George Fuller III is one of Fairhope’s true creative spirits — an advertising man, songwriter, magazine editor and published lyricist — but to understand where he comes from, you have to drive about 12 miles up the bay to Spanish Fort, where his family helped build a town.
His father and grandfather were instrumental in shaping Spanish Fort as a community, and Fuller grew up in its tight-knit streets before Spanish Fort was a city at all. Today, as Spanish Fort prospers into a small city of nearly 12,000 people, he carries both the memories and the family name — on a park, a street, and a style of architecture that still shows up in the town’s public buildings.
A tourist village at the crossroads
The family’s enterprise began with a stock market crash. Fuller’s grandfather, George Fuller Sr., had been a successful broker in Chicago until the market collapsed in 1929. Not long after, his grandmother inherited some money, and the family used it to buy roughly 3,000 acres directly across the bay from Mobile.
The timing, it turned out, was perfect. The Causeway across Mobile Bay had opened just a few years earlier, in 1926, and the Fullers’ land sat at a genuine crossroads — the point where Highway 31 from the north met Highway 90 and Highway 98, in an era when air travel was rare and everyone driving to the coast came through by car.
There they built the Old Spanish Fort Tourist Village: a gas station, a motel and cottages, thematically styled to capitalize on the ground’s layered history. French colonists had established a trading post on the bluff in 1712. Spanish forces defended the site against the British in 1781. And nearby Blakeley was the scene of one of the last battles of the Civil War. The Spanish mission-style architecture the family chose was as much marketing as taste — designed to catch the eye of motorists rolling off the Causeway.
“This was in the days before air travel was commonplace, so the motel was extremely popular,” Fuller says. “All kinds of famous people came through, including lots of TV celebrities.”
In the 1950s, George Fuller Sr. updated and expanded the operation with a newer, larger motel and restaurant. The properties anchored a community rhythm that revolved around a swimming pool open — by membership — to neighborhood families, making the motel pool the center of summer life in the area. By the 1970s, George Jr. and his brother David were selling lots for a new subdivision called Spanish Fort Estates.
Then the road moved. The Bayway opened in 1978, and the interstate traffic that had sustained the Tourist Village for a half-century now bypassed Spanish Fort entirely. “The change was dramatic,” Fuller says. “It was like, ‘Whoa, where did everybody go?'” The tourist village is gone today; the ground it occupied holds shopping centers — a Walgreens, a Piggly Wiggly, a credit union branch.
Growing up Fuller
Fuller grew up minutes from the family business, in a neighborhood where the Fullers were the third house built on the street — a lot on Patrician Drive, named for his grandmother, near what is now Fuller Memorial Park. The house itself is gone; after the family moved away, a drainage problem developed and the structure was razed before it could slide off the hill. The memories, though, stay put: block parties at the park, summers at the motel pool, a Boy Scout troop in Spanish Fort.
There were no schools in Spanish Fort then, so he rode to Daphne Junior High from first through ninth grade, then finished at Fairhope High School. He graduated in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, and enrolled at the University of Alabama — studying journalism, in part because his father had been a radio broadcaster and published a Spanish Fort periodical called The Bulletin. He earned his master’s degree in 1976 and went to work at newspapers in Monroeville, Mobile and Fairhope before crossing into advertising.
Madison Avenue skills, Gulf Coast roots
Advertising took him through Mobile agencies and then to New Orleans, Birmingham and Tampa, where he settled in as an associate creative director at WestWayne, a busy firm whose clients included the Publix supermarket chain. Alongside him for the journey was his wife, the former Frances Tucker, a nurse practitioner who grew up in Mobile’s Spring Hill area with family in Point Clear.
They married in 1979 — two weeks after Hurricane Frederic came ashore. “We had a little garden wedding in her parents’ backyard in Mobile,” he says. “Everybody sat on felled trees and got pine sap all over them. It was a mess. Our friends who came to the wedding remember it so vividly because it was like the first party after that horrible hurricane.”
The couple lived in Fairhope early in their marriage, raised two children, Jake and Annie, in Tampa, and returned to Fairhope in 2015. For two years starting in 2017, Fuller edited Portico Eastern Shore magazine, adding publishing to a résumé that already spanned newsrooms and ad agencies. Forty-six years into the marriage, he still speaks of his wife with open admiration. “She leads by example, and she’s the kind of person I wish I could be,” he says. “I’m very fortunate to wake up in the morning and realize I’m having coffee with this person I want to exemplify.”
Eighty songs and a three-finger salute
Music has been the constant. Fuller started playing guitar in the early 1960s and has written around 80 songs. “It’s hugely important to me,” he says. “I learned to play the guitar and sing because I was so shy, and it would give me something to do at parties. When the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show, I already knew enough chords that, the next day, we could go out and form a band. We were The Impacts — ‘music for the in-crowd’ — and we were so bad.”
The bands improved. He has played Eastern Shore rooms like Winslow’s and Saratoga Trunk, sometimes with a self-described “punk bluegrass” outfit called Skunk Posey. More recently he has released two full-length albums of his own songs, available on Spotify, plus a steady stream of home recordings on SoundCloud. He downplays the musical résumé — but he cared enough about the words to publish a book of his lyrics, with a cover photo of his own hand holding up three fingers. It means two things at once: his identity as George III, and the three-finger Boy Scout salute he learned in Spanish Fort. “It reminds me to do a good turn daily,” he says. “I try to do something every day that helps others without expecting anything in return.”
What remains
Spanish Fort barely resembles the town where he grew up — the tourist village, the family motel, even the childhood house are gone, replaced by the retail of a prosperous suburb. But the traces survive: other houses in the old neighborhood, the park where block parties once gathered now bearing the family name, and — in a nice piece of accidental continuity — the newer public architecture around town. The high school and the community center that houses the library and city hall borrow elements of the same Spanish mission style his grandfather calculated would pull motorists off the Causeway nearly a century ago.
The family that built a crossroads left a town that keeps, in brick and in name, a little of what they built.