WOONSOCKET -- Ethel Dowdy has seven children.

If that seems like a lot, consider this: over the last two decades, she's been a foster mother to more than 80 children.

She confesses that's an inexact count. She lost track at some point.

Even before she became a licensed foster parent, Ethel was taking children in on an informal basis. Neighborhood kids who were having a hard time at home were frequent guests. At the Dowdy home, on North Main Street in Woonsocket, it was rare that all the occupants were family members.

"I just would help out with children who needed a place. My home was that place," says Ethel, who, at 71, is still licensed for one foster child.

THE FIRST FOSTER child was a girl named Toni.

Ethel's daughter Jackie was working in a shelter for adolescent girls. Most of the occupants were girls too rough to qualify for foster care. Toni, who was 14, did qualify. She was only at the shelter because the state couldn't find a home for her.

"Jackie came to me and said, 'Mom, she shouldn't be here with these girls. Why don't you take her?' " Ethel remembers.

Ethel didn't think twice. She took Toni in, and ultimately became licensed by the state to have three foster children at a time. She would have taken more if she'd had the space.

"If I had a room and there was no one in the room, I thought, why not put someone in it?" she says.

Of all the times the Department of Children, Youth and Families asked her to take a child, she never told them no.

Jackie, who's now 40, says she and her siblings never resented the extra faces at the dinner table. "It seemed natural," she says. "Our family is big anyway."

"If my children wouldn't have liked it," Ethel says, "then I wouldn't have kept going with it."

She did occasionally ask the Department of Children, Youth and Families to take a child out of her home if she thought the child needed care she couldn't provide, such as psychotherapy. Other than that, she says, she kept them all, and just tried to figure out how to parent them.

"You learn the different personalities," she says. "You have to learn what they lack."

In September, Ethel's prolific foster parenting won her a Women of Achievement Award from the YWCA of Northern Rhode Island. "I really felt nice that day," she says.

Lisa Guillette, who heads the Rhode Island Foster Parents Association, says some other people have had more foster children -- for instance, foster parents who specialize in short-term, emergency placements. What's remarkable, Guillette says, is Ethel's length of service. "Most people in their 70s say, 'I've done an awful lot of good. I'm going to take a break,' " she says.

Besides, the number of children who've passed through the Dowdy home number far more than the 80 on record with the state. "I remember one set of three or four kids whose mother died, and Mrs. Dowdy just took them and raised them," says the Rev. Sammy C. Vaughan, pastor at St. James Baptist Church in Woonsocket -- the church where Ethel worships and serves on the board of trustees. "She probably never got a dime for it."

She didn't, and even official foster parents don't get much for their troubles. Rhode Island pays them about $15 per day per child.

"I think there's a myth out there that foster parents are sleazy individuals who are in it for the money," Guillette says. In reality, she says, foster parents are dropping out because it doesn't pay enough.

About 1,300 children live in foster homes in Rhode Island. That's just more than half of the children in state custody: an additional 1,200 live in group homes and shelters, Guillette said.

Many of the latter group would qualify for placement in a foster home, but there aren't enough available. In Rhode Island's licensed foster homes, all the rooms are full.

Ethel Dowdy helps with that, too. She's a regular speaker at DCYF's monthly recruitment meetings. And, says Guillette, "She gets people to sign up every time."

Several of her recruits are family members. Emma Dandy, Ethel's kid sister at 56, has two foster children. Thomas and Nellie Gray, Ethel's nephew and his wife, just adopted a child. Deanna James, Ethel's niece, has two foster children. Her mother has a foster son, too.

"Foster care goes through this family like an epidemic," Ethel says. "You say you're not going to do it. Then you end up doing it."

BORN IN NEWBERRY County, S.C., Ethel -- nicknamed Chick -- was the fifth of 16 children.

She eloped with John Dowdy Jr. at age 19, and moved to Woonsocket a year later, following siblings north.

She worked in factories at first, and later for a widower in Mendon, Mass., who needed help keeping house and caring for his 10 children.

"She'd come in on a Monday and the place would look like a cyclone," that widower, Charlie Allaire, remembers. "Within 10 minutes, everything would be put away, and she'd have started the laundry and be planning the meals."

