Colleen Sullivan

COLLEEN SULLIVAN is a leading candidate for the All-Bapstonian honors. She has all charm and grace one would look for in a queen but for all of that she is very much a regular person. Colleen has been a soloist at Bapst since her Freshman year when she scored a hit singing "Bali Hai." She is a member of both the student and the senior choir at Saint Mary's. Colleen has done very well and qualifies to go on with the college course but is of late wavering and may turn to nursing and Mercy. Our very best good wishes go with you, Colleen.

Colleen Sulivan
Died June, 1959

Darling Colleen!

Who could ever forget her beautiful voice, her glorious smile, her throaty laugh, her fun-loving ways?

In ninth grade, she was the first among us to wear a poodle skirt. She loved scary monster movies, where we would all shriek and scream at "the thing" and his ilk.

We never realized that the bruises that appeared so easily on her arms were a symptom of the leukemia that would take her life all too soon.

She was the star of the Girls' Glee Club and hoped someday to have a career in music. She loved to jitterbug, and nothing could keep her off the floor when Kenny Williams and Teddy Wilson began a fast rendition of "In the Mood" or "String of Pearls."

After graduation, she went to nursing school in Portland with the two Genevas and Therese, but returned to Bangor to work as an operator for the telephone company.

On December 28,1956, she married a handsome young serviceman from Kennebunkport in a lovely ceremony at the University of Maine chapel.

She was simply luminous, and I was happy to share that day as one of her bridesmaids.

I didn't know that was the last time I would ever see her. She and her husband moved to Pensacola, Florida, where he attended flight school.

Like all of us girls, her main goal in life was to be a good wife and mother, so it was especially cruel that her leukemia was discovered during her first pregnancy.

She died in childbirth in June, 1959.

Her daughter survived; she was also named Colleen.

Ann Davis Chadbourne
4 August 2003