Eulogy --
Memorial Service for Dr. Virginia Apgar
Riverside Church--September 15, 1974
By Mr. Joseph F. Nee, President
The National Foundation-March of Dimes
Virginia Apgar was simply--and genuinely--interested in everyone and everything. Someone once described her ability to connect instantly with individuals and with audiences as "uncanny". There was nothing uncanny about it for she never met a stranger. She valued experience with another human being, whatever his or her strengths or weaknesses, more than she cherished ideas or music or any of her myriad other enthusiasms.
One of her highest compliments was to call a colleague a "people doctor". She had great respect for the laboratory scientist, but greater empathy for those who dealt personally with patients in  need of help. It was obvious during her recent sabbatical at Johns Hopkins that, although the challenge of learning more about genetics was mentally stimulating, her greatest satisfaction came from the opportunity to work directly with the children and families who brought their problems to the Moore Clinic.
I like to think that a voluntary health agency, more than many institutions, attracts people who share a similar orientation toward others, albeit to varying lesser degrees. And that the grantees, medical advisors, staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of the National Foundation-March of Dimes formed a natural constituency for Virginia--one which not only appreciated her unique qualities, but also satisfied her own need to be needed by her fellow man.
Certainly all of us expressed our needs to her time and again, making prodigious demands on her time and energies. And she responded in kind until her life became one long juggling act to fit speeches and site visits, professional consultations and chapter meetings, media interviews and international congresses into her impossible schedule.
It was often difficult to tie her down long enough to arrange a staff meeting at which her presence was essential because she was always more concerned with the problems of say, a child in Fargo, North Dakota, than she was with administration in New York.
Her wide-ranging personal interests sometimes conflicted, too. She always carried an international directory of amateur chamber music players to contact for an evening of music wherever she went. Before breakfast, she might have a date to bicycle on the boardwalk with a colleague's children. On a free afternoon, she'd take off to visit a former student, call on the aged mother of a friend, and look up the nearest flying instructor to add another lesson to the log she had tucked in her luggage.
If she was needed for an emergency decision before the next scheduled event in the Hague or Phoenix or White Plains, locating her could be quite a venture.
Her zest for life and her ability to communicate on every level gave her high visibility. She drew and held the attention of writers, broadcasters, talk-show hosts and their audiences like a magnet. Riveting them with a quip, she would proceed to provide more effective public--and professional--education than all the learned tracts, leaflets or films we could produce. We often complained that she talked too fast--but she got the message across.
Most of us are familiar with the chronology and many revealing anecdotes of Virginia's life. Filching a shelf from a telephone booth because it was the right wood for the back of her first hand-crafted viola . . . carrying a child who feared elevators down the stairs from his hospital bed to surgery . . . encouraging Mount Holyoke girls to go into medicine, then proudly following each career . . . carrying instruments in her handbag to enable her to meet any medical emergency anywhere . . . violently rooting for the Mets in a competing team's ballpark . . .
Everyone who came into her orbit--and that includes an untold number of airline passengers who found themselves seated next to her as she crisscrossed this country--can interweave his own personal thread into that expansive tapestry in praise of life.
The breadth of her interests and the depth of her concern for people made Virginia inestimably valuable to all the institutions she served.
Because of her drive and vision, the National Foundation has made great progress toward its goals in research and service, and in the resources to make them possible. To our National Foundation family, she was--and will always be--not the "legend" that she hated to be called, but a symbol of our aspirations that is very much alive.
One of our volunteers said it all a few years ago:
"When she talks to you, you know she's talking to you--more important, listening to you--and doesn't have her eye or her mind on something over your shoulder. Her warmth and interest give you the feeling that her arms are around you, even though she never touches you. Dr. Apgar is an emotional experience."
Pause
She was, indeed.