A member of the governor’s staff was sent to pick up Charlotte Watkins on April 9 at her house on Smith Hill. She had just gotten back from her regular Wednesday Scrabble session at the library.

The Rhode Island Senate delayed its business until Watkins arrived and took a seat in the chamber. Then it proceeded to bring tears to her eyes by confirming her daughter, Sandra Powell, as the director of the state Department of Labor and Training.

It was a moment when a woman who had dropped out of Hope High School to get a job in a laundry could look at her Princeton-educated daughter and know a gratifying sense of life coming full circle. Powell was taking over the top spot of a department where her mother once worked as a clerk-typist. And that job of clerk-typist was no less an achievement for one woman than the director’s job is for the other.

“When my mother started here in 1971, it was the Department of Employment Security,” says Powell. “I was 10 years old.”

Now, she hears from people in the department she runs about a woman warmly remembered.

“My mother’s always had great integrity,” she says. “People who worked with my mother still talk about her.”

The pride runs back and forth as mother and daughter talk about life in a big family. They never felt poor, says Powell. There was always food on the table. Wednesday night was pasta night.

“And my mother always insisted on the importance of education,” she says. “There was never any question. It was the pathway to improve and change your life.”

It was a pathway not easily followed by Charlotte Watkins. She says she always regretted dropping out of school. But the reason was as basic as it gets.

“We were poor. My father brought us up.”

There was the job in the laundry. And there were other jobs.

“A lot of low-paying jobs,” says Watkins. “A candy factory, jewelry shop, making sandwiches at the Biltmore.”

“In the meantime, she raised eight children,” says Powell.

Watkins’ first husband died at a far too early age. She and her second husband broke up.

It was a neighbor in Providence who told Watkins about a program that would prepare her for her high school equivalency test and provide job training. She was a long way from her last classroom.

“But it was a way out of bad jobs,” she says.

It was also a way into a good job, one she enjoyed until her retirement in 1989. She bought the house on Providence’s Smith Hill shortly after she started working for the state.

And Sandra Powell stuck to the plan. She went to Classical High School, then to Princeton, where she was a classmate of Craig Robinson, who would move on to become Barack Obama’s brother-in-law and Brown basketball coach.

She was named interim director of Labor and Training in January. Governor Carcieri nominated her for director March 19, calling her a gifted leader with a strong background in work-force development.

And Charlotte Watkins got her ride to the State House to see that sweet, wonderful reward for all the years of hard work, for all the times she reminded her children that it is education that opens the doors.

At 82, she brought that quiet strength to the Senate chamber and sat and listened as other people confirmed what she knows so well.

Her daughter is smart, she says.

“And she’s a nice person.”

bkerr@projo.com