The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  Sam, the oldest and only male child in their family, left the orphanage first. He was sixteen and because of hard times the Orphanage expected residents to leave at that age, get an appropriate job and pay them back the sum of $250. That was what they figured was fair for past services rendered. He headed for Texas and got a job in an Army surplus store in San Antonio. Eventually, he bought the store and spent his life living in the back room, single, keeping to himself, but always inquiring by way of a letter to his sisters asking, “What did you find out about our Papa?”

  The orphanage placed Malvina with a local family in St. Louis because they claimed they could not provide care for a lame child. This stressed her sisters more than they could cope with.

  Marcella had gotten a reputation of being very smart, she was barely thirteen years old, but she convinced the authorities at the orphanage to release her to go find a job, one that would pay enough money so she could pay the $250 due for each child. They expected to be paid, but as it turned out, payment was rarely forthcoming. The orphanage said, strangely, they believed her and agreed to let her go.

  Marcella went to Cleveland where she got a filing job with J.P. Morgan and Company. The manager of that office soon learned he had a file clerk who read everything she filed and remembered every important fact on the filed sheets. She was remembered as the resource with a wealth of information no one else had. She was eventually transferred to their New York office where she became one of the most successful traders they ever had. Her specialty was pork bellies and winter corn. She was the only female trader then and for thirty years later. Her knowledge of pork bellies was world famous; in fact during World War II she was summoned to the White House, pork was then a diet staple for the armed forces and the then President Roosevelt wanted to be sure he knew where the world’s supply was accounted for.

  Marcella earned a fortune of money, lived together with her three sisters, first in an apartment on Charles Street, Manhattan, then for thirty or so years in Southampton. They lived modestly; their dealings were mostly with women, gave away huge amounts of money mostly to charities dealing with women. There is the theory of male betrayal that was suspected to have a role in all of their decision making, even though it was never proved. Many times when they were asked why they never married, they made it clear they would never trust another man. Marcella earned all the family wealth; her plan was to take care of her sisters and time it so that when the last one died, all the wealth would be given away. She almost made it.

  They are all deceased now. Ruth was 86, Selma was 102, Malvina with the lame leg hopped around for 96 years, and Marcella, the last one to die just short of 97, stayed around just long enough to survive her sisters and finalize her affairs.

  They had a long life, not always happy, but always their way. They were big time cigarette smokers, maybe three packs every day of their lives; ate all the wrong foods, only foods that were tasty to them: good health was never a consideration. They were well enough in mind and body so that until their last days on earth they could carry out their daily activities. They were survivors, they had a lot of hurt, but they carried on and gave a lot back to help others who never knew who the Morrises were, but it didn’t matter to them because that was their way.

  Though it wasn’t the smoothest biography I ever read, there was a lot of information.

  I called Claire and read it to her.

  “Well, that’s very nice,” she said, “but it’s fiction.”

  “Which part?” I asked. I was not ready to give up on this.

  “Well, some of it is right. But what I know was that the Morrises landed on Ellis Island with the plan to go to St. Louis, because their father was a concert violinist and he was going to play with the symphony there.”

  This was news—new news, in fact. Had the Morris sisters’ father been a violinist or a photographer? How could I find out?

  It was clear that I needed to divide the verifiable truth from the family fiction. It was also clear that I needed to approach this question more methodically than I had to this point.

  Four

  Step One: Index Cards

  To start my journey toward greater clarity, I bought two different multicolored packs of index cards, and on the coffee table in the living room, I separated them into colors. Each color, I decided, would be assigned to a family member, and the leftover colors would be for the places they lived.

  After making this determination, which felt like a significant accomplishment, I stared at the index cards for a couple of weeks without writing anything on them. Everyone in my family kept knocking them off the table, so I frequently had to re-collate.

  I am telling you this because I really had no idea where to begin.

  I am a great researcher of one question at a time. If you want me to find out which window air conditioner is the best one for you to buy or what mallard ducks eat in the wild, I am on it—and I always come up with the answer. But the journey to understanding the Morris sisters and their lives traveled over a vast sea of questions, and I knew I couldn’t cross it without help. I knew I needed assistance.

  Putting someone’s, let alone four someones’, life story together is daunting. And I was fairly sure that there were tricks and tips and methods that I was not at all familiar with. When my child had to research our family for a school project, I subscribed to Ancestry .com, and we were able to find little bits of information about my and my ex-husband’s grandparents, but as we only signed up for the free trial, we didn’t go very far with it. When I got interested in the Morris sisters, I remembered that poking around on the site was kind of revelatory, so I paid for a new Ancestry.com membership and began to look around. There were specific tips about widening your search parameters to include more years than you might think to look at and more interpretations of how to spell the names you were trying to track down. One of Ancestry’s services in particular caught my eye: Hire an Expert. It seemed like a good idea to hire someone who could find all of the elements faster and more completely than you ever could. But I wasn’t ready for that yet, partly because I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for and partly because I knew that sometimes you found information you didn’t expect to discover when you looked yourself. There were times when I was looking for a needle in a haystack and instead found a key.

