| Graduation Year | Class of 1938 |
| Date of Passing | Oct 28, 2010 |
| About | Dear Bridgeport Alumni, On the evening of Thursday, October 28th., 2010, my dear father, George Ray Morrison, Jr., passed away. He was 90 years and two months old, to the day. George was a graduate of the Bridgeport High School Class of 1938. What an amazing 90 years he lived. When he was born, Woodrow Wilson was in the final months of his presidency. George had just turned 9 years old when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. He watched one day as Franklin Delano Roosevelt rode through Bridgeport on a train. He witnessed several enormous dust storms sweep over the town. He told me many stories about how tough it was. When he was a teenager he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps helping put out coal seam fires near Gillette, Wyoming. In the 1940's he attended Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, graduating with the Class of 1946. Then he voyaged to Alaska, and he had so many amazing things happen to him there that it would take a hundred pages to tell everything. Suffice it to say it was one adventure after another. In the mid 1950's he traveled to Europe where he met his future wife, Helene. They got married in Las Vegas in February of 1957. I was born just over a year later, and my sister, Rebecca, followed in 1962. We moved from California to Oregon to Washington State to Arizona--where George was a park ranger at Chiricahua National Monument--thence back up to Alaska, and finally he and Helene retired to Tucson, Arizona, where George became the Docent Emeritus at Reid Park Zoo where he volunteered for over a quarter century. When George attended Bridgeport High School in the mid to late 1930's, he was given an I.Q. test and found to have the highest I.Q. in western Nebraska. He used to joke that it was "faint praise" as there weren't too many smart people in that part of the country. His hobby was amateur astronomy, and he built a small telescope to look at the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, far-away nebulae and galaxies. Helene, Rebecca, and I were sad to see George go, but he lived well for 90 years, and we will always remember the good times. If any of his old classmates from the Class of 1938 still survive, please tell them that George has gone to a better place. Thank-you. Sincerely, Bill Morrison |