At the time, Ethel's family was living in a tenement along the Blackstone River. "There were rats like this," Ethel says, holding her hands two feet apart.

They looked for a better place to live. "It was never available," Ethel says, "because we were black."

Allaire bought them the beige triple-decker where Ethel, John and Jackie still live. The only condition was that Ethel continue to work for Allaire until his children were grown.

She did. She also worked full-time at a nursing home, then went home to care for her own children. Her husband, John, by this time, had a disability that prevented him from working. Through it all, Allaire says, he never heard her complain.

"You cannot go out in the rain without getting wet," Allaire says. "You can't be around Chick without feeling goodness."

But Ethel sees Allaire as a source of inspiration. "He helped us to find a place to live when we were homeless," she says. "That's why I think I wanted to take in children when they were homeless."

ONE OF THE foster children stayed longer than the others.

Ann Marie O'Hagan was another girl rescued from the shelter by Jackie. She was 15 and pregnant when she came to live with the Dowdys.

Ann Marie's daughter, Tiffany, was born Nov. 2, 1987. Ethel signed on as foster mom to both.

The daughter of two alcoholics, Ann Marie had been in state care since age 8. She was wild, into drugs and not much interested in raising a child.

When Tiffany was 4, the Dowdys proposed that Ann Marie relinquish her parental rights. Rather than risk losing them involuntarily and having Tiffany put up for adoption by a stranger, Ann Marie jumped at the chance.

The state, however, wasn't so eager. "Tiffany was your blond-haired, blue-eyed baby that everybody wanted to adopt," Jackie remembers. The state suggested Tiffany be placed with a family of the same race.

The Dowdys fought it, and they won. Tiffany graduated from Woonsocket High School last year, and entered Rhode Island College this fall. She plans a career in social work.

As a white child in a black family, living with a mother she called her grandmother, Tiffany's life could have been confusing. "It was actually just very normal," Tiffany says. "It was a normal, happy childhood."

"I really don't think Tiffany realized the difference, that she was white and we were black," Ethel says. She tells a story about being in the grocery store when Tiffany was 5. "She said to me, 'Grandma, we're the only black people in the market!' "

Ann Marie never finished high school. Now 34, she lives in Pawtucket and works at Dunkin' Donuts. She had four more children after Tiffany, and lost her parental rights to two of them. She says proudly that she's off drugs now, and trying to be the best mother she can to Nick, 8, and Marina, 6.

She sees her daughter's life, with college and accomplishments, as what her own might have been. "I just want so much more," she says. "All I would have had to do is stay out of trouble, stop hanging around with the wrong people."

Because she wouldn't, Ethel eventually told her to move out of her apartment on the third floor of the triple-decker. But she didn't cut Ann Marie off from her daughter.

"I was just in and out of Tiffany's life for a while," Ann Marie says. "The door was always open when I came back."

That approach -- letting the birth parents stay involved in the foster child's life -- is rare among foster parents, who tend to "fall in love with their children," Guillette says. "In their heart of hearts, I think a lot of them hope that things don't work out with the family. But Ethel has never been frightened or scared by the relationship with the biological family."

Ethel didn't change Tiffany's last name to match her own. Tiffany calls Ann Marie her mother and Ethel her grandmother.

"I feel like I've had two families instead of one," Tiffany says.

ETHEL MOVED TO the house's first floor a few years ago. Her knees give her trouble these days.

Jackie lives on the second floor. The Dowdys rent out the third-floor apartment, but dream of one day turning it into a group home for adolescents. While it would technically be a group home, Ethel and Jackie speak of making it as much like a home as they could.

In the meantime, the North Main Street triple-decker is still home to two foster children. Janae Page, 15, lives with Ethel and John. Jackie also has a foster child, Hassan Johnson, 17, who's lived with her on the second floor for seven years.

When Hassan, who has a developmental disability, turns 18 in April, the state will no longer pay Jackie to care for him. But, says Jackie, "He's not going anywhere."

When Hassan asks how long he can stay with Jackie, she tells him, "It's up to you."