RALEIGH - She's led a campaign to stop teens from drinking and worked to put North Carolina on the arts map. She's read to schoolchildren and honored teachers. She's trained lawyers and police officers.

Mary Easley, 58, has been North Carolina's first lady for nearly eight years. For most of that time, when she sought the spotlight, it was for causes important to her, such as underage drinking, education or the arts. But as Gov. Mike Easley's second and final term winds down, Mary Easley has been dragged into the public eye over first-class trips to Europe at state expense and an 88 percent pay increase for her job at N.C. State University.

Friends and colleagues say the news stories and criticism paint a picture that bears little resemblance to the talented, smart and warm person they know.

"I have never seen an aloof Mary Easley, nor have I seen, like I said, an ostentatious or false Mary Easley," said Doug Parsons, a lawyer who has known Easley since 1972, when they were both law students at Wake Forest University.

The travel expenses and the NCSU job have rankled many state workers, said Dana Cope, executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, which represents 55,000 employees and retirees.

"I think it's a classic case of the haves versus the have-nots," Cope said. "I think our state employees and I think regular taxpayers see it for what it is."

Riding out the storm

Easley, through a spokeswoman for the governor, declined to be interviewed for this story. In an interview with WRAL television earlier this month, Easley said she has tried to ignore the negative attention.

"You can't control people's reactions or how they're going to write a story or how they're going to present a story," she said. "You really have to concentrate on what you're trying to do that's positive."

Mary Pipines moved to North Carolina from New Jersey in the late 1960s to attend Wake Forest University. After earning a law degree there, she was hired as a prosecutor in Pender County. Through her work she met her future husband, who was a prosecutor in a neighboring judicial district.

But Mary Pipines was attracting attention in her own right. She was probably the only female prosecutor east of Raleigh.

"She was kind of an oddity around the state," said John Carriker, who was a fellow prosecutor who eventually became district attorney. Carriker remembers that at district attorneys conferences, other prosecutors would ask, "How's that girl doing?"

Carriker and others said she was a good prosecutor who handled everything from traffic tickets to murder cases, and defense lawyers and defendants learned to take her seriously.

The Easleys married in 1980. About twenty years later, Mike Easley, who had been a district attorney and North Carolina's attorney general, was elected governor. Since then, Mary Easley has done the first lady's duties -- ceremonies, occasional ribbon-cuttings and, rarely, public events at the Executive Mansion -- and her naturally warm and gregarious personality has been an asset.

"When there's a ceremonial role, a first lady should do that, with good humor and enthusiasm and make that enthusiasm contagious," Mary Easley told The Charlotte Observer in 2003. "I think it has important symbolic value. It may be the only exposure some people have to the governor or the governor's family or someone representing the state."

But she has also continued to teach law, and historians and political scientists think she was the first governor's wife in state history to continue working.

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