Hanover
The fourth-generation Hanover resident and longtime Public Works Department employee built two tree houses a quarter-mile apart from each other on his 125-acre property on Pinneo Hill Road. From his perch, Fullington would scout deer in the woods, or on a crisp autumn or cold winter day, he’d nap in the recliner warmed by one elevated cabin’s wood-burning stove.
Ellen Fullington, his wife of 59 years, dubbed her husband’s one-room man cave paradise “the condo in the clouds.”
“He’d pop popcorn on the stove with his granddaughter Jenna in the afternoon or just watch the wildlife,” she said. “He loved the woods and he loved being in the cabin. It was like another home for him.”
Family, hard work, the woods, animals, hunting, an unhesitating courtesy to dig out a neighbor’s car marooned in a snow ditch, rushing out in the middle of the night to a fire as a member of the Hanover Fire Department, ferrying a deceased resident to a distant cemetery for burial, volunteering faithfully at the Hanover Center Old Timers’ Fair for three decades and teaching his children and grandchildren how to hunt and be stewards of the family’s patrimony — all of that exemplified Alan Fullington’s life.
“He loved anything to do with his land, with animals, with living the life he was brought up to live,” said Ellen. “It was the simple life, where a man’s value was how hard he worked and where his word was good.”
Fullington, who grew up on a family dairy farm on Lyme Road with three sisters and two brothers and later built with his father his own family home a few miles away where he and Ellen raised their two daughters, died of cancer on April 3, 2018, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, surrounded by family members. He was 77.
Alan Fullington had multiple nicknames: Alan. Al. Fully. AW. Alfredo: His wife called him Al, but around Hanover, Fullington was mostly known as “Fully,” although “he’d answer to anything,” said his longtime friend and hunting buddy Bernie Corette. “He was just a peach of guy.”
The Fullingtons have deep roots in Hanover: Alan’s grandfather started what became Dartmouth Dairy, which his father and uncles inherited and where Alan and his brother worked when they were growing up. At one time, the Fullington dairy operation had more than 75 cows and five trucks delivering milk to 1,000 customers around Hanover and Norwich.
“It was seven days a week, sunup to sundown,” Alan’s younger brother, Stanley Fullington, who lives in Seattle, Wash., said of their boyhood. “Hard work.”
A standout athlete at Hanover High School, Alan excelled at track and field and football, and as a junior he played in the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl game in 1958, the first year the annual contest between New Hampshire and Vermont was played in Hanover.
He went to work on the family dairy farm after graduation until 1966, when he was drafted into the Army.
It was the height of the Vietnam War, and the family was terrified that Fullington would soon be wading through rice paddies and sent into harm’s way.
“His mother was very upset. She took it really hard. She really did not want him to go,” said Dot Wallace, Alan’s older sister who lives in Vero Beach, Fla., and with whom he was close. “But being the individual he was, he wanted to serve his country.”
To the family’s relief, Alan was dispatched to a U.S. Army installation in Furth, Germany, where he was charged with delivering mail around the base.
Back stateside after his two-year hitch, Fullington didn’t return to work on the dairy — it would be sold in 1972 — but instead in 1968 went to work for the road construction company RS Audley as a heavy equipment operator. A year later, through mutual friends, he was introduced to Ellen Cloud, whose family was originally from Norwich. They were married in 1970.
Alan’s job building roads required him to be working around New Hampshire much of the time, and Ellen often joined her husband during his weeks and months away from Hanover.
“I would travel with him. We’d find places to rent. Often times, the guys working with him would stay with us. I’d do the cooking, fix lunches. All of them were really good guys. Some of them we are really good friends with still,” Ellen said.
Then in 1971, their first daughter, Vicki, was born, and when the construction season ended in December, Fullington “came home and said ‘I don’t want to travel anymore. I have a child now. I want to stay home,’ ” Ellen recalled. (A second daughter, Amy, was born in 1974.)
That’s when Fullington went to work for the Hanover Public Works Department, where he stayed for 30 years and six months, working as a heavy equipment operator, before retiring in 2001.
Indeed, if it had wheels — or tracks — no matter the size, Fullington could handle it: firetruck pumpers, 18-wheelers, excavators, dump trucks, loaders, backhoes, graders, bulldozers and snow plows. His work for the Public Works Department made him one of the most visible faces in Hanover, a person residents came into contact with on a daily basis. His daughters’ hearts would swell with pride as they caught a glimpse going and coming from school of their dad working on road projects around town in command of dinosaur-size machinery.
“He knew every cop, every doctor, every lawyer, every businessman and person in this town for years,” Ellen Fullington said. “And they all knew him. He delivered milk to them when he was young, he plowed their roads. There is no one on this hill that Al hasn’t gotten out of a snowbank at least once or twice before.”
Fullington’s job as one of the town’s plowmen meant that he frequently had to crawl out of bed before sunrise on Christmas to get out and clear the roads of the night’s snowfall, disrupting any hope to spend Christmas morning with his daughters opening presents.
So Ellen and Alan would wake Vicki and Amy at 3 a.m. to give them their stockings, which they would take back to bed with them as their dad went off to work on the one morning of the year all other fathers would be home with their families.
“He never once in 30 years turned down a call” to go out and plow the roads no matter the day nor time, Ellen Fullington said. But once he retired from Public Works, “Al never wanted to do anything more with snow,” she said, unless it was to help dig out a neighbor.
Nonetheless, “retirement” was not the end of Al’s work life, Ellen stressed. Her husband next went to work for L & M Service Contractors in Orford as a heavy equipment operator, where he worked seasonally for the next 15 years.
