Eleanor Mae Bruce

Before there were online travel services there was Eleanor Mae Bruce, a remarkably capable airline agent with a dazzling smile, who died in St. Petersburg on January 10, 2007 after a heart attack. She was 81. As a reservations agent in Miami for Pan American World Airways, Miss Bruce was cheerful, accurate, thorough ? and swift. She worked for the airline, arranging complex journeys for Pan Am?s top customers, from the late 1940?s until she retired in about 1985. Then she clowned around, literally. Miss Bruce attended Clown College and transformed herself into Petunia. With stark red wig, whiteface, a red bulb of a nose, an enormous yellow bow tie and a dress of many colors, she entertained children at Miami hospitals and in parades and at restaurants and private children?s parties using balloon animals and sometimes sleight-of-hand. She was born September 5, 1925 in Painesville, Ohio, an idyllic town near Cleveland. She was graduated from Thomas W. Harvey High School and worked as a secretary for the Diamond Alkali Co. After her family made several trips to Florida, Miss Bruce decided that Miami was the place for her. She moved there as a young woman and never left. When her health became too precarious to continue clowning, she moved to St. Petersburg in 2002 to be close to her widowed sister, Hazel L. Thomas, and her niece, Diana M. Naughton. She is survived as well by Diana?s husband, James; grandnieces Jenifer Genovesi in Chattanooga, TN, Lara Naughton in New Orleans, LA, and Kerry Naughton in Alexandria, VA; a grandnephew, Michael Naughton, in Philadelphia, PA; and two great-grandnephews. Services will be private. Interment will be in Ohio. Anderson-McQueen Funeral & Cremation Centers-NE St. Petersburg