Mary McEvoy was 'a bright light' in DFL politics
Trudi Hahn
Star Tribune

Published Oct. 26, 2002 MCEV26

Mary McEvoy was a shining voice in grass-roots DFL politics and a nationally respected researcher and advocate in the field of early childhood development.

She was also good friends with Sen. Paul Wellstone's wife, Sheila. They rode the senator's campaign bus together during the 1996 reelection run, and McEvoy, 49, died Friday with the Wellstones in a plane crash on their way to a funeral and a political debate in Duluth.

"She was a bright light, just like Paul," said state Rep. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis. He met McEvoy when they both worked the floor of the 1998 DFL convention to get Mike Freeman endorsed for governor. McEvoy served as Freeman's field director in that campaign; Sheila Wellstone had made the political match.

McEvoy, associate chair of the state DFL since 1999, "had great political judgment, great people skills," Freeman said. "She deeply loved politics -- the excitement, the energy, the policies. It wasn't just theater for her."

To her political career, she brought sharp academic skills, honed at the University of Minnesota, where she was a full professor and chairwoman of the Department of Educational Psychology.

"She's a faculty member the likes of which you rarely see -- she had this enormous energy and commitment," said Robert Bruininks, interim president of the university. They became close friends after he, as the chairman of educational psychology, helped recruit her from Vanderbilt University in 1990.

"It's very difficult to achieve full-professor status in a place like the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus," he said. Candidates are judged on their research, their teaching and mentoring and how well they connect their work to the community, he said.

"Some people are good at one of these things, some at two of them. Mary was accomplished in all these things."

She and Scott McConnell, who succeeded her as director of the university's Center on Early Education Development, had recently devised a way to measure individual growth development indicators, said Todd Otis, a former DFL chair and now executive director of Ready 4K, an early-childhood advocacy organization. The measurements were "about comparable to a physical growth chart, but it's for their literacy skills," he said. McEvoy served on the board of Ready 4K.

An active member of St. Luke's Catholic Church, Mc Evoy sang in a vocal group, said a friend, Mary Kay Orman of St. Paul. "She had a lot of faith in action. She lived her life that way" and didn't forget her advocacy at church either -- she spoke out for the ordination of women and for embracing gays and lesbians into the faith fold, Orman said.

Survivors include her husband, James (Jamie) Cloyd of St. Paul, and three children at home: daughters Claire, a junior in high school, and Becca, a ninth-grader, and a son, Luke, a seventh-grader.

Services will be held at 10 a.m. Tuesday at St. Luke's, Lexington Pkwy. and Summit Av., St. Paul.