Lorena Bell Fuller

LORENA BELL FULLER-LEONARD

HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION PHOTO

PORTLAND HIGH SCHOOL (1936)

(1917-1994)

My Nana, Rena Fuller, was a very kind lady who lived a hard life.  Born in Bangor in 1917 to Arthur Fuller & Lorena Murch, she lived in Portland most of her life.  In high school she enjoyed being a member of the Glee Club, and her senior quote in the yearbook was quite telling of her personality: 

"Dare to do your duty always".

At PHS, she met my grandfather, Thomas Edward Leonard, with whom she was a member of the Glee Club.  Their romance bloomed quickly for a time, as shown from these pictures:

Upon her graduation, in May of 1936, they went to Portsmouth for a quick and easy marriage (Nana was already two months pregnant with my father, who was named after him, Thomas Edward Leonard).  Tom fibbed on the marriage record and claimed to be 21, when he was actually 19. 

Below is a photo of Nana with her mother Lorena, and her brother Harold (and his first wife Virginia), around 1934, just prior to Nana's marriage to Tom.

LORENA BELL FULLER

LORENA HOLLAND MURCH-FULLER

VIRGINIA AUGER-FULLER

HAROLD FULLER

My grandparents' marriage was short-lived (not even 3 years).  In Portland, they lived at 99 Forest Avenue, 21 Spruce Street, and then 94 State Street, where Tom ran a ham radio operation out of his house.  Nana filed for divorce based on desertion in March of 1939, after Tom had joined the Navy, remarrying to another classmate Barbara Connell in 1942.  He and Barbara had been seeing each other all through Tom's marriage to Nana.  

After the divorce, Nana and her three kids moved in with her parents (Lorena and Arthur) to 102 Forest Avenue (1940 Census), and around 1941 she moved into an apartment at 13 West Presumpscot Street (left side second floor in the picture below), where she resided until 1958.

13 WEST PRESUMPSCOT STREET
PORTLAND, MAINE

My dad's sister Charlotte explained to me that an upright piano had to be brought in to the middle floor on the left, at some point in the 40s.  My father had piano lessons on that for years, but he didn't enjoy them.  When my dad's other sister Honey broke her arm, Nana couldn't afford the doctor's bill, so she had to sell it to pay the doctor’s bill and they took the piano out through the window with a crane.  It was a shame because Nana's mother Lorena played piano beautifully and it broke her heart to give it up, but they had no other object of value.  Back at that time the house was painted yellow, and the paint was all peeling.  "The sidewalk was a dirt sidewalk, and there were no pretty bushes out front.  It was called a “cold-water flat”…..  meaning there was no furnace.  There was a coal-burning stove in the LR and a big black cook stove in the kitchen that burned oil, but the BRs were unheated, and they were very cold!  When we lived there, there were porches on the back, but the last time I was home I saw that they had been taken down and the apple tree I used to climb was gone.  Up the street was the abattoir and down the street was the city dump, and when I got older I was ashamed of where I lived.  Our apartment (the rent was $20/mth) was on the left."

In the backyard of the house, you can see below, my Aunt Honey playing in the snow (early 1940s), and the Washington Avenue Methodist Church in the background.  This church is still there, but the steeple on the right was eventually torn down and the church now serves the Korean community in Portland.

Several years after the divorce, in fact, just after Charlotte's graduation from high school in 1956, Nana stopped the car with all three kids inside, right on Tookey's Bridge overlooking Back Cove in Portland, took off her wedding ring, and threw it over the side.  My father was angry at his mother for doing that, as he had his eye on that ring for a potential future bride of his own.

Nana worked as a secretary at Hannaford in their South Portland offices, back when Hannaford was a distribution company and before they bought out the Shop N Save grocery store chain.  She kept her married name all her life.  She raised her three kids (Thomas, Honey & Charlotte-named after her lifetime best friend Charlotte Hall) on Presumpscot Street in Portland, and in 1958 she started moving around quite a bit for the next few years: 89 Sherwood Street,  127 Grant Street, 51 Park Street, and then Neal Street in 1970.

Charlotte Hall also introduced Nana to a gentleman named Clem Pratt, with whom Charlotte worked.  My aunt Charlotte, for whom she was named, reminisces here:

"Clem was a wonderful man that worked with Charlotte Hall at Edwards & Walker near Monument Square, and I guess he would have been willing to marry my mom and take on all 3 of us kids, but that never happened.  He would stay with us so that my mother and grandmother could go to the PTA meetings, and he always came to Sunday dinner after church.  He bought us so many things (bikes, mattresses for our beds, etc.) and whenever he would come back from a trip (always by train) he would bring us each a souvenir.  It was during the War and we, like most people, had a "Victory Garden" at Payson Park.  We grew vegetables (so many things were rationed then, and a family only received just so many coupons for different foods) and Clem would help to plant and weed.  Clem had a car which he left with my mother to use so that she could pick my grandmother up after work at Watkins Cleaners.  For some reason she always parked around the corner to wait for her so that no one my grandmother worked with would see that we had a car.  Clem eventually married a woman he met many years later when he was in a nursing home."

From 1972 to 1982, Nana and her mother Lorena moved to a trailer park in Saco, at 28 Meserve Circle, and this is where I remember visiting them with my father.  They had a golden retriever dog named Ginger who I enjoyed playing with.

In the mid 80s, Nana moved to Gray (145 Yarmouth Road), around the corner from my Aunt Honey's house.

Nana's mother Lorena had moved in with her after Nana's father Arthur passed in 1940.  Nana took care of her for 50 years, until Lorena died in 1990 of dementia.  Nana died four years later in a nursing home on Baxter Boulevard in Portland.  She had caught pneumonia, but also also of a pulmonary blockage caused by choking on her lunch, while strapped to a chair in the hallway.  A very sad ending to a life filled with sacrifice.  RIP Nana, you were cherished by your children and grandchildren for your lively and loving personality and sense of humor.  I can still smell her perfume, and hear her say "Jeekers!"

LORENA & HER MOTHER LORENA

(ABOUT 1950)

Here's a picture of Nana holding me!

Below is the gravesite of Nana:

Below is her pedigree chart.  She was 6% German (through her 2nd Great Grandfather, Daniel Hollien), about 12% Scottish (accumulated royal blood through ancestors Mary Bean, John Jameson, and Jane Bell), less than 2% French (through the Sibley line) and the remainder 82% was English colonial.  Her ancestor Benjamin Burrill was a descendant of Mayflower passengers John Alden, Rebecca Mullins, William Mullins & Alice Atwood. Her ancestor John Fuller was a descendant of Mayflower passengers Edward Fuller and his wife.  Her ancestor Celia Cook was a descendant of Mayflower passengers Francis Cooke, Stephen Hopkins, Elizabeth Fisher and Constance Hopkins.  That's ten Mayflower passengers total for Nana.  Additionally, her ancestor, Susannah Martin, was hanged in the Salem Witch Trials, and accused by Ann Putnam, granddaughter to Thomas Putnam, yet another ancestor of Nana.  Finally, her ancestor John Jameson descended from the renowned Jameson Clan of Scotland, who fought in the Revolution and were among the first settlers of the early Maine towns of Cape Elizabeth, Rockland and Friendship.  This line also connects her to the Leonard Forge of Raynham Massachusetts, family of which are the ancestors of Celia Cook shown below.