The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  Marcella graduated from high school in St. Louis in 1922, two years after women won the right to vote and were getting out in the world in greater numbers than earlier generations had. At the turn of the century, only 19 percent of college students were women, but by 1928 it was up to 39 percent. Still not a huge number and definitely not everyone could go. My father’s mother, Billie, who was around the same age as Marcella, grew up in New York City and wasn’t poor but did not go to college. My mother’s mother, Pearl, who also grew up in New York City and was not only well off but also her parents’ little princess, did go to college. She told me that her mother gave her ten dollars and she took the train to Columbia University and enrolled. On the way home, she ran into her friend Norma, who said, “Why did you sign up at Columbia? Everyone knows all the cute boys are at New York University!” My grandma Pearl went home and cried to her mother about this bombshell news, and her mother wiped her tears, gave her another ten dollars, and told her to go down to New York University and enroll there. (Which she did and she met a very cute boy there, my grandpa Saul.)

  I knew that Marcella was working right out of high school, but I wondered if she might have gone to college at the same time. Given her intelligence, it was possible that she might have gotten a scholarship.

  I called Washington University and explained that I had a relative, Marcella Morris, who it seemed had been a student there sometime between 1922 and 1929, and wondered if there was some way to find her, even if she hadn’t graduated. The very nice woman I spoke to said they actually had phone books for all the students and she could search them for me. A day later she let me know that she had gone through all the phone listings for those years and there was no Marcella Morris, but she told me that the Washington University yearbooks (The Hatchet) were now digitized and I could access them. I thought it would be around 1923 or so, but I decided to go further back, to 1917, and work my way through to cover all the bases. The yearbooks were not searchable; you literally had to go through them page by page and read everything. But they had every student enrolled that year—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors—with their names and pictures as well as all of the schools (nursing, law, etc.). I looked through each page of The Hatchet from 1917 to 1929, and Marcella was nowhere to be found. I studied every club photo and class picture, and she was definitely not there. I imagined that as smart as she was, Marcella must have found it extremely painful not to have gone to college. Did she see herself as the female Abe Sachar who might have had similar success in academia if she’d had the same opportunities he’d had? They were both poor Jewish kids who grew up in Ward 23 in St. Louis. Abe was two years older than Marcella, so they might even have run in the same circles.

  Samuel Morris

  The other detail that struck me was the mention of Sam Morris, the sisters’ only brother. Almost no one in the family mentioned him, and certainly none of the biographical information gave more than a line that he existed. They were always referred to in my family as the Morris sisters. What about the Morris brother?

  Through my Morris sisters research, I learned that he was the oldest living child, born Israel Moritz in Râmnicu Sărat, Romania, on July 12, 1897. He emigrated with his family in 1902, and would have been fourteen when his mother was committed to the asylum in St. Louis, so he did not go into the orphanage. He received a draft card from the newly founded US Selective Service System in 1917, just at the end of World War I, when he was twenty-one years old, but did not serve in the military. In 1920, he was working both as a musician and an insurance broker in St. Louis. (So Claire was right that there was a musician in the family, but it was Sam, not Guerson.) When the Morris sisters moved to New York, Sam moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he met Esther Mary Pomerantz, the daughter of Polish immigrants. She went by Mary, and on July 28, 1927, her parents announced her engagement to Sam in the Houston Jewish Herald Voice. Mary was twenty-five and Sam was thirty-one. They were married on August 12, 1927, in Seguin, in Guadalupe County, Texas. In 1930, they lived in a small house in Seguin, where Sam owned a dry goods store and Mary sometimes worked as a saleslady. They had no children. On June 24, 1934, Mary was committed to the San Antonio State Hospital, which was formerly known as the Southwestern Insane Asylum. On February 17, 1935, at 4:35 p.m., Esther Mary Pomerantz Morris died at age thirty-two. The cause of death was listed as “Exhaustion Due to Insanity.” She is buried in the Congregation Agudas Achim Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas. Her headstone reads “esther mary, beloved daughter of louis and ida pomerantz, june 17, 1902–february 17, 1935.” And in Hebrew it says “rest in peace and let her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.”

  There is no mention of being a wife, or the last name Morris, or her husband Sam.

  I shed my share of tears during the researching of the Morris sisters’ lives, but the story of Sam caught me totally by surprise. To have both your wife and your mother suffer from mental illness and be committed to asylums where they died was a horrific, unbearably sad coincidence.

