Ann Rulon-Miller of Naples, Florida, formerly of Bristol, Rhode Island, passed away peacefully July 20, 2021, age 98. Born in 1923, she was the wife of Robert Rulon-Miller, and the daughter of the late U.S. Senator and Federal Judge Edward Lawrence Leahy and Fern Dixon Leahy. She was a graduate of Wheeler School in Providence in 1940 and Bradford Junior College in Bradford, Massachusetts, in 1942. When her father became Rhode Island’s Senator in 1949, she spent much of her free time in Washington, D.C.
An avid sailor, she cruised and sailed worldwide with her husband, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1980 in their own boat to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands where they maintained a home at Cowpet Bay for 25 years. Together, they sailed extensively in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, up and down the east coast from Maine to Barbados, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and likely other locations now lost to memory. Accompanying her husband on business trips and vacations, she visited all seven continents and an untold number of countries.
Ann was most generous with her time serving as chair of the Rhode Island District Nursing Association, chair of the board of the Rogers Free Library in Bristol, and chair of the Bristol Heart Fund. She also served on the board of the Children’s Friend & Service Society (now Children’s Friend).
At the suggestion of her mother-in-law, Nancy Rulon-Miller, an accomplished bookbinder, Ann studied bookbinding in Paris, and later on in Bristol under Daniel Dana Gibson Knowlton. In Paris she later met and became friends with a large French family with which she maintained a loving and spiritual relationship for the rest of her life. She studied French at the University of Angers in 1976, and later at the language school CERAN in Spa, Belgium.
Ann was a voracious reader taking on novels and poetry in both English and French with regularity, and had an uncanny ability to recite both poetry and prose from memory. She wrote poetry herself voluminously, many of her later poems appearing in the Arbor Glen newsletter in Naples over the last decade.
She was likely a synesthete (to her the number six was always ablaze in yellow), rearranged as a matter of habit letters in words to make new words just because it was fun, and could remember anniversaries and birthdays to everyone’s astonishment. When meeting someone for the first time the question was often asked, “What is your birthday,” and even if she did not meet that person again for five years she would authoritatively say on the next encounter, “May 16.” Until her eyes failed, she worked the N.Y. Times crosswords and acrostics with jarring aptitude.
Though a Florida resident in her later years she maintained close ties with her friends in Rhode Island, some of her friendships stretching back 80-odd years. She and her husband Bob gave the next two generations of her family an extraordinary, even romantic education in both the ways of the world and personal comportment, by way of world travel, book history, and a plethora of liberal arts, for which they remain eternally grateful.
In all, she was a gracious, elegant, and erudite lady, full of wit and curiosity, and was on the best of terms with many encyclopedias and dictionaries. She swam laps in the pool into her nineties, spent much of her time barefoot, and dined on a mixture of nuts, berries, Dunkin’ Donuts and PB&Js. She never drank, never smoked - never needed to.
She is survived by her two sons, Edward Lawrence and his wife Lauren of Shelton, Connecticut, and Robert, Jr. of Saint Paul, Minnesota; a nephew Brian Berwick and his wife Mary of Austin, Texas; nieces Julia Berwick and Elizabeth Berwick of New York City; and Katherine Berwick, also of Austin. She was predeceased by her daughter Ann in 1989 and her husband Robert in 1995.
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