Avis de décès de Eleanor A. Norris

Eleanor Almy Norris, of Norwell died in her sleep on Nov. 23, 2012, at The Village in Duxbury, a few days short of her 101st birthday. Through Eleanors generosity, the town of Norwell is home to a 100-acre nature preserve along the North River. Eleanor donated this land to the Trustees of Reservations in 1970 in memory of her late husband, Albert F. Norris, for whom the preserve is named. Born on Dec. 5, 1911 to Chicago banker Loris Almy Miller and his Boston wife Madeleine Tinkham, Eleanor was home-schooled by her mother, who believed children should not be taught to read before age eight, and encouraged by her father to play with boys toys. When her parents moved to Boston in 1919 and placed her in private school, she was far behind other girls in traditional subjects but entranced with Ives electric trains. She made rapid academic progress, delighted in foreign languages and art, and entered Vassar College, where she and her friends delighted in taking the train into New York to visit museums, attend plays and parties, and shop. During college she enrolled in Harvard Summer School courses to learn more philosophy than what she later called philosophy for young ladies. After graduation her parents insisted she attend the Kellogg Institute of Domestic Science in Battle Creek: she learned practical housewife skills and to never use white flour or white sugar, to focus on fresh vegetables, and other dietary precepts she practiced faithfully her entire life. She returned to Boston and abandoned the social-activities whirl for a variety of clerical positions as the Depression deepened. After a long courtship, Eleanor married Albert F. Norris in 1956. Born in 1891 and owner of a Boston iron foundry, he had begun buying land along the North River in the 1920s, working on weekends to build a small cottage and to reopen colonial cart paths. To save money, Eleanor and he lived adjacent to the foundry, where she learned the rudiments of casting iron and to drive a dump truck: to the end of her life she boasted of knowing how to turn a dump truck around in its own length, a skill she acquired spreading foundry clinkers on the paths running down to the estuary. Together they built a small, Cape Cod-style house in Norwell, aligned toward sunlight and views and graced by features they valued, especially a second-story musicians gallery. An accomplished pianist and superb dancer, Eleanor and her husband routinely hosted small gatherings in their home and subsequently in the river-front cottage and boathouse they built from found materials. In winter they gave skating parties in which guests waltzed on the mill pond ice: in later years Eleanor skated at the Evening With Champions charitable event. For decades once a month she hosted lunch for women friends who had bound themselves to speak only French while together. After the sudden death of her husband in 1962, Eleanor began a new career teaching in the Hanson elementary schools. A life-long lover of children, she excelled at teaching despite privately believing that children should learn to read around age eight, when it came instantly to them, and that they should spend much time outside. She welcomed local children and teenagers into her woods, often surprising them and challenging them to tell her what animals or plants they had noticed, and encouraging teenagers to swim from her boathouse wharf or sunbathe. In 1962 she helped found the South Shore Nature Center, now the South Shore Natural Science Center: that summer, operating out of the Unitarian Church classrooms near her home, the Center used her woods as an outdoor classroom. Until 1970, Eleanor maintained the outbuildings, paths, and colonial mill dam and sluiceways on her own, demonstrating to teenage boys that a family sedan did well in the woods when a skilled woman drove it. That year she donated the property to the Trustees of Reservations in memory of her husband, telling her friends how much she enjoyed giving posterity such a beautiful place while triumphing over developers who hounded her following the death of her husband. After her teaching years she traveled in Africa, Europe, and the eastern Pacific, drawn by indigenous ecosystems and museums alike. A strong swimmer and determined walker in rainstorms, into her eighties she carried her kayak through the woods on her shoulder: in her nineties she discovered computers, took college courses in their use, and continued learning about coastal New England ecosystems. Sister of the late Kathleen Bennett Minot and aunt of the late Eleanor Minot Morales, she is survived by Robert L. Davis, a grandnephew, and Elizabeth Davis, a grandniece. A memorial service will be held on Jan. 12 at 2 in the First Parish Unitarian Church, River St., Norwell Center. Contributions in her memory may be made to the Eleanor Norris Endowment Fund, Trustees of Reservations, 572 Essex Street, Beverly, MA 01915.. For an online guest book, please visit www.mcnamara-sparrell.com. McNamara-Sparrell Cohasset-Norwell 781-659-2200