  I started at the beginning and entered each sister’s name and approximate date of birth and various spellings. I got a lot of hits, but nothing that seemed associated with them. I kept thinking that if I were a character in a movie and I’d put in the search terms, a newspaper from 1905 would spin into focus with the headline “Mother Dies in Childbirth, Father Forced to Place Children in Orphanage,” and then a big story would appear, filling in all of the details—accurately this time—and I’d know everything, maybe with a nice Movietone News narration. But life is not a movie—at least mine isn’t—which is why no one pays to watch me.

  It was at this point that I remembered I’d once printed out some papers about the Morrises when I was on a field trip to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration with my child’s third-grade class. I love it there. I am not a museum person. If you ever want to go to a museum, you don’t want to go with me. I zoom through, because the air in there makes me feel like I’m going to pass out, and my feet get very heavy, and if I’m carrying my coat, don’t ask me anything. Anything. But the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration is more of an experience. We went through the doors as if we were immigrants getting off a ship, and we visited the stations they went through (all in a fraction of the time it took actual immigrants and without the confusion and overwhelming fear of being sent back to our home country, but otherwise just like them). I have been there several times since and I have never failed to be moved by the immigrants’ stories. These people left what they knew—life in a big city or a tiny village, having saved for months or even years—got on a train (or sometimes walked
) to a ship that would bring them across an ocean to a place they had only heard about, having no idea what lay ahead. All they had was hope. I needed months of extra therapy to get me through my move from 100th to 106th Street.

  While on the field trip as a chaperone, I had searched the Ellis Island database for the Morrises. After looking through various files, I finally found the manifest of the ship they had traveled on, but only three of the children were listed. It stated that on September 12, 1902, Israel, Malvina, and Marcel (this would have been written incorrectly by someone from the shipping company before the Morrises boarded the SS Kensington) traveled from Southampton, England, to Ellis Island, New York City, and that they had originally come from Romania. They traveled third class (steerage).

  But where were the parents and Selma? This was a question I couldn’t answer then, as at that moment it was my job to make sure twenty-seven third graders weren’t leaping into New York Harbor. So I printed the page of information about the Morris family (Ellis Island allows you to do that) and tucked it away. It was clear that the Morrises didn’t land in Canada as the family story went. Maybe they went to Montreal after, but they had arrived through Ellis Island in New York City from England and before that, apparently, Romania.

  When you are at Ellis Island now, you hear story after story about conditions aboard ships: They were often filthy, cold, damp, and dark. People were sick and half-starved and jammed together like animals. It made perfect sense to me that under these conditions, Clara would have contracted tuberculosis.

  I decided that I needed to track down Clara’s death certificate and see what I could learn from it. As I began my search, I ran into the problem I had frequently had with researching this book: determining what was true and who was who. Clara Morris is not exactly an exotic name. In my searches I came across a great many Clara Morrises, including a beautiful actress born in 1849 in Canada (of all places). But the one Clara Morris I was looking for would have died around the time Ruth was born, which was 1904. (In the family biography Ruth was listed as being born in 1905, but since she was born in the United States, I was able to find a copy of her birth certificate, which was actually one line of a full registry. Her name was printed in a ledger of babies who were born in February 1904 in St. Louis.) There definitely were no Clara Morrises that fit her description who died in St. Louis in 1904 or 1905. In fact, the only Clara Morris I found who seemed as if it could be her died in St. Louis in 1953. (I had a long labor, but forty-nine years?) Something wasn’t adding up.

  After I found Ruth’s birth certificate, I started studying census records to see whom she might have lived with. Every ten years, the federal government conducts a national census of all US citizens. And seventy-two years later the government releases detailed information about what it learned. In the 1910 and 1920 censuses, the Morrises were listed, while Clara was listed with them in 1910 but not 1920, so it seemed logical that she had died somewhere between those ten years. In other words, not in childbirth with Ruth and not from tuberculosis on the SS Kensington.

  Marcella Morris’s yearbook, 1921

  Armed with this information, I went back to Ancestry and started to dig.

  The first unquestionably accurate details I came across were Marcella’s and Ruth’s yearbook pages, both from 1921. I put on a Ruth Etting album and started reading.

  Marcella Morris went to Soldan High School in St. Louis, a public school that at the time was known for having wealthy and predominantly Jewish students. Her senior photo is on the bottom middle of a page among six other students who look like flappers, very chic and put together with lipstick and pearls. In contrast, Marcella had natural, frizzy hair and wore round metal eyeglasses. In the photo her lips are pressed together, and she looks as if the photographer was trying to get her to smile, but she was having none of it.

