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Virginia Evrard, devoted her life to church, has died

BY BART JONES | bart.jones@newsday.com

January 8, 2009

Virginia Evrard was a Protestant up until the age of 14. Then she converted to Roman Catholicism - and ended up devoting her life to the church.

She became a well-known and beloved figure at St. Ignatius of Antioch Martyr Church in Long Beach. For 30 years, from 1937 to 1967, she served as secretary to the parish's founding priest, the Rev. John A. Cass.

When Cass retired, Evrard moved over to the parish school, where she worked for 10 years as secretary to the principal and was the first face thousands of children saw as they came to school each day.

Evrard, 94, died on Dec. 14 at the Long Beach Medical Center. She is survived by six children, eleven grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

"She was a very mild-mannered woman who had a keen sense of humor," said one of her daughters, Mary Alice Grothe of Long Beach. "She was very intellectual, witty." She wrote poetry and from the age of 21 did challenging crossword puzzles, she said.

Evrard was born in 1914 in Glen Cove, and by 1926 moved to Long Beach with her mother Eleanor. They both converted to Catholicism a couple of years later. Grothe said she was not certain what promoted them to convert.

Virginia graduated from Long Beach High School in 1932, and went on to attend the Kathrine Gibbs secretarial school. In 1936 she married Maurice "Buddy" Evrard, who is now deceased.

She had been working in New York City at the time, but the following year joined her local parish as Cass' secretary. In a memorial written for her funeral, her son Thomas Evrard of Long Beach, said, "She was the first face one would encounter at St. Ignatius rectory door. It was the face of Christ, welcoming and comforting."

Likewise, later hers was the first face for the students at the school, he said. "It was the face of Christ; consoling and encouraging."

Her impact on the parish was so great that in 1986 she was awarded its St. John Neumann Award for Service to the Parish.

In addition to Grothe and Thomas Evrard, she is survived by her other children; Jeanne Browne and Kathleen Orza, both of Long Beach, Anne Michelle Rhodes of Durango, Colo., and Richard Joseph Evrard of Kansas City, Kansas.

A funeral Mass was said on Dec. 16 at the parish.