PORTLAND – Annie Merrill remembers that as a teenager, she dreaded shopping trips with her mother, Eleanor Merrill.

It wasn’t because of the normal friction between most mothers and their teenage daughters — it was the other people they would encounter.

“You’d be walking down Congress Street and through Porteous, Mitchell and Braun (department store) and it seemed like every 10 feet, there would be someone stopping us and saying, ‘Mrs. Merrill, you won’t remember me, but you taught me at Lincoln Junior High and you’re the reason I read to my children every day,’ ” Annie Merrill said.

Eleanor Merrill died last Tuesday at 95. Annie Merrill said her mother was ready when the time came and “died on her own terms in her own home, which is what she wanted.”

From a daughter’s perspective, Annie Merrill said her mother’s legacy is her children and grandchildren, but she knows that the thousands of students she taught over the years are an equally important legacy.

Eleanor Merrill was extremely smart, her daughter said, graduating from Gorham Normal School, a teachers’ college, at 19. She taught at the school after graduating, usually teaching students her age or older.

She then started teaching in Massachusetts and traveled frequently to and from her family in Portland by train.

On one trip, she met a Royal Air Force pilot, Flight Lieutenant Laurence James Trapp, who had been in Canada teaching pilots.

“As she put it, he picked her up on the train,” Annie Merrill said.

A “whirlwind romance” followed and the two got married shortly before Trapp had to return to England.

It was tough arranging travel during World War II, Annie Merrill said, but her mother learned that she could get approved for transport if she signed on as a teacher in England.

The couple was reunited in England, but Trapp died when his plane was shot down in 1945 and Eleanor Merrill returned to the United States and started teaching again.

Her mother remarried and took a few years off while she had four children and raised them, Annie Merrill said, but soon returned to the classroom.

“She really cared about the kids,” Annie Merrill said. “She was a demanding teacher. She was one of the teachers that kids said, ‘Oh, I hope I don’t get Mrs. Merrill next year,’ but then they would get her and adore her.”

Eleanor Merrill’s strength was her nonjudgmental nature, Annie Merrill said.

“She could be firm, but you would feel the love that emanated from her to her students,” she said.

That love was reciprocated, Annie Merrill said, noting that one girl Eleanor Merrill taught was a new student who took her ninth-grade English literature class at Lincoln Junior High.

The student apparently felt a bond that was cemented as the class read Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” set in London and Paris during the French Revolution.

The student went on to become a Naval criminal investigator, Annie Merrill said, traveling the world.

But every year for decades after she graduated, Annie Merrill said, the student made sure that a dozen roses were sent to Eleanor Merrill, arriving on Bastille Day.

Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at:

emurphy@pressherald.com