Lifelong teacher loomed large in students' minds

Do you remember the name of your kindergarten teacher?

Virginia French's students did. The longtime Golfview Elementary School teacher would invite her kindergarten classes over for a picnic reunion at her Dundee Township home after they graduated from high school.

French, known as Ginny to her friends and family, began her career in Community Unit District 300 in 1962 as an English teacher at Algonquin Junior High School, district records show.

Twenty-four years later, French retired from the district where she had prepared hundreds of Carpentersville children for high school -- but she didn't consider it retirement.

In the last two decades of her life, French directed church choirs, traveled the country and wrote a book profiling active retirees in all 50 states.

French died Sunday at her home. She was 92.

Among those who paid their respects this week were former students French taught in her first year with District 300.

While she spent most of her life in the Fox Valley, French's family said she was always a Southern girl at heart: When the family would take yearly trips down to Kentucky, they would roll down the windows as they crossed the Ohio River, honk the horn and cheer.

Irma Virginia Robinson French was born Dec. 5, 1915, in Clabber Bottom, Scott County, Ky., to Hermon Clayton Robinson and Irma Augusta Wieland.

French, a lifelong University of Kentucky Wildcat fan, graduated from the university in 1937 with a degree in journalism and later obtained her master's in education at Northern Illinois University.

Besides traveling, making music and writing, French used her retirement to do charitable work, running a furniture ministry that delivered furniture to needy families in the Fox Valley.

"People on the edge of society were people that she cared about," said her son, Michael. "Retirement was a dirty word. She never retired. She just changed what she was doing."

French is survived by her brother, Hermon Robinson; her children, Patricia Thomas, Katherine Gutgsell, James, Robin, Michael, Christopher and William; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A graveside service will be held at 11 a.m. today at the Lexington Cemetery in Lexington, Ky.

Memorials can be made to the American Red Cross.