Eileen (Haydock) Merullo
Eileen Haydock Merullo, 95, died peacefully at home on June 17. Born and raised on Olive Street in Revere to loving parents James and 
Catherine Haydock and among a close family of five sisters and one brother, she excelled in sports from an early age, playing ice hockey with the boys, winning the city tennis championship in 1939 at age 16, and, as a high school senior, starring at third base on the Olympets softball team alongside several women who went on to play in the famous League of Their Own.
She graduated from Revere High School in 1940 and received her B.S. from Boston University’s Sargent College in 1944. Immediately upon graduation she enlisted in the United States Army and served as a registered physical therapist in the Army Medical Corps, working with wounded soldiers in the Amputation Center at Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C. Always proud of her military service, she was a lifetime member of the Revere chapter of the Disabled American Veterans, and a charter member of Women in Military Service of America, as well as other veterans’ organizations. In 2013, she initiated the effort to place a stone memorial honoring Revere’s 145 women WWII veterans. She helped design the memorial, raised funds, and presided over the ceremony, which was held the day after her 91st birthday. That same year she was voted Revere’s Woman of the Year and honored in a ceremony at the Massachusetts State House.
During the post-WWII polio epidemic, Eileen courageously volunteered for a year in a polio clinic in Illinois, then returned home to work as a physical therapist at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, where she was head of the rehabilitation clinic and where she donated her invention of a pronation device.
In 1951 she wed the late attorney and city councilman Roland A. Merullo and they were blessed with 31 happy years of marriage and three sons, Roland, Jr., Steven, and Kenneth. After raising her children with love and attention, Eileen went back to work as a science teacher in the Revere Public Schools and proudly held that position for 25 years. While teaching, she earned two Master’s degrees, one from Salem State in Administration, and one from Fitchburg State in Computer Science. She also studied Braille, learned to hook rugs and make stained glass, took a course on the Holocaust, loved to read, and repair small appliances, and, until age 84, was an avid and skilled golfer at Bellevue Golf Club in Melrose.
Upon her retirement from Lincoln School, Eileen volunteered as a teacher’s aide at McKinley School in a first grade classroom where she, herself, had been a student 70 years earlier. She also worked part-time for another 25 years at the Lighthouse Nursing Home as receptionist.
Eileen Merullo selflessly loved and served her family, her country, and her city, and was constantly looking for ways to help others. She will be deeply missed by her surviving sons, Roland and Steven, her devoted daughters-in-law, Amanda and Theresa, her loving grandchildren, Nicole, Steve, Alexandra, and Juliana, by her great-grandchildren Skyla and Joseph, by her sister, Cynthia Goodyear of Indianapolis, and by numerous relatives in both the Merullo and Haydock families.
At her request, services will be private, but all are welcome at the burial at Woodlawn Cemetery, 302 Elm St. Everett, at 11:00 on Thursday, June 21st.