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 Alvan T. Fuller was born in Boston, MA on February 27, 1878, son of Flora Anabella Tufts and Alvan Bond Fuller. His parents, together with he and his sister, Martha (Fuller Halsey), lived in Malden, where young Alvan attended Malden public schools. He was noted for being outstanding in sports and loved to ride bicycles, receiving his first bike at age eight, and could ride faster than any youngster in town.

His father, Alvan Bond Fuller, was a Civil War veteran and a printer by trade, employed as an assistant foreman at the Boston Globe. Young Alvan had to leave school at an early age when his father died. His first job was at age fifteen at the Boston Rubber Company (Converse) in Malden, in the shipping department, where he moved crates and rubber boats from 7:00am to 6:00pm for $7.50 per week. He continued studying at home and took courses from Burdett Business College. All during this time, he won numerous bicycle racing competitions, becoming New England champion at age 16. Evenings and holidays he repaired and sold bicycles from his mother’s barn next to the house, and used the family’s living room on occasion as a showroom. At age eighteen when he earned enough money to buy the lumber he and his Uncle Peter Tufts, who was a carpenter, built a small shop on the family plot on Cross Street. He tacked out a sign that read "Alvan T. Fuller, Bicycles and Tires, We specialize in Repairs." With the success that followed him, he repaired and sold over three hundred and sixty bicycles that first year.

In 1899, at the age of twenty-one, he sold his bicycles prizes (which he was still winning) and was able to finance a trip to Europe on bicycle business and to look at the automobile he had heard so much about. He returned home with his first two cars to enter the Port of Boston, two French "DeDion Bouton Voiterettes." He wrote home before his departure, "I think the Boston store can make a go, I have spent a lot of money, but what I have in return no one can take away from me. I am feeling fine as silk." On December 23, 1899, Alvan sent a postcard notifying his arrival, "The SS St. Paul is below New York, will probably dock at 1:00 p.m. today." He sold the cars for a profit and in 1900 opened a second bicycle shop in Boston. One year later, he sold automobiles, as well as bicycles from his Boston store.

Foreseeing the future of what was then a new business, he traveled to the Packard factory in Detroit and returned with a contract, becoming the first distributor for Packard Motor Cars in New England. In 1904, he sold Cadillac’s as well as Packard’s and in 1906 he moved his business to the new Boston Motor Mart Building, Park Square, Boston. Not only was Fuller a pioneer is the automobile industry, he became one of the foremost auto dealers in the country. He originated the Washington’s Birthday sales and other service techniques that form the basis of today’s marketing procedures.

Theodore Roosevelt, whom Fuller had great admiration was the first to urge him into politics. He joined the progressive movement and campaigned for Roosevelt in 1912-13.

In 1914 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from the Ninth District to two terms in 1916-1920. In 1924, he defeated Boston Mayor James Curley in a race for the Governership of Massachusetts; he was re-elected in 1926. He kept a keen interest in politics throughout his life, showing his independent party line by voicing publicly his "mounting confidence in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in 1933.

In 1910, Fuller married Viola Davenport from Medford, MA, while she was studying voice in London. "Her love was music and mine was Packards," Alvan said of them. The Fullers had four children: Lydia (Mrs. George T, Bottomley), Mary (Mrs. Robert L. Henderson) Alvan Jr., and Peter. Both sons followed him into the auto industry and are successful businessmen in their own right. The family lived in Malden on the corner of Appleton and Hancock Streets until the 1920’s after which they lived at 150 Beacon Street and spent their summers at Little Boar’s Head (North Hampton) New Hampshire.