  In Judaism, the headstone isn’t laid on a person’s grave for a year because it’s believed the soul is judged during the eleven months after death. The headstone is a sign of completion. So for a full year—and beyond—Sam was grieving alone, and maybe even being blamed or blaming himself for Mary’s death.

  For the rest of his life he remained a widower and lived alone in San Antonio. When he filed for naturalization in January of 1956, Sam wrote Mary’s name on the form as his deceased wife, twenty-one years after her death. He worked as a men’s clothing salesman, rented his home, and must have saved every penny he made, as when he died he left most of his estate to Brandeis University. Though he never amassed a fortune to rival his sister Marcella’s, Sam used what he had to make life better for Jewish students at Brandeis, which he had chosen for its connection to Abram Sachar, and inspired his wealthy sister to do the same.

  In 1963, Sam planned to visit his sisters in New York for the first time ever. He died at the San Antonio airport before he boarded his flight.

  Eighteen

  FDR and NYC

  I had been thinking about hiring an assistant to help me research the Morris family for two reasons. The first was that I saw how useful it was in St. Louis to have another set of eyes looking for details and following leads, and the second was that I was about to publish my fifth book, and my brain can’t exist in two books at the same time. (I know there are writers who can do that easily; good for them.) I figured I would need someone who could look through documents, but I also wanted someone willing for us to do the research together, kind of like a genealogical Starsky and Hutch.

  Alison was a graduate student and had been the thesis advisee of my friend Meg. Meg had been using her as a research assistant, too, and said that she was qualified and delightful and, just as important, had some spare time.

  I contacted Alison and explained what I was doing, what I knew, and what I wasn’t sure I could find without her help. Alison was fascinated by the project and had some good research ideas. We decided to meet at the New York Public Library in the genealogy room and together we’d dig around in the city guides and see what we could find of the Morrises’ daily lives.

  The Manhattan telephone directories for the years the Morris sisters were in New York (from 1930 on) were on microfilm. Reader, do you know what microfilm is? If you’re young and grew up never being without a cell phone, the internet, or social media, you may not have ever used microfilm or even heard of it. Back when I was in school and we used our feet to propel our school bus and Dad ran a dinosaur in the quarry, we used microfilm in our liberry. The microfilm reader looks like an old black-and-white TV. (Or if that’s not a visual you’re familiar with, an old desktop computer. And if that’s not a visual you’re familiar with, then just stop it right now!) At a library you would request a certain reference book, and the librarian would hand you a box and inside was a roll of film. But it’s n
ot moving images, it’s microimages (“micro” was a word used to describe high-tech devices back in the twentieth century). You thread the film into the machine, not unlike how I used to load film into 35 mm cameras in college (which I didn’t do if I could help it even though I was a film major and it was a mandatory skill to learn).

  Everything I needed from the New York Public Library about the Manhattan phone directory was in those little boxes. Alison heroically fixed the machine every five minutes when it did something weird that I’m sure I had nothing to do with, and she took responsibility when we were talking too loud and another patron shushed us.

  We went through as many phone books as we could together, and Alison stayed to finish the job when I had to leave. What twenty man-hours of work got us were addresses. They were only for Malvina—Marcella and Selma lived with her, so they were not listed. And there were about twenty million Ruth Morrises. Even I wasn’t foolish enough to search through them.

  In 1930–31, Malvina was listed as living at 240 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. In 1931–33, she was listed at 130 West 116th Street, which is near Columbia University. I wondered if it was actually Sixteenth Street, because they’d always lived in Greenwich Village, not near Columbia. By 1934, she was back downtown at 29 Charles Street, where she remained for the next thirty-two years, until 1966. The Charles Street home was a West Village six-story apartment building on what was and still is an incredibly charming block. Their apartment was a third-floor walk-up and, as I’d later discover, Ruth’s was a brick town house nearby. This was when I first learned that all four of them didn’t always live together, as the family story went. In fact, Ruth didn’t live with them after the initial year.

  When I went to see the buildings for the first time, it dawned on me that the Morris sisters were in New York City for the 1929 stock market crash and throughout the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the Village was an artsy, bohemian haven. Cafés and pubs filled with musicians, actors, and artists lined the leafy cobblestone streets. When I was in high school in the 1980s, my friends and I loved to take the train into Manhattan, and we’d head to the Village to visit vintage record and punk rock stores. Many of those stores are still there. I deeply admired the Morris sisters’ choice of neighborhood.

