A Page from the Memory Book

The friendship between Frank Fuller '33 and Dana Jaquith '35, Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity brothers at Colby, deepened when they found each other again in Providence, R.I., where Jacquith made a career in investment banking and Fuller taught Latin and English at Moses Brown School for 32 years. Last spring Dana Jaquith's widow, Mary, honored Fuller with a named scholarship. Income from the Frank E. Fuller Endowed Scholarship Fund will support financial aid to deserving students at Moses Brown.
Mary Jaquith says her husband, who died in 1989, wanted to leave money to the school. "I thought it was better to have a particular person receive it," she said. "It's important to me that Frank enjoy knowing about it now. My husband and Frank were always friends."
"I was very pleased with this recognition," said Fuller, who, approaching 86, still works in his office at Moses Brown from 10 to noon every day, compiling a history of the 212-year-old Quaker institution. In 1983-84 he solicited, edited and put together a book of alumni reminiscences called Shadows of the Elms. A few years later he taped the remembrances of a 100-year-old headmaster who had served the school from 1925 to 1955. Recollections by L. Ralston Thomas came out in 1994.
"I've tried to gather school memorabilia--things were in closets and attics--and pull them together," Fuller said of the project he started when he retired from teaching in 1975. He continues to dig up and assemble records, diaries, letters and reminiscences and memoirs by Moses Brown alumni.
A native of Freedom, Maine, and a graduate of Freedom Academy, Fuller was a Latin major at Colby and earned a master's degree in classics at the University of Michigan. As faculty advisor to Moses Brown School's newspaper, he received a grant for journalism studies at the University of Missouri. He also studied library science at the University of Rhode Island. Since his retirement, Fuller has attended a lifetime learning program at a church near his home. The slide shows and presentations help him keep abreast of current events and political matters, he says.
Fuller originally was in the Colby Class of '32 but stayed out the 1930-31 year trying to land a teaching job. Ultimately he taught in rural Maine elementary schools from 1934 to 1943, and he remembers thinking that teaching at Moses Brown, with a student population ranging from nursery to grade 12, would be "a good experience."
"I can hardly believe it's fifty-three or fifty-four years of association with the school," he said. "I've been fortunate. And I'm enjoying doing the history. The school seems to appreciate it. It's a privilege to have the school have me around. It's a pleasure to have alumni come back and to talk with former students."
Mary Jaquith says that others who wish to honor Fuller may give to the Frank E. Fuller Endowed Scholarship Fund now or at any time in the future.