Inducted in 2013
Commissioner, Landmarks Preservation Commission, New York City
Member, Prep Board of Trustees (1969-1975)
Mother of Four Prep Graduates

Induction Video

Born in August 1909, Marie Veronica Gough was the eldest daughter of Lawrence Gough and Anna Tomkins Gough, a supervisor for the postal service and a homemaker. The family initially lived on West 103rd Street in Manhattan, but soon moved to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, near Manhattan College. One brother, Raymond, would become a Jesuit and spend most of his priestly life in the Philippines. Another brother, Lawrence, Jr., was a New York Archdiocesan priest who became a military chaplain during the Second World War and was killed during training. Her sisters were Anna and Virginia, both of whom would marry and raise families.
 
Marie went to Cathedral High School and then received a bachelor’s degree from Mount St. Vincent College in 1929. She would be known at the Mount as a loyal alumna all her days. In 1931, she earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University.
 
In February 1935, Marie V. Gough married Joseph W. McGovern, a 1925 Regis High School graduate who would go on earn his bachelor’s from Fordham University in 1929, as well as a degree from Fordham Law in 1933. He had a private practice and was on the faculty of Fordham Law School. 
 
Marie and her husband had a daughter, Marie Therese, and four sons. Raymond graduated from the Prep in 1957, Joseph, Jr. in 1960, Philip in 1963 and Lawrence in 1965. Ray and Joe, Jr. would go on to Fordham University.

The McGoverns had what friends called a Fordham Family because of both of their own Fordham connections as well as their four sons’ Prep careers. Even their daughter, Marie Therese, had earned her own Maroon credentials: she had attended nursery school on the Rose Hill campus.

McGovern, who had distinguished herself by earning a graduate degree at a time when relatively few women attended graduate school, was known for being feistily independent, “but in the best sense of the word,” according to her son Larry. “She was down-to-earth, practical-minded and didn’t suffer fools.” She served on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and was a key figure in the designation and preservation of several historical sites, including the South Street Seaport, sections of Central Park and the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side, which during McGovern’s tenure on the Commission was home to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

As the Prep legally separated from the University and began for the first time to operate under its own governance, the level-headed and ever-efficient landmarks commissioner and Rose Hill matriarch was a perfect candidate for the newly forming Fordham Prep Board of Trustees. It is certainly fitting that the first laywoman inducted into the Prep’s Hall of Honor was also the first woman to hold a position on its Board. She served from 1970 until 1976, and thereafter was known as a trustee emerita.

The Fordham Prep Board of Trustees is the policymaking body of the school, responsible for the preservation of its traditions, ideals and values. McGovern became a trustee when the Board shouldered the burden of constructing the new school building, seeing it through serious financial problems and guiding it through its fledgling years of independence from the university — all the while preserving its continuity of history, its spirit and character and its commitment to quality education in the Jesuit tradition. 

During those turbulent days of the early 1970s, Marie’s vision and keen ability to plan for the future was key to so many decisions that would shape the school to this very day. Moreover, together with Arthur McCormack and Gerald McNamara, two of her fellow trustees and Hall of Honor inductees who had also had sons at the Prep when they joined the Board, Marie McGovern would bring an important perspective to the Board: that of the Prep parent.  The storied history of Fordham Prep has many chapters — from chapters on 19th-century bishops, to chapters on legendary teachers in the 1930s, to more recent chapters on celebrated teams whose championship seasons had the whole Fordham family holding their breaths.  But it must never be forgotten that it is the Prep parents and their many sacrifices that make that story possible year after year — and have been making it possible since 1841.

For many years, before the reconstruction of the space, Marie’s portrait, alongside the portraits of other great figures from the school’s history, hung in the Prep library. Though no longer physically on the wall, those images, digitized in the early 21st century, still grace the school from electric screens. Remembering that framed painting from his own Prep days, McGovern’s grandson, Adam, Class of 1998 noted, “I started my days at the Prep, not only in the shadow of my father and three uncles who attended the Prep throughout the ’50s and ’60s, but also in the shadow of my grandmother, Marie McGovern. In fact, I literally mean in the shadow of her portrait that hung above some study carrels in the library! If you knew Marie, then you probably know that her presence up there on wall served as one very effective deterrent against wasting time or causing trouble in that library,”

His recollections continue: “Throughout my youth and as a young adult, I was fortunate to witness firsthand the way that my grandmother developed relationships and contributed her time, effort, intelligence and will to improve the places she cared about. Her relationship with this school provided us with a connection that I will always cherish when I think of her. It was the example of this woman, who gave so much to so many that truly showed me the embodiment of the motto "men for others." Adam received his diploma on stage from his alumnus father, in the Fordham Prep tradition, but also from his grandmother, the trustee emerita.

Marie Veronica Gough McGovern passed away gently and peacefully on the afternoon of October 7, 1999.  Her husband was at her side.

Words from Adam’s sister, Jessica, written on the tenth anniversary of Marie’s death: “I will always admire Grandma for her intelligence, faith, love of and dedication to family. She was much accomplished for a woman of her time (or any time). I am grateful to have had such a female role model. Clearly she did something right, because she lived such a blessed life — even in her death.”

In 1982, with the struggles of the legal separation and move from Hughes Hall comfortably in the Prep’s past, and with a renewed sense of optimism for the school’s future in the air, the following note of relief, gratitude and hope appeared on the fifth page of the Ramkin:

Special recognition must be given to the Trustees Emeritae and Emeriti. They were our founding mothers and fathers, and without them, Fordham Prep as we know it would not exist today. Their belief in Jesuit education is the reason they stood by the school in our early days of independence. We thank them wholeheartedly and salute them.