Bobby West Alford, 87, retired English teacher

She kept her hair in a tidy bun at the back of her head.

She stood maybe 5-foot-2, maybe more, depending on how much a person shriveled in her presence.

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Bobby West Alford taught literature and English grammar at Woodward Academy, where her one-liners became the stuff of legend. She retired in 1990 after 35 years at the school.

She never paced around her classroom at Woodward Academy or lectured standing up.

Instead, she sat with a prim calmness behind her desk while she somehow managed to totally dominate a classroom full of boys.

And when she died, those former students expressed their love and awe of Bobby West Alford in an outpouring of online condolences.

They described how she could be stern and a little intimidating yet reprimanded them with a twinkle in her eye.

They described how she refused to mince words yet showered them with encouragement. They called her Lady Alford as an expression of their affection.

A memorial service will be held for Bobby West Alford at 2:45 p.m. April 27 in Woodward Academy’s Gresham Chapel. Mrs. Alford, 87, died March 10 at her College Park residence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. H.M. Patterson & Son, Spring Hill, is in charge of arrangements.

Mrs. Alford taught literature and English grammar at Woodward Academy for 35 years — starting in 1956 when it was still the all-male Georgia Military Academy — and rose to become chairwoman of the upper school’s English department.

Current chairwoman Peggy McNash of Smyrna said the petite, immaculately dressed Mrs. Alford would stay for hours after school to coax every bit of their best work from her students.

“She jokingly said she could have been admitted to every college in the country because she worked on so many essays,” Mrs. McNash said. “But she was always willing to go over them one more time and one more time and one more time.”

Often, she preferred to teach what others considered the more problematic students, said her stepdaughter, Anne Mudgett of Corona del Mar, Calif.

“I think Bobby was sort of a psychologist at heart,” her stepdaughter said. “She was always looking for the motivations in people, and she felt that literature provided ordinary people with insights that they could apply to their own relationships.”

Maybe that’s why one of Mrs. Alford’s favorite authors was Thomas Hardy, who certainly knew a thing or two about the shadowy landscape of the soul.

She committed lengthy passages of poetry and prose to memory, then whipped them out at just the right moment to make her point.

In fact, her one-liners became the stuff of Woodward legend.

“You didn’t put one over on her verbally, ever,” her stepdaughter said.

When a student saw the poor test score he’d received and exclaimed, “Dear God Almighty!” she advised, “I think you should call on someone who knows you.”

When an irate parent insisted on knowing why her son had received an F, Mrs. Alford coolly replied, “Well, it’s the lowest grade the academy will permit me to give.”

After she retired in 1990, her later years were colored by the deaths of her son, Robert Coleman Alford, in 1991 and her husband, Coleman Alford, in 1994.

She maintained her obsession with antiques, so much so that her collection of china, porcelain, silver, lamps and other decorative objects filled three large trucks after her death.

But at 87, the tiny yet still formidable Mrs. Alford “could still hold onto stuff in her mind that would blow most people out of the water,” her stepdaughter said.

“So many people, as they age, become mentally mushy. But she didn’t. She was just as sharp to the end,” she said.

“I just wish that all of us could live to that age and have that kind of self-possession.”

She is also survived by a stepson, Tom Alford of Clinton, Tenn.; and four grandchildren.