Anne Clarke Berube

Anne Bérubé was born Anne Marie Clarke in New York City on September 22, 1935, and grew up in the Highbridge section in the Bronx. The oldest of three children to Frank and Margaret McHale Clarke of County Mayo, Ireland, she was educated at Sacred Heart elementary school and Aquinas High School, a Dominican school for girls. At Aquinas she met her first and most influential mentor, Winifred Neville, who persuaded her to switch to the academic track at Aquinas and apply to college. Anne attended St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., graduating in 1957 with a B.A. in history. Neville later introduced Anne to the Dorothy Day wing of the Catholic Church, in which she frequented the Paraclete Book Center on 74th Street and Lexington Avenue, a renowned meeting ground for liberal Catholics– in the words of Peter Steinfels, a longtime family friend, “an outpost of the new Catholic thinking that culminated in the Second Vatican Council.” It was there that Anne first encountered the work of radical educator Ivan Illich– and made connections to the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, where she met her future husband, Maurice Bérubé of Lewiston, Maine.

Anne’s independent streak manifested itself early and in a variety of ways. Breaking with family custom, she moved out of her parents’ apartment prior to marriage and lived in Manhattan as a young career woman. With her dear college friend, Mary Kay Donohue (who was also active in liberal Catholic circles involved in promoting social justice), she was among the few of her cohort to support Adlai Stevenson in 1956, her first opportunity to vote for president. She began working and writing for the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal and writing unsigned book reviews for the Kirkus Service; in 1961 she was featured in Cosmopolitan magazine as an example of an emerging class of young professional women.

She married Maurice Bérubé on December 26, 1960, in New York City, and honeymooned in Kennebunkport, Maine. She and Maurice had three children, Michael (in 1961), Jean (in 1965), and Katherine (in 1970). Throughout her life as a wife and mother, Anne kept up her writing, reviewing books for Kirkus and serving as editor and assistant for many of Maurice’s articles and essays. Anne and Maurice lived in various residences from 1960 to 1967, in apartments and houses in lower Manhattan, the Bronx, two neighborhoods in Queens, and Silver Spring, Maryland before buying their first house in Flushing, Queens, where they lived from 1967 to 1980. In 1979 Maurice was offered a job at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and took it on short notice; Anne, Jean, and Kathy followed a year later, while Michael remained in college at Columbia.

As Anne settled in to Virginia Beach, where she lived for the remainder of her life, she worked as a paralegal for the Virginia Delegate Assembly before landing a permanent position at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center. In the 1980s and 1990s, Anne developed a new second career as an amateur photographer, winning numerous prizes and accolades at juried competitions throughout the Tidewater area. Her black-and-white work was especially accomplished, and her best photographs manifested a subtle degree of abstraction that rendered them forceful without being iconic; but her sense of color was acute as well, and she proved particularly adept at capturing features of buildings and landscapes that brought out the telling, evocative details of the built and natural environment.

Anne and Maurice Bérubé divorced in 1998; Anne retired from the Marine Science Center in 2000, and soon cultivated a new hobby, golf. In her late 60s and 70s she became a regular at Kempsville Greens golf course, where she began honing her skills around the greens at an age when most golfers are starting to hang up the cleats. She travelled often, sometimes on group golf outings, to places like Hilton Head, the Bahamas, and Nova Scotia.

Anne was a devoted grandmother to four charming grandchildren. Toward the end of her life, her skills as a grandmother were called upon even more frequently than her skills as a photographer and golfer, and her grandchildren came to know her as an indelible– and still, always independent– figure in their lives. She was, throughout those years, their Nan.

Anne Bérubé is survived by a brother, Frank Clarke of Manhattan; her son, Michael Bérubé (Janet Lyon) of State College, PA; her two daughters, Jeannie Bérubé (Rick Holtz) of Frederick, MD, and Kathy Boyer of Virginia Beach; her grandchildren, Nicholas and James Bérubé and Marie and Christopher Boyer; and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins, including Mother Superior Veronica McShane of Dublin. She was preceded in death by her sister Rita Buckley.