The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  One of the other attendees, a tall, gray-haired man in a tie, sweater vest, and sports jacket, told me that he was writing a family history for his children and grandchildren and that his family’s lineage went back to New York in the 1600s. He looked pleased and confident about what he knew of his ancestors and his family’s past. I told him he was lucky his task was so easy; mine was a challenge. Much more complex!

  The presentation began, and the two dozen or so other attendees and I spent a couple of fascinating hours looking at the collection of materials that the New-York Historical Society had. There were maps from the 1700s showing almost nothing north of Fourteenth Street and a book that chronicled the street names in New York and what they had been changed to over 350 years. There was a logbook from the 1700s that recorded all of the African American babies that had been born, each mother’s name, and chillingly, each mother’s “owner’s” name. There was also a large collection of letters from the New York Foundling Hospital, an orphanage created in 1869 by the Sisters of Charity for Catholic Orphans. Mothers had left these letters to explain the circumstances that had led them to the desperate act of leaving their babies. They were heartbreaking; some mothers knew their babies were dying and that they couldn’t afford to bury them. (One letter said, “Don’t be afraid of the sores on her face, it’s only ringworm.”) Others said that they had tried to find work but no one would hire them with the baby. Many said they hoped to come back for their children when life got better. Just the way the Morrises’ father had likely hoped.

  I realized that if the Morris sisters had lived in New York in the 1750s or the 1850s, I’d have much better luck with the resources of the New-York Historical Society. They just had so much research material that reached further back than more recent history, and in terms of genealogy, it’s better if you are dead for longer, because more material is made public.

  After the presentation, I introduced myself to the genealogist who’d given the talk and told her that I was looking for information about women who had died in 1978 and the 1990s. She knew exactly what I was talking about: with the rule that someone has to be dead for seventy-two years for the census records to be made public or for fifty years for vital records such as death transcripts to be available per the Freedom of Information Act, and there was no way around it unless I was the parent, child, or sibling of the person I was searching for. The genealogist questioned me about my research, and I explained what I’d done and was both happy and dispirited to hear that she agreed I had uncovered all the tracks that I could. There were no secret doors that I hadn’t unlocked.

  Then she said something that I really liked: “With genealogy, you rarely get proof, but you often get evidence.” I had a lot of evidence.

  She also said how important it was to look at the backs of photos. You never know what you’ll find written on them, and that I should also write details (names, dates, locations) on the backs of my own photos for future generations. It reminded me of a picture my parents had of my grandmother as a young flapper in the 1920s, sitting on a fire escape in New York City. On the back she or someone else had written, “40 E 40th St. 1922,” and it was captioned “The Human Fly.” It also reminded me of the boxes of photos I have collected over the last thirty years that have nothing written on the backs of them. Except for my immediate family, I have no idea who many of the other people in the pictures are. I vowed to get help from people I know to identify and mark the photos up. There is nothing more confusing than finding a batch of photos of people and one rando in them you don’t know and can’t tie to the group.

  At the end of the workshop, the genealogist handed us a list of websites—all of which I’d already visited—but she said sometimes it pays to look again. She also mentioned that when you get five thousand hits (possible answers) on whatever genealogy site, it’s the site’s algorithm that gives you the top hits it has chosen, so it is worth spending time looking at what the site may not have picked up on.

  Equipped with this information and with more hope than when I’d arrived, I went home and started looking again at some of the sites I’d visited before. I put in Marcella’s name. All the dates and places auto-filled, and the usual documents—census, travel manifests, etc.—appeared and this time I clicked on “Social Security Application and Claim Index.” As I read it over, there was a small checkbox, which I had never noticed before, to request a copy of the original application. I clicked on it and was taken to the Social Security Administration website. The top of the page said “Electronic Freedom of Information Act Request for Deceased Individual’s Social Security Record.” I hadn’t known I could do this, and I ordered records for Marcella and then for Selma, Malvina, and Ruth, filling in their names, dates of births, places of birth, parents’ names, and of course each’s Social Security number. Each record was twenty-five dollars for a photocopy or twenty-two dollars for a “computer extract.” I chose the photocopy. It seemed like a steal.

  While I waited the two to three weeks for the records to come, I returned to my research of women in finance in the first half of the twentieth century. Years ago I had read a great biography of Victoria Woodhull, who with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, were the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street, in the 1870s. Victoria Woodhull was also a radical female suffragette, a newspaper editor, and the first woman to run for president. The sisters were also very involved in the spiritualist movement. In the 1860s, Tennessee became the spiritual adviser to Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famed railroad tycoon, and rumors abounded that they were lovers. In 1870, Vanderbilt backed the opening of Woodhull, Claflin and Company Brokerage House. All the papers wrote about the scandalousness of petticoats among the bulls and bears. The New York Times headline was “Wall Street Aroused”—I’m not making this up—while Harper’s Weekly called them “bewitching brokers.” People clamored to get a glimpse of these women traders. (I love the idea of someone thinking, “What should I do today? I know, I’ll go look at women stockbrokers!”) It was said that Cornelius Vanderbilt gave the women stock tips that earned them the equivalent of $13 million in today’s dollars. It should also be said that Woodhull and Claflin tapped into an underrepresented group of investors—wealthy women. Widows, society ladies, and even prostitutes all came to them not in spite of but because they were women. Late in the nineteenth century, a small number of financial institutions in the United States opened “women’s departments” for women to do their business—manned by men, of course.

