Mary Lou Boyle of Old Field, head of Suffolk public health nursing bureau, dies at 81

As a nurse and public health official, Mary Lou Boyle established programs to tackle some of the biggest crises of her time — AIDS, pay inequity and drug addiction — and her efforts garnered acclaim for Suffolk County.

“She knew how to get things done on behalf of people who had no voice,” said Jane Corrarino, a retired nurse who started working with Boyle in 1981. “She made a real difference in the world and the effects of that will be felt for generations — not just touching lives but improving lives.”

Boyle succumbed Oct. 7 to an aggressive brain tumor less than three weeks after it was discovered. The Old Field resident was 81.

She chaired Suffolk’s Comparable Worth Commission from 1986 to 1988, a panel studying gender bias and unfair pay in Civil Service, especially in female-dominated fields. It found that some licensed workers, such as nurses, were getting less than men painting traffic stripes on the streets, prompting the county to revamp Civil Service rules, Corrarino recalled.

“Big business should realize that we save a lot of money because of what we do,” Boyle told Newsday in a 2000 story about the value of nurses.

As director of Suffolk’s Bureau of Public Health Nursing from 1990 to 2001, Boyle was innovative, said Corrarino, who succeeded Boyle as director. The bureau set up one of the state’s first home care programs for people dying of AIDS. When babies were born drug-addicted and taken from their mothers, Boyle organized help from the county social services and the drug and alcohol unit for a holistic approach to saving at-risk families.

It was the bureau’s outreach to reduce infant mortality in the 1990s that led to awards from industry leaders, including the American Public Health Association. Through data and anecdotal experience, Boyle and her nurses noticed the higher death rate among Black babies compared to whites, so they visited minority and low-income communities to identify risk factors and provide prenatal help.

“She could connect with anyone and everyone,” said her daughter Mary Boyle Anderson of Silver Spring, Maryland. “I remember coming home from college . . . and being struck at how well she knew the people at the coffee shop and dry cleaner and all these places. They were so happy to see her and extended her such warmth because she treated them that way.”

The second of seven children and the oldest girl, Boyle grew up in Freeport being called “Peachy,” hospital nurses’ nickname for her due to her jaundice at birth, her family said. 

She looked after younger siblings and was a confidante for life, said sister Maggie Bisceglia of Nashville, Tennessee: “She was always there for you. I talked to her three or four times a week. It was always a good conversation.”

After graduating from Georgetown University School of Nursing, Boyle worked in New York City and Suffolk hospitals before being hired as a Suffolk County nurse in 1973, assigned to the county’s public health centers.

On a blind date in 1965, she fell in love with budding attorney E. Thomas Boyle, now a retired federal judge. They were married later that year.

Rarely going out without each other, Boyle and her husband spent even more time together during their retirement, sailing 16 summers from Maine to the Georgia islands on their old fishing trawler named The Wild Goose. Boyle also took weekly yoga classes to combat painful spinal arthritis, wrote poetry and indulged in her love of photography, including from a different angle — on her back, her daughter said.

Anyone who knew Boyle had at least one story of her loyalty to her dog Zoe and especially her Amazon parrot Tootie of 40-plus years, who went on travels and always had a place next to her human at family meals. 

“She just felt like she was part of the flock, and she needed a seat at the table,” Boyle Anderson said. “That’s how my mom treated all people.”

Besides her husband, daughter Mary Boyle Anderson and sister Maggie Bisceglia, Boyle is survived by another daughter, Elizabeth Lucey of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina; brothers, Paul J. Kelly Jr. of Santa Fe., New Mexico, and Patrick Kelly of Southold and Hobe Sound, Florida; sisters Jacqueline Stevenson of Kennesaw, Georgia, Elizabeth Smith of Naples, Florida, and Rosemary Kelly Giugliano of Fort Salonga; and two grandchildren.

Boyle was buried Wednesday in a private ceremony at Oak Hill Cemetery in Stony Brook. Donations may be made to Good Shepherd Hospice in Farmingdale.