Mary Berry

Mary Frances Berry Mary Frances Devine Berry, 94, a homemaker and editor died Friday night at Chateau de Notre Dame Nursing Home of congestive heart failure. Mary Frances was married 47 years to Jason F. Berry, Sr, who died in 1995. She is survived by her sons, Jason (Melanie McKay) of New Orleans, and Lamar (Ellen Carter) of Covington; grandchildren Simonette Berry-Whatley (David), Zachary Berry, nieces Darcy Devine Scoggin, nephews Roy and Daniel Devine, several grand-nieces and nephews. Her third son, Jack, died in 2012, and a granddaughter, Ariel Laforet Berry, in 2008. In a 2008 blog post for The New Yorker, author Dan Baum wrote of her "wide smile, a buttermilk complexion, big bright eyes and a warm, lingering handshake." She was born Mary Frances Devine on July 3, 1921, to Beline Lamar Devine and William W. Devine in Tampico, Mexico, a booming port where he worked in the oil business. The family moved to San Antonio, Texas, where Mary Frances and her three brothers, William Jr., Lamar and Lanier Devine, grew up. Her siblings predeceased her. She was extremely close to her mother Beline and maternal grandmother, Isabel de la Peña Lamar, a native of Jalápa, Mexico. Mary Frances and Beline kept ties with cousins in Mexico City and Veracruz. After her 1941 graduation from Incarnate Word College with a degree in Spanish, Mary Frances moved to New Orleans with her mother. In World War II, they landed jobs in government intelligence, reading letters in Spanish that authorities suspected of espionage code. In 1948 she married Jason Berry, an Army captain and later restaurateur, at St. Stephen church. With her sons in school, Mary Frances earned an MA in English at Tulane in 1967 with a thesis on John Dryden. She taught at Tulane, completing course work for a doctorate, but not the dissertation because of a hiring glut in academia. For several years she was a part-time guidance counselor for teenage first offenders in the city probation office. She became close friends with Berry Morgan (no relation), a Mississippi novelist who published short stories in The New Yorker. For many years, Mary Frances served as first editor of her stories in draft. They shared had a long correspondence. She wrote essays on Morgan's work for New Orleans Review and the Vieux Carré Courier. In 1972 Mrs. Berry was a volunteer in the George McGovern presidential campaign in New Orleans. Later she worked at Loyola's Marian Anderson Institute, assisting Rev. Thomas Cully, S.J., a pianist, on musical outreach work. In 2008 she told writer Baum about getting mugged outside a Walgreen's several years before Hurricane Katrina. She was moving into the Chateau De Notre Dame Assisted Living and had $1000 in her purse to pay movers. "I never walk around with that kind of money," she said. Getting out of the car she saw a young black man, "so nice looking...and he said, 'I'm going to have to have your purse.'...I looked right at him and said, 'I'm afraid I can't do that.' And, do you know, we both just froze." He threatened to shoot her. "I didn't believe him. He turned around and walked away. And me, with my big mouth, I called after him, 'The idea of doing that!' And do you know, he came running back, grabbed my purse and ran off. I felt so terrible - I'd made him steal my purse, you see - that I prayed for him every day for a year." Mary Frances devoted much of her time to her many family members. She nursed her husband through his final illness. She was deeply involved with her granddaughter Ariel (1991-2008), who had Down syndrome, helping her develop speaking skills. She was a member of Les Causeries du Lundi, read on-air for WRBH, radio for the blind, and participated in a Great Books reading group for more than sixty years. She amassed a large library and made donations of family papers to the Latin American Collection at Tulane's Howard Tilton Library. Mary Frances did genealogical research on the Devine and Lamar families, but put special focus on her grandmother Isabel de la Peña's Spanish lineage. She edited her mother's semi-fictional memoir, Mi Vida, privately published when Beline was 93, on her childhood in Jalápa, Mexico. "Mother lived to be 106," Mary Frances often said. "I'm not sure I'm up to all that." The family offers profound thanks to her devoted friend, Frances De Losa, the staff and many caregivers at Chateau De Notre Dame Nursing Home. A wake and visitation will be held at 10 AM on Tuesday at Lake Lawn, with a funeral Mass at 12 PM.