Augustus Agar and George Stephen Morrison: Difference between pages
(Difference between pages)
Content deleted Content added
m removing editing experiment, fix image |
No edit summary |
||
Line 1:
'''George Stephen Morrison''' was the father of [[Jim Morrison]], also notable for being the youngest admiral in the [[US Navy]] at one time.
George Stephen Morrison, also known as Steve, was born in Georgia in 1920 and raised in Leesburg, Florida. The Morrison family was descended from Scottish settlers who arrived in America in the late eighteenth century.
Steve Morrison's parents were hardworking, God-fearing, nondrinking southern Presbyterians, and Steve followed the family's tradition of military service and entered the U.S. Naval Academy in the late 1930s. He was a trim young man, short of stature and serious, with an air of quiet authority. With World War II about to begin, his class was hustled through an early graduation in 1941, and Steve Morrison was posted to Hawaii for flight training. Later that year, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he met Clara Clarke at a military dance. Blond, bubbly, very pretty and slightly heavy, she was the daughter of a Wisconsin lawyer and political maverick who defended union activists and had run for political office as a socialist candidate. It is interesting that Jim Morrison's maternal grandfather came from the great populist/progressive/socialist strain of American radicalism, a powerful sector of dissent and anger that challenged the two- party establishment from a strong political base in the upper Midwest and produced national leaders like Robert La Follette.
After a brief and war-torn courtship typical of thousands of young couples in that dangerous time, Steve Morrison and Clara Clarke were married in April 1942. They moved to Pensacola, Florida, where Steve continued flight training before shipping out on a vessel laying mines in the waters around Alaska. Their first child, named James Douglas Morrison, was born in Melbourne, on Florida's Atlantic coast near Cape Canaveral, on December 8, 1943, amid the greatest burst of military energy his country ever experienced. He was called Jimmy by his family, and answered to that name all his life, at least to those who knew him intimately.
His father was soon flying Hellcat fighters in the South Pacific, and spent the next eighteen months on duty. While her husband was overseas, Clara lived with her husband's parents, Paul and Caroline Morrison, who operated a laundry in Clearwater, on the Gulf of Mexico. Jimmy lived in his grandparents' house until he was three, and Clearwater remained the family's hometown of record during Jimmy's childhood.
Steve Morrison emerged from the war a decorated Navy pilot and an ambitious officer devoted to his career. His first postwar assignment was in Washington, but, determined to rise in the naval hierarchy, he moved his young family around with very little notice as he earned promotions and his assignments changed. Correctly guessing in 1947 that quick advancement lay in the new technologies that were reshaping the world, Steve Morrison transferred into nuclear weapons systems in the period when the hydrogen bomb was being developed at Los Alamos and tested at the White Sands proving grounds in the deserts of New Mexico. During this time in New Mexico, Jim Morrison would experience the Indian highway death scene, which he relates to in his poetry. George Morrisons new duties required a high-level security clearance that specified that his work was never discussed at home. Obscured by official secrecy (references to Lieutenant Morrison's duties during this period are still heavily censored in copies of his naval records made available to the public), all that is known about this era is that the Morrison family lived in naval housing in the vicinity of Albuquerque. Jim's sister, Anne, was born there when he was three years old.
George Stephen Morrison was later to serve as the Captain of the USS Bonheim (58-60) and later transfered to the pentagon. Ironically, George Morrison was the keynote speaker at the decomissioning ceromony for the USS Bonham on July 3, 1971 in Washington, USA (just 12 hours after his son Jim Morrisons death).
{{US-mil-bio-stub}}
[[Category:The Doors]]
| |||