Charles Joseph Doran - age: 91
(December 01, 1928 to December 14, 2019
)
Resident of
Bluffton, SC & Saco, Maine
Visitation Information:
Dennett, Craig & Pate Funeral Home, 365 Main Street, Saco is handling the arrangements. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Hospice of Southern Maine, 180 US Route One, Scarborough, Maine.
Obituary:
Charles Joseph “Chuck” Doran, 91, passed away peacefully on December 14, 2019 after a brief illness at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough. He was surrounded by family when he died.
Chuck was born in the Bronx, New York on December 1, 1928. He was the youngest child of Charles Edward Doran and Mary (McGrath) Doran. He graduated from Manhattan Prep High School and subsequently attended Manhattan College. While at Manhattan College, he met his future wife and the love of his life, Claudette Gauvreau. After marrying Claudette, he lived and raised his family in Hartsdale and Valley Cottage, New York.
Chuck was the owner of Square Auto Supply in the Bronx, New York. After many years of running Square Auto, he and Claudette retired to Kinney Shores in Saco, Maine and to Sun City Hilton Head in Bluffton, South Carolina.
Chuck lived a varied, creative and joyful life, and was a man of many talents. In his youth, he was a horseback riding instructor and rodeo cowboy at Cimmaron Ranch in Peekskill, New York. Later, he avidly took up skiing and taught all his children to ski. He co-founded the Valley Cottage Ski Club, where many young skiers rallied on his front lawn each winter Saturday morning at 6 AM before being bused to Hunter Mountain.
In retirement, he brought his energy and enthusiasm to gardening, woodworking and croquet. He grew vegetables in a plot of seven raised garden beds at the family’s Valley Cottage home, where he also planted many flower gardens, including a peony garden in front of which his daughter Christine was married. He caringly created and tended to gardens at his home in Saco and taught his children and grandchildren how to properly prune Rosa rugosa.
He was a skilled woodworker and his retired life is perhaps best measured by the long list of woodcarving projects he undertook: ranging from a collection of over twenty finely-detailed half models of ships that sailed Maine’s coastal waters, to a pod of Orca whales that hangs suspended from a cathedral ceiling in the family summer cottage. He had a deep and enduring respect for Native American culture, which influenced everything from his woodwork to his affectionately named homesteads. His proudest accomplishment was a multi-layered Navajo Sun Face woodcarving that was one of the last projects he completed before he stopped woodworking. Interested readers can see some of the half model ships on display at the Dyer Memorial Library in Saco.
In his later years, he replaced skiing with croquet (a sport more agreeable to his lifelong appreciation for details and rules). He was an instructor in the Sun City Croquet Club, a role which included teaching new members the distinction between a croquet stroke and a continuation stroke.
He was a loving husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and uncle, forming the Lonny Zucker Club, a Kinney Shores version of a polar bear plunge in which all members of the club must go swimming in the Atlantic Ocean before 8:00 AM. He will be immensely missed by family, friends and all others who were lucky enough to know his good humor and creative and loving heart.
He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Claudette (Gauvreau) Doran, and by daughter Christine Marie Doran of Delmar, New York; son Charles Edward Doran and daughter-in-law Christie Shaw-Doran of Franconia, New Hampshire; and daughter-in-law Catherine Greene of Central Nyack, New York. Other survivors include sister Caroline Boily and grandchildren Adam Shaw-Doran, Cameron Shaw-Doran, Alexandra Jay, Manisha Doran, Leonard White, Madeline Wade and Rebecca White, as well as twelve great-grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. He is predeceased by his sons Peter Thomas Doran and Matthew Paul Doran, by his son-in-law Paul Rolf White, and by sisters Evelyn Vestal, Charlotte Agostini and Marie Bauldauf.
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