SACO – Stella Mae Mills Turner, 94, a longtime Saco schoolteacher, died Feb. 20.

Mrs. Turner was an avid gardener and a prolific collector of postcards, teddy bears, ceramics, and cups and saucers, as well as other keepsakes. After retiring as a math teacher, she loved to travel with family and friends, visiting Hawaii and the Pacific Coast, and touring Canada by train.

Her hobbies included knitting and crocheting and late in life, she took up rug hooking with enthusiasm. She enjoyed the reaction she got from acquaintances, when, well into her ’80s, she would announce, “I’m a hooker, you know.”

Mrs. Turner was active in the community, including working on local blood drives, visiting the elderly and serving as a member of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program in Saco. Her pastimes included beachcombing at Camp Ellis, walking in the woods on the Ferry Road and designing and maintaining the flower gardens around her home.

Born in Oxford, Nova Scotia, in 1911, Mrs. Turner moved to South Paris at age 5 and became a U.S. citizen. She earned a degree from Gorham Normal School in 1930.

She began her career as a teacher during the Depression, at a time when women who married had to give up their jobs to men. So she secretly married her sweetheart, Lawrence Wellington Turner, to keep her job teaching in a two-room schoolhouse in central Maine.

Once they began a family, however, she had to give up her job and they struggled through the Depression with a growing family before moving to North Livermore to find employment.

She and her family moved to Saco in the early 1950s and Mrs. Turner taught sixth-grade math for many years at the C.K. Burns School before retiring. She was a longtime member of the United Baptist Church in Saco and a member of the Order of the Eastern Star.

She is survived by four children, Donald Turner of Las Vegas, Nev., Lawrence Turner of Salton City, Calif. and Patricia Vertefeuille and Constance Gosselin, both of Saco; 12 grandchildren; numerous great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Her husband died in 1981, after 49 years of marriage, and a fifth child, David, died in childhood.