Eleanor Corinne Parker née Faber was born February 2, 1924 the first child of Samuel and Dora Faber in Lynn, MA. Her brother, Leonard, was born a few years later. The major events during her early life in Lynn was a ruptured appendix – before modern antibiotics -- at age 8 for which she spent a long-time in hospital. During that same year, she received a double promotion despite missing much of the school year because of her illness. She also loved her piano teacher of the time, Mr. Gaines.
Like many people during the depression, her father was forced to move to find work, and they spent a year in NH before settling in Lewiston, ME where she grew up, graduating high school in 1940. Although she wanted to go to college she was not allowed to, so she arranged to go back and live with her Aunt Sadie in Lynn, MA and find work there. Her family followed her back to the Boston area, and they all ended up on the third floor of a triple decker in Chelsea, MA. Eleanor worked in Boston, calculating and typing up mortgage payoff statements.
Eleanor apparently had a habit of throwing off her shoes when she got back in the evening, which disturbed the poor man, Joseph Parker, in the second floor apartment, who worked early in the morning. In self-defense, Joseph started dating Eleanor, and they were married on October 12, 1947.
They found an apartment in Revere, MA but the apartment was so filthy, so a very pregnant Eleanor spent a week scrubbing the apartment to raise it to her standards before moving in. Shortly afterward, their one child, Robert, was born. He quickly learned that he preferred the name Bob, as he was only called Robert when he was in trouble.
Eleanor started working in the Revere Jewish Community Center in the afternoon when Bob was in the fifth or six grade. She was the smiling face that made everyone feel welcome when they came in. She worked there until Eleanor and Joseph moved to a retirement community in Margate, FL in 1973, shortly after Joseph had a heart attack forcing him to retire.
As it was a new community, with everyone coming from somewhere else to retire, Eleanor quickly made numerous friends although she was the youngest person in her group. Eleanor hated Florida, and even 15 years after she left it, she would shudder when talking about how awful it was to get into a car there – and this was before climate change really took hold.
Eleanor was bored in a retirement community, so eventually became a volunteer at a local library (her favorite place in the world), and was quickly hired to become the full-time volunteer coordinator at a larger branch, which she did until she was retired in 1994 at age 70. She loved the job and the opportunity not to be home everyday.
Following a disastrous trip to London in 1975, their second international trip, Joseph refused to travel again. After his death in 1997 (a few weeks before their 50th anniversary), she was able to do some travel around the United States with friends. Despite many attempts by her daughter-in-law, Laurie, to get Eleanor to travel, Eleanor only did two more significant trips – both cruises.
The first was through the Panama Canal in 2007 with Bob, Laurie and their two children, David and Allen. Eleanor wanted to make this trip because this was the one trip her brother Leonard (who had died a few years earlier) repeatedly talked about. Going through the locks of the Panama Canal was an incredible experience for all concerned.
The second was a cruise to Alaska that Eleanor took with a friend, Carol Izzo, and Bob and Allen. Having learned on the first cruise not to take the package tours arranged by the cruise company, one especially memorable time was when they hired a local person to take them to see whales in a small fishing boat, the four of them and the Captain. The captain found a pod of whales, went around them, stopped, and said to be quiet and wait. We slowly drifted through the pod that paid us no mind at all, for a magical experience for all of us.
Eleanor moved to the Jack Satter House in Revere in 2006. Finding that the library was one shelf of books at the time, she pushed to improve it, getting space and bookshelves which she managed to fill to overflowing. She continued managing the library with her friend Carol Izzo until 2021.
During the first few years in Revere, Eleanor and her friends took courses at U Mass Boston, but she stopped about 2011. In retrospect, stopping may have been the first sign of her slow decline with dementia, but even until the end she knew who Bob and Laurie were.
She was adamant that she did not want to go to a nursing home and was fortunate to die at home, with her son near, on August 27, 2025.
Eleanor Corinne (Faber) Parker, born February 2, 1924, was married to Joseph Parker for 49 years and leaves behind a son, Robert Alan Parker, and daughter-in-law, Laurie Catherine Allen, residing in Somerville, MA; two grandchildren, David Londono Parker and Allen Londono Parker, and Allen’s wife Kelly Jrolf Parker, also residing in Somerville MA; and four nephews: Richard Murstein and wife Jan, of North Easton, MA; Ronald Murstein and wife Margie of Boca Raton, FL: Joseph Faber and wife, Karen, residing in Bodega Bay, CA; and Barry Faber and wife Susan, residing in Baltimore, MD. A memorial service will be held at 10AM, Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at the Jack Satter House (9th floor conference room), 420 Revere Beach Boulevard, Revere MA 02151 with a private burial service afterwards. A memorial ice cream party is being planned in her honor at Jack Satter House, but the data is not yet set.
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