and daughter Katharine Harrod remembers growing up surrounded by collegiate boys -- the "Yes, ma'am" variety, not the fraternity type.

Watkins' character formed in the mountains of Depression-era McDowell County, where she was a middle child in a family of 11 and left school to work in a hosiery mill.

She was immensely proud that her father had been a postmaster in tiny Pinnacle, N.C. He was the strict sort who wouldn't allow dancing. So when Watkins met a young worker with the Civilian Conservation Corps, it didn't take much convincing to get her to Raleigh.

"I think he swept her off her feet," said Harrod, her daughter in Durham.

Married in Raleigh, she took a job at Briggs Hardware -- its first female employee, Harrod said. While she worked, her new husband gambled. Poker, mostly. Somebody had to keep the household going, so Watkins started her life at Western Lanes, leasing the little restaurant space within the alley by the year, never letting on that life got tough.

She used to sketch children's clothes from shop windows on Fayetteville Street then go home and make them. When her husband's backhoe business fell through, she used to tell Katharine to sit on the piano if anybody came for their possessions. Her sister Nancy would guard the sewing machine.

Western Lanes, then and now

Days at Western Lanes started with breakfast at 6 a.m. Later, students would line up outside for lunch. Watkins took a break at 2 p.m., then returned at 4 for dinner, finally closing at midnight.

Western Lanes still looks like the smoke-filled alleys of past decades, where until recently you could buy Schlitz in a can. There's no music inside. Just the relentless clink of falling pins.

Cathy Richards has listened to them for more than 40 years, so long she hardly hears them anymore. She recalls being a young black woman and cutting pork shoulders in the Western Lanes kitchen.

"I was here when I couldn't sit down in this place," she said, now a white-haired veteran folding silverware into napkins and using a cane to walk.

She described Watkins as a fair-minded church woman. She hated smoking, but she tolerated the smokers. She was a teetotaler, but she put up with the bowling alley bar, pretending it wasn't there even though her brother-in-law Mike worked behind it. She opposed opening up on Sundays, but she brought the girls to Western Lanes every week to feed the after-church crowd. She wouldn't curse, but she would chuck you out of your seat if you crossed the line.

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