She would spend hours baking and would send homemade cookies and little cakes to her friends and relatives. The halls of her home would be well-decked for the Christmas holidays, and Nat King Cole and Perry Cuomo’s Christmas albums were a tradition for the living room console stereo during the holiday season. Evie loved to cook, bake, decorate and entertain. Evie, along with howling schnauzers, endured hours of practice sessions at home while Cindi, Dawn and Geri learned their individual instruments including flute, piccolo and clarinet. The couple attended numerous performances of the Campbell County Band of Pride to support children in band and rode for hours on school busses with rambunctious adolescents to chaperone overnight trips to marching band festivals. They would also dress up for Halloween and New Year’s Eve parties. She recruited Jerry into square dancing, and threw another party, in square dance costume, at Rainwater Farm. After the family moved to Alexandria, the work gatherings included all family members, and while the adults gathered on the patios after a cookout, the children of all the work couples would play croquet and badminton, and sometimes get a game of chase (not always voluntary) with the Fuller family schnauzers. She was well aware that suspicious teachers would use a ruler to measure knee-lengths on dresses to enforce the school dress code. As the family’s fashion evolved into the 1970s and after the family moved to Alexandria, she carefully crafted the “elephant” (palazzo) pants (after the school dress code permitted girls to wear pants to school) and acceptable shorter dress hemlines on mod, geographic patterns for her daughters. She also served as a home hair stylist for her daughters’ pin-curls and pungent perms, but never quite mastered the talent of cutting her daughters’ bangs, as evidenced in elementary school photos. Evie also was an accomplished seamstress - a passionate collector of Simplicity and McCall’s sewing patterns - and would dress her girls up in homemade matching coats and dresses, leggings and, of course, patent leather shoes. The girls would be looking forward to the promise of a hot fudge sundae at the McAlpin’s or Shillito’s tea rooms, if they behaved. The girls (their mother choosing to take one on a Saturday) would spend many hours rolling their eyes in the Cincinnati department store dressing rooms of Gidding Jenny, McAlpin’s and Shillito’s while their mother tried on dresses. When Evie went shopping in downtown Cincinnati, she would take her older girls, Cindi and Dawn, to Polly Flinders to buy itchy-slip, smocked dresses that drew loads of compliments. These years were the 1960s, before the shopping malls, the construction of I-275 and the AA Highway. The wives wore taffeta and silk dresses, pearls and stockings (attached to girdles), and likely had their hair professionally styled in the hours prior to the dinner party. That was back in the day when the men wore suits and narrow ties to these soirees that were held at the Fullers’ first home in Fort Thomas. She loved to plan the many parties she and Jerry held for his peers who worked for the U.S. When her daughters were very young, she would lead bedtime Bible stories, devotionals and children’s songs such as “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, ” “Jesus Loves the Little Children, ” or “This Little Light of Mine.” For decades, the family attended First Christian Church in Fort Thomas, where she would sometimes scold her young daughters for elbowing each other, or, when they were quiet, for focusing only on playing hangman on the church bulletin. Evie was a devoted wife, mother and homemaker. They began dating while Jerry was earning his undergraduate degree at Duke University, and they started out as newlyweds in Lexington, Ky., where Jerry completed law school at the University of Kentucky. She first met her husband, Jerry, in church. Evie briefly attended Bob Jones University. As a teenager, she enjoyed basking on the sunny beaches of the peninsula. She grew up as an outgoing gal and a high school cheerleader. Her distinctive, unmistakable laugh was with her to the end. A native of Erie, Pennsylvania, Evie had a wicked sense of humor and loved to laugh. In her final years, the non-stop care for her at her Rainwater Farm homestead was tirelessly led by her loving daughter, Cindi. She was also the proud grandmother of Tanya Tackett of Butler, Ky., Chelsea (Tim) Butler of Falmouth, Ky., and Becca and Bekir Bicer of Columbus, Ohio, and great-grandmother to Chelsea and Tim’s daughters, Madalynn, Aria and Chloe. Evie was the devoted mother of three daughters, Cindi (Chuck) Tackett of Butler, Ky., Dawn Fuller of Latonia, Ky., and Geri (Sabahattin) Bicer of Columbus, Ohio. Evelyn “Evie” Josephine Fuller (nee Niethamer), 94, of Alexandria, Ky., was reunited in heaven with her husband, Gerald Fuller, on Monday, May 1, 2023.
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