Region's historian Tacoma native Murray Morgan helped others appreciate his beloved home

By Bart Ripp; The News Tribune, June 23, 2000
Reprinted with the permission of the News Tribune.
Photographs courtesy of Mary Randlett.

Long after he stopped writing a Sunday column for our newspaper, there was a mailbox in the newsroom for Murray Morgan.
Only recently, when the new faces asked us old-timers about this Morgan guy, did we remove that mail slot, but not the memory of Murray Morgan.
Morgan, historian of our South Puget Sound and a treasure for generations of Pacific Northwest readers, died Thursday morning in the native Tacoma he loved. He was 84 and a writer for life, always curious, always a shy gentleman interested in yarns about anyone but himself.
"Murray could talk about any subject. He was omnivorous in his appetites for our area," Gary Fuller Reese said. Reese is director of the Tacoma Public Library's Northwest Room, where Morgan donated his collection of history books and the papers accumulated in a life of writing 20 books and thousands of stories, and teaching, always teaching.
"Murray was," Reese said, "the kind of man who proved you could be a scholar as well as a great teacher. His wit and charm made his classes and lectures a real joy. He was the greatest historian Tacoma has yet produced."
Although Morgan traveled the globe as a correspondent, was a CBS Radio personality in New York, and earned a master's degree in communication from Columbia University, he preferred to teach history at Tacoma Community College.
"Murray might have held a chair in any of the distinguished professorships of history," said Washington State History Museum director David Nicandri, "but he reached more people on the subject of Northwest history than any other historian. People valued what Murray Morgan wrote."
This spirited historian of the people was born Murray Cromwell Morgan on North 31st Street in 1916. His father, Henry Victor Morgan, was a minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church and published his poetry and the theatrical plays of his wife, Adda Camille Layne Pearne Morgan.
Murray Morgan was a 1933 graduate of Stadium High School. Four years later he graduated from the University of Washington, where he was editor of the UW Daily and distinguished himself by getting suspended for running a story about venereal disease on campus.
Morgan married Emma Rose "Rosa" Northcutt at his father's church in 1939. They instantly left on a freighter for Germany, where they paddled the Danube in a kayak and found themselves briefly immersed in World War II.
Always a maverick, Morgan wrote for such august institutions as Time, CBS, the New York Herald Tribune and Hoquiam's Daily Washingtonian. But he kept returning to the Puget Sound he celebrated in definitive history books about Tacoma ("Puget's Sound") and Seattle ("Skid Road"). "Skid Road" marches on in its 54th year, the longest-running Pacific Northwest book in print.
"We have a steady demand for Murray's books," said Larry Jezek, owner of Tacoma Book Center, the South Sound's biggest secondhand bookstore. "Pretty much all of Murray's books still sell, to old-timers and kids. His work spans the generations."
The Murray Morgan Bridge spans Thea Foss Waterway as a graceful gateway to downtown Tacoma. The 89-year-old relic, originally called the 11th Street Bridge, where Morgan worked as a bridge tender in the 1940s, was renamed for him in 1997.
There is a literary prize named for Morgan at Tacoma Public Library. The library's Web site maintains a collection of his stories. Called Murray's People, it can be accessed at www.tpl.lib.wa.us/v2/NWRoom/MORGAN/Intro.htm.
Morgan's books explored Tacoma, Seattle, Grand Coulee Dam, the Olympic Peninsula, the Columbia River, St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Co., the Alaska Gold Rush, the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and a topic that constantly fascinated him - Alaska's Aleutian Islands.
"My books reassure me when I have writer's block," Morgan said in a 1990 interview. "I look at them and I know it'll wear off."
Murray and Rosa lived in Auburn, in a log house that once was Trout Lake Dance Hall. It was known for its proximity during Prohibition to a bootleg liquor joint called Mickey's Chicken Dinner Inn.
Hamburger was Morgan's meal of choice - for health, not flavor. In 1964, while researching a Saturday Evening Post story about cancer, Morgan was told he had stomach cancer and less than a year to live. After surgery, after conquering cancer, Morgan went on a medically mandated burgers-for-breakfast diet and resumed writing. Only death halted Morgan's quest, at an ancient Smith-Corona manual typewriter, to finish his long project about sea otter fur trade in the Aleutians.
A memorial is pending. He is survived by his wife, Rosa, and their daughter Lane Morgan of Sumas, Whatcom County.
Murray Morgan loved lighthouses. He loved libraries. He loved Tacoma's Tideflats. He loved scavenging for huckleberries in woods behind his Trout Lake cabin.
"He was curious about everything," Lane Morgan said. "He was convivial and he was generous. He was a gifted friend, as well as a gifted writer.
"He loved scavenging for something - bark from a tree, wood from the Tideflats, mushrooms from somebody's yard - and giving them to someone. He loved the serendipitous."
Murray Morgan's most serene spot was two acres of rhododendrons, alders, maples, cedars, firs, ferns and forget-me-nots behind the cabin at Trout Lake. Trilliums, his favorite flower, bloomed under a thicket of vine maples. His family called the place Druid's Grove.
A swift, clear stream runs beyond the trilliums. It bubbles loudly through spring and now summer. Like Morgan and his curiosity for a place he loved, the creek meanders through the woods, refreshing everyone.

A Murray Morgan Reading List

• "Puget's Sound: A Narrative History of Early Tacoma & the Southern Sound" (1981)
• "South on the Sound: An Illustrated History of Tacoma & Pierce County" (1984)
• "Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle" (1951, 1960)
• "The Mill on the Boot: The Story of the St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Co." (1985)
• "One Man's Gold Rush: A Klondike Album" (1995)
• "The Pike Place Market: People, Politics & Produce" (1982)
• "Over Washington" (1995)
• "The Last Wilderness: The Olympic Peninsula" (1976)

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