COLUMBUS, Ohio - In 1973, Rose Mary Woods emerged from the relative obscurity of typing letters and juggling schedules. The devoted secretary of President Nixon was in the middle of the Watergate crisis.

Woods, who ignited a firestorm when she said she inadvertently erased part of a crucial Watergate tape that had an 181/2-minute gap, died Saturday at a nursing home in Alliance, about 60 miles south of Cleveland. She was 87.

Funeral home owner Roger Ruzek said Sunday he did not know the cause of death.

The gap in the tape of a June 20, 1972, conversation between Richard Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman was critical to the question of what Nixon knew about the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex three days earlier - and when he knew it.

Woods, who moved to northeastern Ohio after leaving the disgraced president's staff in 1976, never talked much about her years with the only American president to resign the office.

But Nixon considered her a member of the family. He wrote in his memoirs that it was Woods he asked to inform first lady Pat Nixon and his daughters in 1974 that he had decided to resign on Aug. 9.

"My decision was irrevocable, and I asked her to suggest that we not talk about it any more when I went over for dinner," Nixon said.

When the time came for the family to privately say goodbye to Nixon before he climbed aboard the helicopter headed for Air Force One, Woods stood by with Mrs. Nixon, daughters Tricia and Julie, and their husbands.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox said in a statement Sunday that Woods will be remembered for her devotion to the country and their family.

"She was a cherished friend to us and to all who knew her. None of us will forget how she served her country with unswerving loyalty and dedication throughout her entire career," the statement read.

Woods, the granddaughter of an Irish stowaway, was born in Sebring, 20 miles southwest of Youngstown, on Dec. 26, 1917, and was raised in a strict Roman Catholic family.

She worked as a pottery company secretary in Sebring, then moved to Washington to become a typist on Capitol Hill, where she caught the eye of a rising Republican star, Congressman Richard Nixon of California.

Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken said the two hit it off immediately. Nixon, elected to the Senate in 1950, hired Woods as his secretary.

"She was intelligent, literate, clamlike in her discretion. Technically superb, she possessed the high-speed skills of shorthand and typing necessary to keep up with her boss's often frantic and always demanding schedule," Aitken wrote.

"One of the reasons why Woods struck up such a good rapport with her boss was that their characters were similar. Disciplined in her emotions, yet passionate in her convictions, Woods was intuitive, protective and obsessive about privacy."

Nixon defended his loyal employee when fingers pointed at Woods, who had spent weeks transcribing subpoenaed White House tapes. "I know I did not do it," Nixon said. "And I completely believe Rose when she says that she did not do it."

She denied she caused the full 181/2-minute gap, testifying later that she inadvertently erased four or five minutes. The phone rang while she was transcribing the tape, she said, and she accidentally hit the record button.

A picture in which she demonstrated her action - stretching one foot forward while reaching back to get the phone - became one of the most famous images of the era. She was put on the cover of Time magazine.

A panel of experts set up in the 1970s by federal judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate criminal trials, concluded that the erasures were done in at least five - and perhaps as many as nine - separate and contiguous segments. The panel never figured out what was erased.