RALEIGH - Mildred Hopkins was always turning words into stories in her head. After she moved to Raleigh in 1999, she sought an outlet for her literary musings.

She inquired at the Whittaker Mill Senior Center about creative writing classes. Sorry, she was told, there are none.

Want to teach one?

She did and continued to instruct small groups of older people, including an autistic man who was the only one she'd let get away with calling her "Millie," in the art of storytelling.

She stopped teaching last year, after a series of strokes, and died a few months ago. She was 87.

Mildred Ingersoll Hopkins was born in 1920 in Everett, Mass., outside Boston. One of eight children, she couldn't afford to go to college, and she always regretted her lack of higher education.

Instead, she went to work for the Department of the Navy. In Germany, she met Jim Hopkins, a movie-star handsome pilot. As he had told it, she was sitting on the piano, singing, when he walked into the officers club. He was smitten.They married in 1948 and honeymooned in Italy.

Upon their return to Germany, he got out of the car and gazed skyward, pointing out at the full moon. How romantic, she swooned.

"What a great night to go boar hunting," he said.

Hopkins was taken aback, but she rebounded swiftly, taking up hunting in order to spend time with her husband.

She reveled in a first-place finish in the women's division of a shooting competition held on base. She told only a select few that she was the only female participant.

On her one day off a week, she'd root around in the rubble of bombed-out buildings.

Sifting through her belongings when she moved to Raleigh in 1999, she discovered Hitler Youth propaganda she'd found long ago.

The military life

Hopkins and her husband raised five children, three boys each born a year apart -- "Irish triplets," she called them -- and two daughters.

Like any military family, the Hopkinses moved often. From Germany, they landed in Savannah, Ga. Stints in Louisiana, Newfoundland, California, New York and Oklahoma followed.

In Oklahoma, Hopkins indulged her writerly leanings. In Hominy, a town of about 3,200 where her husband had grown up, she was editor of the paper. He was the mayor.

After her husband died in 1987, Hopkins moved to Dallas and later to North Carolina, where her youngest daughter, Barbara Coram, lived.

Hopkins took writing seriously. On a high school graduation trip in Spain, her daughter wrote letters home describing bullfights and the countryside.

"I remember being scared to death because I knew mom was going to grade them," Coram said.

'Write it down'

In Raleigh, Hopkins was a fixture at the senior center. Her class began with a core group of 10 people and ebbed and flowed through the years.

Michaeline Richardson was one of her first students. Richardson recalled that for Christmas one year, Hopkins gave each student a notebook. On the covers she had written, "Write it down."

So Richardson did.

"I always had these words in my head," Richardson said. "I never knew what to do with them until her class."

Under Hopkins' direction, the class published a book, a compilation of memories and feelings.

When writer's block set in, Hopkins encouraged students to draw from their bank of memories. As literary fodder, she'd read aloud articles she'd written for the newspaper in Oklahoma.

The class was called "creative writing," but any writing -- creative or not -- was fine by Hopkins.

Her autistic student wrote stream-of-consciousness sorts of things, a great breakthrough in Hopkins' eyes because he barely spoke.

A lady needs a hat

At the library and at her nearly daily lunch outings to K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village, Hopkins was known for her millinery collection -- big-brimmed hats in bright colors, dripping with scarves and pins.

It wasn't an attempt to garner attention. She simply believed a lady needs a hat.

They were so big and bold that they would have gotten in her way during class, so she didn't wear them while teaching. As an instructor, she was all business.

At each meeting, students would read their writing. Then they'd steel themselves for the gentle critiquing.

Hopkins had one rule: no self-flagellation.

"We could not critique ourselves," Richardson said. "If we said, 'Maybe I shouldn't have written that,' we would have to put a quarter in a little glass jar."

With that money, Hopkins would buy treats, candy usually, for her class.

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Mildred Hopkins is survived by five children, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.