Juliet Kellogg recalled as ‘extraordinary’

BANGOR – The community is mourning the loss of a woman who touched many aspects of life here through her long career in volunteerism and public service, often involving music, history and her church, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Bangor.

Juliet (Spangler) Kellogg, wife of the late Dr. Robert Kellogg and mother of six children, died Thursday at the age of 88 after a long period of declining health.

“She really was extraordinary,” Joan (Woodcock) Nestler of Bangor, a close friend, said Sunday. “She was the kind of person who made everyone feel better. She just had this enthusiasm for life. She was really gifted and so bright and obviously well-organized.

“She worked with four Nobel Prize winners in medicine and could have had a really outstanding career as a medical researcher, but she fell in love with Bob Kellogg and came back to Maine,” Nestler said.

“In those days, people did tend to come back to where they had grown up,” she said. “It used to be sort of a joke that the way we replenished doctors here was to have the girls go out, marry them and bring them back here.”

Kellogg’s many interests included canoeing, travel and music – she played cello for the city’s symphony orchestra for 35 years – as well as Bangor history.

Kellogg, who attended Bangor public schools, graduated from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., earning a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1939. She earned a master’s degree in zoology in 1941 from the University of Maine. She worked as a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Lab, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Cornell University Biological Labs and the National Cancer Institute.

She met her husband, Robert Orcutt Kellogg Jr., of Brooklyn, N.Y., while working at Cornell. They married in 1943 and had six children and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church, and a reception will be held after the service in the undercroft of the church. Kellogg will be buried at Mount Hope Cemetery.