  To no one’s surprise, the walls of Wall Street were not moved by Woodhull’s success: In the 1920s, there were still very few women on Wall Street and they were almost all in menial clerical jobs. Sylvia Porter, the renowned financial journalist, wrote an advice column in the New York Post beginning in 1934, but her gender was disguised behind the byline S. F. Porter until 1942, when the paper’s editors decided her gender wasn’t a hindrance and might actually be an asset.

  During World War II, many women were recruited to fill the jobs of men in the armed forces in manufacturing, medicine, and education, but Wall Street still didn’t believe women were up to buying, selling, and trading stocks, futures, and whatever else was for sale in the US financial markets. Post–World War II, there were only small numbers of women on Wall Street and they were still doing mostly clerical work. By the 1950s and ’60s, a few women were able to break into some research positions. In 1967, Muriel “Mickie” Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. It wasn’t easy to do even then. She had to have two sponsors in order to buy her seat, and nine men she approached turned her down before she was able to find the required two.

  Almost every book and article I read about women in finance mentioned how many of the women who were able to break into the trading side deemed it prudent to keep a very low profile, not overproducing or getting a lot of attention or ruffling any feathers. This to me seemed the most likely explanation for the absence of Marcella’s name from t
he histories of the women on Wall Street. My family thought so, too: If Marcella was doing as well as she appeared to be, there was no benefit for her to call attention to herself. I kept saying that, but I still really wanted to find more.

  The last place on my list to visit was the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, New York. I knew the Morris sisters had donated to the library because there was a Morris Meeting Room. I hadn’t been in contact with the library since I’d gotten the initial (mostly incorrect) biographical material. But after all of the research I’d done, I figured that there might be some information that someone there could provide about how the library came to get the sisters’ donation.

  My friend Lauren is a librarian in Long Island, and she recommended that I email Beth Gates, a librarian at Rogers Memorial. (The person I had previously contacted was no longer there.) About the Morris sisters, she said in an email, “Our meeting room is indeed called the Morris Meeting Room, and our Reference area is also named the Morris Information and Reference Center (see attached image of the plaque). I would be happy to dig around and let you know what I can find, and if you let me know when you are visiting I will gather materials for you.”

  She also asked me for the Morris sisters’ address in Southampton, to see if there was any estate information. A few days later, Beth emailed me to say the sisters must have lived frugally because they weren’t listed in any estate guides and that none of their obituaries appeared in The Southampton Press, the town newspaper. “Strange, if they lived here for 30+ years that they wouldn’t have an obit in the local paper.”

  I told her that I had come across this issue again and again. The Morris sisters seemed to be very good at flying under the radar, alive and dead.

  Beth said she found the files from their donation and I was free to look through them whenever I could get out there. She also suggested that a good place to find information on past residents was the Southampton History Museum, and that I should speak to Mary Cummings.

  I called my aunt Mattie, who has a car and a house in Montauk, not far from Southampton, and asked if she wanted to go with me (that is, drive me out there, take me to dinner, and let me sleep at her house). She said she would be delighted, so we planned to travel the following week. In the meantime, I emailed Mary Cummings at the Southampton History Museum and asked her if she had any records of the Morris sisters. She looked through the museum’s collections and archives and found nothing. (Surprise!) She suggested that I contact the town historian, Zach Studenroth. I had a pleasant back-and-forth with him, and he asked me if my “ladies were with the Morris Studio, a local photo shop in business since the 1890s?” Unfortunately, my ladies weren’t. He had a few other Morrises who weren’t them, and then suggested I contact Mary Cummings at the Southampton History Museum. (And scene!) I had come full circle.

  Mattie and I left New York in the morning and arrived in Southampton around noon. Mattie dropped me at the Rogers Memorial Library and went to look at patio furniture.

  A smiling young woman with light brown hair and glasses, Beth Gates, greeted me and showed me the Morris Meeting Room. It was a large conference room with a long table, with “Morris Meeting Room” displayed on one wall in very large gold letters. I wondered if the library would let me rewrite the biography on the wall.

  Beth took me to the reference room where there were a table and chairs, and brought me the files she had found. The first item I came across was a letter from April 10, 1995 (Malvina died in January of 1994, so it would have been just Marcella who was still alive), from the Morrises’ lawyer (now long gone) that said, “I have a client that is interested in making a substantial contribution to your library. Please have a representative of the library contact me and arrange for a conference. Your prompt response is imperative.”

