Kathryn Brophy; directed food service at schools

As a child, she was raised by a single mother who, after being widowed, first worked during the Great Depression as an attendant in the ladies’ washroom at the state’s welfare offices. As an adult, Mrs. Brophy went to college and became director of food service for the Boston Public Schools, overseeing a program that provided meals to more than 30,000 children.

The food helped lower the number of children whose hunger pangs made them inattentive in class. But the program, Mrs. Brophy knew, also was an education for those who never saw a nutritious dinner on the table at home.

“By virtue of the fact that some of these kids have a hot meal every day, and it may be their only meal of the day, at least they get the idea of what a meal is supposed to be composed of,’’ she told the Globe in 1985, “and in some instances that’s doing something.’’

Mrs. Brophy, who also devised a clever ruse to make the skim milk provided by the government more palatable to Boston’s schoolchildren, died Saturday in Linden Ponds, a Hingham retirement community, of complications of cancer. She was 89 and had previously lived in West Harwich and Wollaston.

When the federal government decided that school systems should offer only skim milk, many children across the country turned up their noses at the prospect, and those in Boston were no exception. Mrs. Brophy came up with an idea to make children think they were drinking whole milk, which came in red milk cartons, rather than skim, which had green packaging.

She simply asked the milk company to change the skim milk cartons from green to red.

“They drank it without a ripple of complaint,’’ she told Life at Linden Ponds, a publication at her retirement community, last year.

Having been raised in a home that weathered the rough years of the Depression with help from extended family and some public assistance, Mrs. Brophy saw her years in the school system as assistant director of food service, then director, as more than just a job.

“She was very passionate about doing well for the students,’’ said her daughter Jane Brophy Porter of Dedham. “There were kids in Boston who had never seen an orange or an apple until they saw it in the school food program.’’

Susan Brophy of Arlington, Va., said her mother “really believed in this issue.’’

“She was very proud of her work and the role schools can play in giving children the start that they need,’’ Brophy said. “If they couldn’t get food at home, she was glad to play a role in helping them get it at school.’’

Mrs. Brophy had seen firsthand what it was like to grow up with little income. Born Kathryn M. Nagle, she was 10 when her father died. Her mother, Mary Nagle, had a friend who knew James Michael Curley, Boston’s storied mayor, and she finagled a job as a washroom attendant.

Mary Nagle moved on to better jobs while raising her children in Roslindale, and she made sure all five went to college. Mrs. Brophy graduated from Boston Latin School in 1937 and received a bachelor’s degree from Framingham State Teacher’s College in 1941. She went on to study dietetics for a year at Duke University in North Carolina.

Though the Nagle children grew up poor, “they really didn’t know it, because they had a mother who was optimistic and faithful,’’ Susan said.

During World War II, Mrs. Brophy served in the US Army as a dietician and was discharged with the rank of captain. While working in food services in Boston, she met William Brophy, a wholesale produce dealer, when they crossed paths at Faneuil Hall. Quite smitten, he wanted to see her again. A proper young woman, she was reluctant at first because they met through work.

“My father was a persistent suitor,’’ Susan said. “To get him to stop calling, she went out to dinner with him, and the rest was history.’’

They married in September 1948 and lived in Wollaston for many years, retiring to West Harwich in the late 1980s. He died in October 1995.

The Brophys were like-minded in their life view. He believed that “everything he had was the best,’’ Susan told the Globe after Mr. Brophy died. “He had the best family, the best kids, and the best house. He was in want of nothing, and he didn’t envy anybody anything. In his opinion he had it all.’’

Mrs. Brophy shared the optimism and thankfulness of her husband and her mother.

“I would talk to her, and she would say, ‘I count my blessings,’ ’’ Susan said. “She lived her life in the 99th percentile, and she even died in the 99th percentile. She was just a very, very grateful woman.’’

After pursuing a career during decades when many women did not, Mrs. Brophy retired from the Boston public schools in 1988. Except for about 13 years when she stayed home to raise her daughters, she had worked in food service since her Army days, most of that time with Boston’s school system.

“She was very proud to be a public servant and considered that to be a very noble profession,’’ Jane said.

Mrs. Brophy also set an example, her daughters said, by showing how to balance work and life at home.

“I think I was maybe in my 20s when a friend of mine said to me, ‘You know, you have the perfect mother,’ ’’ Susan said. “I knew I had a really good mother, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had the perfect mother.

“But she had no sense of the impact she had on people. After my mom got sick, one of my friends said, ‘She’s the mom we all wanted.’ I told her that, and she was like, ‘You’re kidding me?’ She was not full of herself at all. She just did everything with real grace.’’

In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Brophy leaves a sister, Jean Hannon of Milton; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today at the Church of the Resurrection in Hingham. Burial will be in Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne.