Sister Anna May Rochford of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville dies at 98

Her Irish eyes were smiling, say those who knew Sister Anna May Rochford of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville. Except occasionally when she had to silence an unruly schoolchild.

"She could reprimand you with just her eyes," marveled her one-time student and longtime friend and fellow nun Sister Maureen Chase, director of pastoral care at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. "She had the most piercing, knowing blue eyes. If she didn't approve of something you were doing, she just would look at you, and it was like she looked into your soul. I never heard her raise her voice ever."

Variously a teacher, a high school principal and a campus minister, and always a Mets fan in a large family that rooted for the Yankees, Sister Anna May "touched many lives," said one niece, Kathleen McQuade, of Huntington. "Any of her students, if you spoke with them, they’ll probably say she made a lasting impression on them."

That is so, said Sister Maureen, who first met Sister Anna May "when I was 8 years old. She was my fourth-grade teacher at [the now-closed] St. Catherine of Sienna in St. Albans," Queens.

Sister Maureen said: "I can still sing the song 'Anchors Aweigh,' in which she taught us how to remember prepositions. And when I would visit her [during her last days], I would sing it to her, and she would burst out laughing. 'I can't believe you remember that!'"

Sister Anna May died of natural causes May 27 in the nursing home at her order's Queen of the Rosary Motherhouse in Amityville at age 98.

Well-educated and a history buff, "she was easy to converse with," said McQuade. "She was just fun." Echoed Sister Maureen, who as a young teaching nun lived in the same convent with  Sister Anna May for eight years, "She could dance. She loved a party. She loved a nice, ice-cold glass of Coors beer. Maybe once in a while, a little Bailey's [Irish Cream]."

And "she was Irish through and through," said Sister Maureen. "She was waked in a bright green suit. And everyone who came to her funeral wore green in some fashion."

"The wearing of the green was really important," McQuade agreed. "She always said, ‘When it's my time to be laid out, I want to be laid out in a green suit.’ And we knew where it was, and I went right into her closet and got it."

The second of nine children of Irish immigrants William Francis Rochford, a mason with a fourth-grade education, and Mary Ellen Nolan Rochford, Anna May Rochford was born Aug. 7, 1926, in New York City. Raised in Brooklyn and Queens, she attended Brooklyn’s now-gone Fourteen Holy Martyrs School, and at 13 was boarded at the Dominican Juniorate, Villa Maria, in Water Mill.

She entered the novitiate at Amityville in 1945, and the following year was clothed in the Dominican habit and received her religious name, Sister Mary Warren. She pronounced her first vows on Aug. 7, 1947, her 21st birthday, and her final vows exactly three years later.

In 1947, she began a decades-long career teaching at elementary and high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, including at St. John the Baptist Diocesan High School in West Islip, plus a 1970s stint as principal of Massapequa Park’s Our Lady of Lourdes Parish School, which closed in 2010.

At points lost to family history, she earned a bachelor of arts degree from Molloy College, now Molloy University, in Rockville Centre, and a master of science from St. John’s University, in Queens, a representative for her order said.

Her favorite post was from 1979 to 1991 at the now-defunct La Salle Military Academy in Oakdale, where she lived and taught religion and history, later serving as campus minister and then as an administrative assistant. "Her happiest times were when she was at La Salle," her niece said.

From 1991 through 1997, she was an administrative assistant at her order’s Siena Spirituality Center, in Water Mill. She then held that position at the order’s Queen of the Rosary Motherhouse in Amityville through 2013 before retiring to the order’s nursing home, Carlin Hall.

Sister Anna May is survived by her brother John, of Jacksonville, Florida; sister Margaret McQuade, of Huntington; 21 nieces and nephews; several great-nieces and nephews; and four great-great-nieces and nephews. One of her deceased siblings, Maureen, was a Carmelite order nun.

A wake took place Wednesday at the order's motherhouse in Amityville, immediately followed by a funeral Mass and burial in the order’s cemetery there.