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.

"My mother didn't suffer fools lightly," Harrod said, "and she got to decide who the fools were."

Nor would she let friends go without. When Richards' son Howard graduated from day care, Watkins altered the too-big outfit his mother had bought.

"She made sure my son had a nice blue suit," Richards said.

Watkins divorced years too late, her family says now. But she filled her life with distractions long after leaving the restaurant around the early 1980s.

She led children's choirs, taught and played guitar. Watkins showed grandson Jason Harrod his first chords, and he went on to record three records and win in the bluegrass category at the annual mountain show MerleFest.

But the largest group of admirers comes from the students who clustered around her booths. She helped Potter find a job in his senior year and stay in college when it didn't always make sense.

"I was always looking for excuses to drop out," said Potter, who now works for Alcoa in South Carolina, "But I never could find one good enough. She was a fantastic lady, in my opinion."

Years later, Potter introduced Watkins to his wife, and then his children. Watkins was proud.

Larry Wilson fretted about chasing a career as a weather forecaster when N.C. State didn't even offer a meteorology degree. At Western Lanes, Watkins reminded him that he had lived through Hurricane Hazel and spent his young life fascinated by storms. At her urging, Wilson transferred to Florida State University and become a lead tornado watcher in Kansas.

"Sometimes we do take the right forks in the road when given good advice," he said in an interview.

Watkins was not without fault, her family is quick to say. She had a sharp tongue.

But when students were long past college and into old age, Watkins' courtesies stayed with them, stuck in their minds like a first dance, or a good meal.