“It takes skill to operate heavy equipment and not endanger people,” said L & M Service owner Ryan Morse. “You have to take care of the equipment and Alan was religious about it – greasing the machine, checking the air filters, keeping the cab neat and clean. It’s a quarter million dollar piece. Some guys don’t care. The top loader was as good as the day he left. He took a lot of pride in that. He was one of the best (employees) I ever had.”
Fullington had, his friends and colleagues said, a remarkable constitution that showed no signs of abating until the final year of his life, when the chronic lymphocytic leukemia he had been diagnosed with years earlier again reared its head and sapped his strength.
Fullington was proud, although not arrogant, about his New England ethos, which came from growing up on a farm where all family members were expected to live up to their responsibility and shoulder their fair share of the work.
“It was that New England work ethic and that was ingrained into him since the time he was born,” Ellen said. “There were two things. The value of a man was how hard he worked. And you were as good as your word — if you said something, you did it.”
“He had a work ethic like no one’s business,” said his daughter Vicki Prentiss. “He believed if you had a job to do, you did it, and he passed that down to us. He was one of the most hard-working and honest people I’ve ever known.”
Daughter Amy Barnes recalls the uncompromising lesson in honesty he memorably taught her.
Once, Amy said, when she was a tween during a family barbecue at home she and her cousin snuck a couple of beers out to the woods and drank them. When her father got wind of the escapade, “he took me out back and made me stand on the porch,” Amy said.
“Did you drink a beer in the woods with your cousin?” Amy said her father asked her directly. Reflexively, as tweens have been known to do, Amy denied it.
“Amy, are you sure?” her father asked again, repeating the question in a tone that made it clear in no uncertain terms he knew his daughter was fibbing. When Amy confessed, her father’s reply defined his sense of rectitude and imparted a lifelong lesson, the exact words which echo with her to this day.
“You need to know: Fullingtons don’t lie,” he told her.
Fullington wasn’t much of an indoor guy and unreservedly his favorite pastime was to be outdoors and in the woods he loved.
“When he wasn’t at work he was doing yard work, or going up in the woods,” Amy said. “For him, that was his church. He had a lot of pride in the property,” which her father had inherited from his own parents.
“I’ll never forget my father saying, ‘They are never going to make more land,’ ” Amy said. “That’s the legacy that was most important to him.”
Fullington loved tooling around the property on his John Deere tractor and his John Deere “Gator” utility vehicle, clearing trails, cutting firewood — and seemingly forever clearing ground for more lawn.
John Wilson, owner of Rand-Wilson Funeral Home and for whom Fullington would help by serving as an attendant at funerals or always be willing to be called out in the middle of the night to transport a deceased who had died at home to the funeral parlor, said his friend had great respect for animals.
“He wouldn’t kill anything just for the heck of it,” said Wilson, who helped Alan build his elevated cabins in the woods. “Al loved to just go up there and sit and watch the deer and feed the animals.”
Although Fullington was partial to displaying the fish he caught at his family’s lakeside camp in Pittsburg, N.H. or the antlers from bucks he had shot, “he was never really a big hunter,” said Corrette. “He just loved the animals. We spent a lot of time just watching them” or after hunting season leaving apples out for the deer, bears and other wildlife to enjoy.
“It was more watching than hunting,” Corette said.
Fullington’s stewardship of the land extended to teaching his daughter Vicki how to hunt when she was 10, at first with an unloaded 22-rifle for safety as he guided her through the thicket and showing her how to site deer and where they liked to hide.
“I can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours we’d sit there in the woods,” Vicki said. “On the first day of hunting season we’d always go out faithfully.
“He taught me an appreciation of what is wild and how to hunt ethically. It was never about just killing deer for him. When he grew up, it was a way of providing food for the family, which is a lost art.”
Ellen Fullington said her husband always told his grandchildren he didn’t consider himself much of hunter, but instead explained how culling the deer population was “far more humane than watching the deer starve to death in the winter.”
Eventually, Fullington’s declining health made it difficult for him to hunt, but he took enormous joy in teaching and watching Vicki’s own children, Jenna, 14, and Alex, 18, become skilled hunters in their own right.
The pride culminated last fall when battery-operated motion-sensitive cameras the Fullingtons installed on their property to track deer detected one particularly large buck, who they named Big Boy, in the woods. On Thanksgiving, Jenna was out with her mom Vicki for their traditional Thanksgiving morning hunt to see if they could find the buck.
They sited him, Jenna took a shot, and missed.
Mom and daughter trudged back home to their Thanksgiving meal, ate quickly, and then headed back into the woods. But they couldn’t find the buck again that day.
A week later Jenna and her mom were back in the Fullingtons’ woods when, after Jenna spotted and gave chase to the deer, she brought it down with a single shot.
Big Boy turned out to be a 9-point buck true to his nickname.
Although Jenna had the opportunity to shoot several 4- or 5-pointer bucks last season, she intentionally held off to wait for the grand prize — heeding her grandfather’s injunction against senseless hunting and indiscriminate taking of an animal’s life.
Jenna and her mom called back to the house and Fullington came up with his tractor. They loaded the deer into the bucket. Given her father’s precarious health, Vicki said she had a premonition after the buck was shot that this might be the last hunting season they would share together as a family.
“It couldn’t have been more perfect,” Vicki said of her father learning that his 14-year old granddaughter had bagged the biggest buck ever taken on Fullington land. “How rewarding for him to witness that.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
