LIFE
RANDOM ROCHESTER
THE GOOD SHEPHERD OF LINDEN STREET BY DAVID ANDREATTA
@DAVID_ANDREATTA
DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
A
small group of people gathered outside St. Boniface Catholic Church in the South Wedge on an overcast day in January to remember a friend to the neighborhood. Her name was Margaret Nordbye, and that day would have been her 102nd birthday had she not died the previous August. Those gathered shouted out “independent,” “devoted,” “grateful,” “giving,” and “beautiful” when prompted for words to describe her. They came to dedicate in her memory what might seem the most trivial of objects — a shepherd’s crook about 8 feet in height — but it was a fitting tribute to Norbye, who had spent some 60 years keeping watch over the neighborhood from her home on Linden Street. “It symbolizes the good shepherd, and she was a good shepherd to all of us,” said Joseph Pasquarelli, who lived across the street from Nordbye. The crook was affixed to the empty and outstretched right hand of a statue of St. Boniface that, until recently, had spent nearly 60 years on a pilgrimage of epic proportions after being knocked off its perch outside the church by a fire that gutted the house of worship in 1957. The return of the statue to the church in 2016 made headlines because the story of its travels was so incredible. After having been carted away with the rubble from the fire and reportedly placed in storage to “rise again,” the statue disappeared. It was only later pieced together that, over the years, the 800-pound effigy had stood in the garden of a Penfield home, on an auction block to benefit public television, as a novelty outside a Livingston County antique shop, and who knows where else. The odyssey of the statue was not unlike that of the real St. Boniface, an English monk who surfaced here and there in what is now Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, introducing Christianity to the masses before being killed by marauding robbers in 754. 38 CITY FEBRUARY 2021
His eponymous statue, originally a sheen of ghostly white, was at some point painted red and white, giving it the look of a gargantuan garden gnome or a scraggy Santa Claus, and the Bible clutched in its right hand was painted black. But when the statute was returned to the church by the antique dealer who researched its provenance and donated it to the parish, the outstretched right hand of St. Boniface was empty — its staff, or what is known in the church as a crozier, having apparently been lost to time. Nordbye, a devout Catholic and parishioner at St. Boniface since moving to the neighborhood in 1953, couldn’t get enough of the story of the statue’s sojourn. She loved her church and carried with her memories of that terrible fire in a mind that her neighbors described as a steel trap. All the years that the statue was missing, Nordbye acted very much like the real St. Boniface, ministering in her own way to thousands of people in and around Rochester, including countless in the South Wedge. Nordbye (pronounced nord-BEE) delivered hot lunches and cold dinners as a volunteer with the Visiting Nurse Service’s Meals on Wheels program for 45 years, many of those years spent simultaneously shuttling meals and helping coordinate the agency’s 900 volunteers. Before she died, she was recognized as a “lifetime volunteer.” “She just is someone who can always be counted on,” the agency’s director of volunteer services, Carol Zoltner, said of Nordbye in 1991. “If there’s a need for someone, she is
The statue of St. Boniface, outside of St. Boniface Catholic Church in the South Wedge, with it's new staff dedicated to Margaret Nordbye, was remembered as a shepherd of the neighborhood. PHOTO BY DAVID ANDREATTA
always right there to fill it.” Nordbye also gave of her time at the Girl Scouts, Monroe Community Hospital, the Rochester Psychiatric Center, and the Genesee Conference of Senior Citizen
Directors, an organization that advocated for the aged. In her later years, though, her neighbors said, it was from the front porch of her Linden Street home that she continued her outreach. From