  It seemed that at the time the library was being rebuilt, the Morrises wanted to donate to help defray some of the costs. In the file were a few pages of handwritten notes from Marcella’s lawyer requesting that the new conference room be named “The Morris Meeting Room” and the new reference area would be “The Morris Information and Reference Center.” Another memo discussed the Morris sisters’ financial distribution to the library, which turned out to be three trusts, each in the amount of $100,000. There were faxes back and forth between lawyers from the library and the bank and the Morrises, and on one of the faxes, someone had written, “Renaming the conference room??? This seems like a lot of attribution for $210,000!!!!!”

  I felt like someone slapped me in the face. In the years that I’d been researching the Morrises, I had begun to feel as if I was their guardian, a protector of their story and legacy. I wanted to find this jerk of a lawyer and ask him how much he had donated to the Southampton library, and then while he was trying to answer, I would knee him in the groin for all those extra exclamation points. His arrogance and high-handedness were beyond annoying.

  I read a few more pages of faxes and decided that he was an outlier—a rogue attorney with an attitude. Everyone else—to my relief—was extremely polite and grateful for the Morris sisters’ donation.

  One of the pages of paperwork said that Robert Berkowitz would take care of the necessary tax documents and that he would need to approve the donation. There was a paragraph that read, “Interests of the family were education and information. For example they established scholarships for gifted children to attend college. They have helped libraries in other places. They are particularly interested in children.”

  Elsewhere in the file was a written proposal of what the Morris sisters wanted to donate and what the money would be used for, which the Southampton library rejected. It seemed that the library wanted to move toward digitization and it needed more money than the Morris sisters wanted to donate. Nine months later there was another proposal from the sisters that offered to donate another hundred thousand dollars, which the library board approved.

  The second donation proposal was for the naming of the conference room and dedicating the handicapped lift in the Children’s Library to the memory of Malvina Morris. It said, “This will give access to the mezzanine level in the Children’s Library for children in wheelchairs or those who are otherwise unable to climb stairs. The lift meets all the building codes and requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act.”

  After Malvina died in January 1994, Marcella must have been thinking of the best way to memorialize her beloved sister and had come up with this tribute. Within the family, it was said that Malvina and Marcella were the sisters who were closest. And everyone told me how sweet Malvina was. When I saw her name by the handicapped chairlift—a small plaque just above the elevator call button—I was startled to find a lump in my throat. This lift was here because of one sister’s love for another, which prompted me to recall a story from Claire.

  “I remember when Malvina had cancer of the throat. I went to Southampton to pick up Marcella so we could go to the hospital in Manhattan to visit Malvina and then she would stay overnight with us. You could see that Marcella just could not function without Malvina. They had a very nice home attendant, but it wasn’t like her sister. You know when someone elderly loses a spouse? So first, she puts a few dirty schmattas [clothes] into a cardboard valise. I decided to take her back to my house so I could wash her clothes and have her shave her hairy chin and upper lip and take a shower, so she could look good for her sister and the doctor.

  “When we got to the hospital we met with the doctor first alone. He wanted to operate and take out Malvina’s voice box, but I was not going to let that happen. Marcella was very anxious, so I didn’t say anything. We then went to visit Malvina. She’s in her room and they had put a hole in her voice box to aspirate it. I looked at her and there is this lit cigarette dangling out of the hole. I then said to myself, no surgery. She lived ten more years.”

  * * *

  • • •

  After I left the library, Mattie and I decided to drive to
the Gin Lane address where the sisters had lived starting in the 1970s. As we did, we talked about the time in the 1990s when we drove to the house that Mattie, my mother, and their sisters grew up in on Tyndall Avenue in Riverdale, a swanky part of the Bronx. When we got to the house, Mattie wanted to see inside but she was too scared to knock on the door, so I said we would go together. We walked up the front stairs and I rang the bell, and then I turned and watched as Mattie ran back to the car. I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say when the resident, an old Italian woman who didn’t really speak English, answered the door. I explained what we were there for, and the woman agreed to let us see the house. Mattie came back and we had our tour. It was just as Mattie remembered it, smaller than I imagined but pretty and homey. As we stood in the sun porch, I punched Mattie in the shoulder.

  I thought a lot about Mattie and my mother and their other two sisters and how close they were, though they never lived together and all very much had their own lives. I’ve always thought that there is definitely some magic about four sisters. Maybe I’ve read Little Women too many times.

  The Morrises’ Southampton house had been torn down long ago, but according to my cousin David Green, it was nothing special. (He is the son of Ruth, Bobby and Claire’s sister.) David said when he was a kid and his family would visit the Morris sisters, the house would be thick with cigarette smoke. He said everything was sepia toned because decades of cigarette smoke—all of the sisters smoked, David told me—had stained the furniture and the walls. He remembered that the house felt dark and there was no sense that you were near the ocean, even though the beach was within walking distance. When he was in college, David took a summer trip with friends to the Hamptons. He said that he called Marcella and asked if he could come and see her, and she said, “Sure, you want to show off your rich relatives?” He said the remark made him so angry he almost didn’t go. The Morris sisters were many things, but no one used them to show off.