During his stay in Seattle he reacquainted himself with Rosa Northcutt, whom he'd first met in Tacoma. They had also worked together at the UW Daily, holding down the only two paying jobs on the paper. (She'd been the morgue librarian.) Murray and Rosa got married at his father's church in Tacoma on March 5, 1939. For their honeymoon, the Morgans took a freighter to Europe and there embarked on a leisurely kayak trip down the Danube River. Murray sent reports of their trip to The News Tribune (Tacoma).
On September 30, 1939, unknown to the kayakers, Germany had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. As the Morgans neared the end of their trip at the mouth of the Danube, a Romanian official apparently questioned them about what they were doing. Murray attempted to tell him in English, and when that didn’t work, he tried to tell them in German. His German sparked an immediate response from the Romanian. The Romanians were on the lookout for German spies. Murray was jailed overnight until he was able to satisfy the Romania state police that his honeymoon trip was in fact a honeymoon trip.
Despite this brief incarceration, Murray Morgan had fond memories of the trip down the Danube.
He always called Western Washington home. “I miss it if I’m not in it for any length of time; I don’t feel comfortable. I want trees and I want frequent rain”.
Murray Morgan decided to get a Master’s degree in Journalism and in 1941 enrolled at Columbia University in New York City. Back East, jobs, at least journalism jobs, were scarce. He applied all over New York for one and got no response. Then Japan attacked the U.S. Naval Station in the Hawaiian Islands. The media outlets immediately expanded their news services and he got calls from most of them offering him a position.
Murray Morgan took full advantage of the offers. In a 1979 interview he recalled, “I worked at CBS [Radio] and edited the network news shows from midnight to 9 a.m., and then I’d report in at 9:30 at Time, and then I worked at the [New York] Herald Tribune on weekends covering the Columbia University campus". That left no time for college. Rosa solved that by going to his classes and taking notes. Murray would show up to take the tests. It finally all caught up with him:
“I finally ran out of sleep to the point where I called in a copyboy at Time and asked if I had paper in the typewriter. I said I could write if there was paper. They took me home in a taxi and I slept for two days, then quit two of the three jobs”.
By 1942, he managed to complete a Master's degree from Columbia University with honors. He was rewarded with a Pulitzer Fellowship to study the conditions of the press in Mexico. At Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico, Murray and Rosa rented a four-room house with an orchard, which included the services of a cook, all for $10 a month. They had been living there for a few months when Murray Morgan was drafted into the Army.
He joined the Army Signal Corps and was stationed on the Aleutian Islands. There was not much to do on an island in the far north Pacific Ocean. To pass the time, Murray wrote to his wife Rosa living on a Seattle houseboat for any books on the history of the Aleutians.
“She wrote back that none had been published. ‘Why don’t you write one?’ she said. And I responded that there was no way to do the research. We didn’t have libraries [in the Aleutians]. Rosa wrote, ‘I’ll do the research down here, send you the material, and you write it’”.Thus began their first of many collaborations.
Murray completed the manuscript while stationed on the Aleutians and sent it to the United States. He received word back that a section was missing. Upon investigation he found out that the Army censors excised a chapter that described a 200-year-old 1748 battle between Russia and the Aleuts. (During World War II, the Soviet Union including Russia was an ally of the United States.) The censors had thought that Murray Morgan was being “hostile to a friendly power”. Fortunately Murray had a carbon copy of the manuscript and reinserted the chapter when he returned to the United States.
Towards the end of World War II, Murray transferred to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. to do decoding. There was not much for him to decipher, so with his free time he and Rosa, who joined him, started researching the Civil War exploits of a Confederate sailing ship in the Pacific. This joint effort turned into the book Dixie Raider. Most of Murray's books were "joint projects" with Rosa. He described her as a first-rate researcher (like me), and a wonderful editor and critic. He said, "She has an ear for the exact word".
Murray Morgan's books did not keep his bread buttered. He explained that it was “those magazines that paid a lot of bills”. He wrote so many articles, that as early as 1947 he had lost count. He wrote articles like “Mexico’s Explosive Muralists” for Holiday and “Seward’s Annual Folly” for Esquire. Dozens of magazines, from Cosmopolitan to The Nation to the Saturday Evening Post kept the Morgans eating.
But slowly this source of income dried up. Murray called himself the “Typhoid Mary of journalism.” In 1978, he said,
“I’d guess I have written for at least 50 different magazines in the past 35 years and half of them folded. I did a two-parter for one magazine and it went belly up between issues".
In November 1951, on the 100th anniversary of the Denny party landing at Alki Point in West Seattle, bookstores started selling Morgan’s Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle. The idea for the book came from Viking editor Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989). Murray served as a tour guide for Cowley, who was visiting Seattle. The Viking editor, impressed with Murray’s stories of the city’s past, encouraged him to write a book about it. Skid Road became Murray Morgan’s most successful book. Sales estimates of hardback and paperback copies through 1999 approach one-quarter million.
About 1952, Murray entered radio. At the time, before television was well established, radio was the dominant medium and powerfully affected public opinion. In the early 1950s, doing business with the City of Tacoma typically involved graft and payoffs. There was a lot to report and comment on. Murray Morgan teamed up with Jim Faber and every morning on KMO and then on KTAC Radio, they did just that. As a news journalist who worked at the same station put it, "They furnished a wild and hilarious radio journalism ..." They played taped discussions between heads of Tacoma’s crime rings and City officials. They named names, exposed corruption. Motivated at least in part by the Morgan-Faber investigative reporting, city hall cleaned up its act.
In 1956, Murray Morgan went solo on KTNT with a news commentary show called “Our Town, Our World.” For the next 15 years, Morgan commented on local news every morning at 7:30. To keep his listeners informed, when in town, he attended nearly every Tacoma City Council meeting. For those few that he missed, Rosa Morgan usually covered for him. In 1970, his reports of the shenanigans in city hall led to a recall of a majority of the Tacoma City Council. Even though he expressed opinions that bankers probably did not share, Federal Savings & Loan Association sponsored “Our Town, Our World” for the entire run.
In 1957, he traveled to 22 countries to research the history and state of the United Nations World Health Organization. He wrote most of Doctors to the World in Geneva.
In 1963, Murray started writing a regular column in the Argus, a Seattle weekly periodical. He wrote theater and cultural reviews for more than 15 years.
In 1964, Murray Morgan was diagnosed with cancer and given a one in 20 chance of living a year. But then, a radical operation cured him.
In all Murray Morgan wrote 21 books. Murray Morgan died on June 22, 2000.
THE WISE MEN
May the Wise Men lead your heart, my dear,
Where the Christ is born anew ;
May Love's kingdom come,
And God's will be done,
In the depths of the soul of you.
The Spirit Singing
By Henry Victor Morgan, 1921
May the Wise Men lead your heart, my dear,
Where the Christ is born anew ;
May Love's kingdom come,
And God's will be done,
In the depths of the soul of you.
The Spirit Singing
By Henry Victor Morgan, 1921
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