  I remembered that my grandmother once said that girls growing up in the early twentieth century used curling irons that were heated with coals (and could either straighten your hair or singe it right off depending on how much attention was paid). Maybe Marcella chose to have her natural curly hair, but I couldn’t help feeling that the picture showed there wasn’t a mother in her life to help get her ready for her school picture.

  The captions under the photos were also revealing. Marcella Morris is between Norman Evans, whose quote is “Those gentle eyes! That Marcel Wave!” (even he used a curling iron), and William Bierman, who went with “His hair is of a good color, An excellent color.” Marcella’s quote was “Thoughts of great deeds are mine.” The boys focused on hair, Marcella on ambition.

  Elsewhere in The Scrip, the Soldan yearbook, I found a page called “The Line-Up,” which listed each student’s name, favorite saying, hobby, hangout, and greatest desire. Marcella’s favorite saying was “Well, listen here!” Below her, Myra Latta’s favorite saying was “Oh, giggle,” while Jane Newman liked to say, “That’s the cutest thing I ever saw!” Marcella’s hobbies were “arguing.” Other students’ hobbies included “wearing short sleeves” and “chewing gum” and “talking baby talk.” The greatest desires from her classmates were “to jump rope,” “to be married,” “to be attractive,” “to vamp the boys.” Marcella’s greatest desire? “To ride in an aeroplane.” It was clear that she was unique.

  In contrast to her sister, Ruth went to Central High School, a large public school in St. Louis. She also stood out on her page of the 1921–1922 Red and Black with the quote under her senior photo: “Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought.” Take that, Joseph Reeves, a fellow student who was super psyched to be “as true as steel, a friend indeed.” Ruth also had written a short story that was published in her yearbook. It was called “Halfway to Heaven,” and it was about a little girl who loved the sunset. Whenever she was playing, she would stop at the sight of a sunset.

  Ruth Morris’s yearbook, 1922

  She loved the colors . . . the yellows and mauves and pinks and violets that glowed for a space in pastel loveliness; she loved the images she could make out in the clouds in the sunset. For she saw in it wonderful sights—Carthage on her golden river, houses and castles all purple, with orange spires; Fujiyama’s great purple bulk with flashing golden-white summit rising from a shimmering sea of gold and orange; the flaming Amazon flowing through purple tropical forests through which brilliant crimson-plumaged birds darted; all this and more she saw in the sunset, and she loved—loved till her inner most being ached from surfeit of loving.

  The girl in the story lived across the street from an “old, old-fashioned building that the Board of Education was always meaning to tear down but never did.” The building had not many windows but a huge tower rising three or four stories into the air, and the child imagined that if she could see such beautiful sunsets from the ground, imagine what she could see from a tower that “reaches halfway to heaven.” The little girl plots and plans, and one day when no one is around, she slips into the unlocked school and begins her ascent to the “huge, gloomy garret” with “deep, impenetrable shadows in the corners.” And though she was afraid, she kept on going. Up flights of steps to rickety ladders she climbed, remembering how a very daring boy had tried to climb up to the top of the tower but came back, his face pale because the ladders and floors were rotted out and they wouldn’t hold his weight. Although the little girl was very afraid, she kept going up, and “what waited for her at the top gave her courage.” More climbing, more floors, more rickety ladders, and finally she reached the last one. “With courage that many men might envy, she climbed up and it was underneath a trap door.” The little girl confidently put her hand on the latch but the trapdoor wouldn’t open. She whimpered and looked down and could see nothing but darkness. She felt dizzy and faint and “for very weakness, she almost let go.” Then one of her little hands found a latch and creakily but easily the door slid open, and she climbed up and stood on the tiny platform that was the
highest in the city. Then she lifted her eyes above her.

  From a Vesuvius, all smoldering red and gray, as large as one third of the universe, rose the shape of an angel, and it filled the remainder of the universe. A mighty, magnificent woman-shape, purple, with burnished outspread wings, and golden rays crowning the head. Great, protecting arms were stretched down to the little girl and a face, in shadow with features scarcely discernible, yet holding the mother-look was bent over the child. And the child stood, motionless and adoring, staring at the divine figure.

  If you had been watching from below, you could have seen, at the very top of that tower, a tiny black speck against the colors of the sunset sky, a speck that was a human child silhouette, lifeless as a statue, with head thrown back and arms raised to heaven.

  And the child said, “Because I have come such a long and difficult way, God has let me see one of His visions”; and she stood thus, until the figure melted into the gray of twilight and the twilight into the darkness and the stars came out. Then she dropped her hands to her side and climbed down from the little platform. Then she went down all those ladders though all was black and only by feeling could she find her way. And though at the bottom of each ladder her foot waved in a black void that might be all eternity before it found a place to rest, she yet was not afraid, because in the sky above her, unseen in the night, was still that mother-angel that watched over her. She made her way down to the garret floor, and then she walked down the long stairs, and out into the early evening street where the lights were lit. And she never told anyone of her ascent halfway to heaven, until now.