William Winfield Watkins, who owned and operated the Forest Inn, a popular Baltimore County restaurant, and was a World War II combat veteran, died of renal failure June 6 at Genesis Spa Creek. The former Eastport resident was 88.
Born in Baltimore and raised on 28th Street, he was the son of William Watkins, a Baltimore city highways engineer who helped construct the old Baltimore Municipal Airport at Harbor Field. His mother was Genevieve Spence, a homemaker. He was a graduate of Roland Park Junior High School.
"My father had an entrepreneurial spirit. As a child, he sold snow cones and worked at Lexington Market. He later had a truck and did hauling and demolition," said his son, J. Scott Watkins of Reisterstown.
Family members said that as a child, he became fascinated with ships and sailing on excursion trips to Tolchester on Chesapeake Bay steamboats.
Mr. Watkins became a defense worker and was a shipyard pipe fitter in the early years of World War II. He sought and won his parents' permission to enter military service at 17. He joined the Navy and after training at Bainbridge in Cecil County and at radar school in Norfolk, Va., he was assigned to the Pacific.
He served aboard the Abercrombie, a destroyer escort. He served at the battles of Leyte Gulf and Lingayen in the Philippines and at Okinawa. He was also part of an early U.S. contingent that entered Japan at the war's end. He left military service as a radarman.
He remained active in the Destroyers Escort Association and an Abercrombie reunion group. He organized and arranged a reunion of his shipmates at the World War II Memorial in Washington.
After World War II, Mr. Watkins became a Standard Oil employee. He sailed on tankers in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic, and spent time in Venezuela, Brazil and Aruba.
After he returned to Baltimore, he met his future wife, the former Barbara A. Bunn, a Waverly resident who was working at the old Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co.'s Homewood Exchange building. She was a friend of his sister, and the couple later ran into each other in Ocean City, where Mr. Watkins was working one summer. They married in 1956.
Mr. Watkins went into the restaurant business with other investors in the early 1960s. He was an owner and manager of the Freedom Inn in the Freedom Shopping Center on Erdman Avenue. The restaurant and bar's clientele included the owners and managers of Baltimore's then-flourishing east-side industries.
Mr. Watkins managed the restaurant and its catering business and booked fishing charters for the restaurant's boat, the Freedom Too. His wife, a soprano, sang show tunes and popular music for banquets and social events and on weekends at the inn.
In 1974, he joined investors to buy the Forest Inn on Route 140 between Westminster and Reisterstown.
Baltimore Sun food critic John Dorsey described it "as one of the nicest places to have dinner in these parts." Mr. Dorsey said the martinis and Manhattans "were unusually good." The critic returned to the Forest Inn and praised its crab dishes, including the crab cakes.
"He would keep his crab cake recipe locked up when he went on vacation," his son said.
Mr. Dorsey praised the inn's Manhattan clam chowder, describing it as "smooth, rich, beautifully redolent of clam, a superior chowder."
Mr. Watkins worked alongside his wife at the Forest Inn. She was its hostess, while he hired, supervised its kitchen and did the ordering. His wife died in 1979.
Mr. Watkins was a past president of the Maryland Restaurant Association and was a recipient of its Dunnock Award.
Frances Haussner George recalled that her mother, Frances Haussner, the co-owner of the legendary Eastern Avenue restaurant, was a Forest Inn regular who enjoyed the crab cakes.
"I knew Bill Watkins socially from the Restaurant Association of Maryland. He was first and foremost a gentleman. In the association, he was not competitive. He wanted what was best for us all," said Mrs. George, who lives in Phoenix in Baltimore County.
Mr. Watkins, who later became the inn's owner and president, closed the restaurant and retired in 1996.
In retirement, he owned and operated a 60-foot yacht, the Counterpoint, which had been built in Annapolis by John Trumpy & Sons in 1947.
"He was always working on it. It was his love. It was always his project," his son said.
A Mass of Christian burial will be held at 11 a.m. June 19 at SS. Philip and James Catholic Church, 2801 N. Charles St.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife of 10 years, the former Barbara Louise Bohl, a retired Baltimore County principal; another son, William Winfield Watkins III of Vienna, Va.; a daughter, Kimberly Ann Watkins Wilmer of Sykesville; two sisters, Louise W. Hoy of White Hall and Mary W. Stambaugh of Timonium; and three grandsons.