  In 1966, Marcella and Malvina moved to a brand-new, full-amenity high-rise at 360 West Twenty-Second Street in Chelsea, the neighborhood north of Greenwich Village. Alison and I were confident it was them because the phone number was the same as that at the Charles Street address.

  The next day Alison and I went back to the library, and I read through books on women in finance while Alison courageously went through dozens of financial reports for J. P. Morgan, Bache, and Dean Witter, and The Association of Stock Exchange Firms Annual Directory and Guide, The National Federation of Financial Analysts’ Societies, and New York Society of Security Analysts, Inc., all with the goal of finding any reference to Marcella Morris.

  There were no mentions of Marcella Morris in any of them.

  I started to realize that it was entirely possible that I would not find anything anywhere about Marcella, though Alison and I agreed that it was highly unlikely the story of her visit to the White House was completely fabricated, and after looking at every possible White House document online, we decided our next stop was the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York.

  * * *

  • • •

  The library was a couple of hours’ drive north of Manhattan, and as we drove up there on a perfect late summer day, Alison and I talked about the fact that, growing up, she had lived on two of the same blocks as the Morris sisters, and we decided she had been destined to be part of this project.

  We got to Hyde Park and went directly to the presidential library. No appointment was needed, but there were scheduled times that you could order materials. Because it’s an archive of important original documents and artifacts all relating to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we had to follow a strict procedure. Our bags with everything in them had to be stored in a locker, though we were allowed to hold on to our cell phones. We were given pencils and pink sheets of legal paper to take notes on, which was all that we were able to bring into the library.

  We told the librarian that we were looking for information on Marcella Morris, who had visited President Roosevelt in the White House, and we understood that she had spoken to FDR about winter corn and pork bellies, which were needed to feed the armed forces. (Pork bellies are exactly what they sound like, a cut of pork from the belly of the pig.) The librarian explained there were several files on agricultural meetings, and there was even a notebook where a White House guard had documented every person who came to see the president during his administration. We were allowed to get our first request of files immediately, but after that we had to order them at specific times. The library staff members would bring you a cart with the files, and you were instructed to use only one file at a time.

  When the files arrived, the librarian showed us how to open and turn the pages so that we wouldn’t damage these original documents. Inside the file folders, which were a very hard cardboard, were original copies of typed notes that were taken during every moment of Roosevelt’s official business during his presidency. Alison and I sat at individual tables with one file at a time. It was extraordinary to look at not only the care and detail that had been put into the notes, but also the integrity of Roosevelt. His responses to whoever wrote to him were thoughtful and caring. One entry was “Thursday, February 12, 1942 Mr. Littlejohn—Farm Sec, Mr. Brunger—Re letter of use for his son, Miss Rebecca Rose-C.E.C.C. (home phone # 1199).” And “Wednesday September 10, 1941—Myrtle Sherrie told her her problems.” And on and on. Some had physical descriptions (short man with glasses).

  Going through the ledger page by page was a slow, tedious process, and it wasn’t long before I was convinced we weren’t going to find any information about Marcella. Still, it was impossible not to be impressed by reading documents that outlined Roosevelt’s solutions to problems. In one file United States agricultural officials told him that there was a national shortage of eggs, and his reply was to reduce the price of chicken feed. In another letter he admonished someone for saying publicly that the war would end early because he needed factory production to keep running at a high level. And the same person also mentioned “a lot of loose talk about meat famine and a meat shortage for the coming winter.” He responded to letters about victory gardens, and on September 11, 1944, he wrote to send food to the concentration camps in Poland.

  The food production plan for 1944 said, “Our food plans for the future are, of course, predicated on the assumption that we must not only continue our shipments overseas but actually increase them. The war is by no means won, and the global effort must be continued and accelerated. The requirements for our armed forces will be increased, not only will they have a larger number of men and women than in 1943, but because more of them will be stationed in distant parts of the world. The average soldier or sailor eats approximately five and one quarter pounds of food per day—almost half as much again as the average civilian who eats only three and three quarters pounds per day.”

  I read executive orders, lists of food production, and letters from farmers pleading for help, which Roosevelt gave them. But I came across nothing about Marcella. Nor did Alison. After several hours of research, we admitted defeat and headed back to New York City. We decided that we could always return if we needed to.

  On the drive back to New York, Alison and I talked through what we found and together we realized we weren’t likely to find this piece of information at the FDR library. The conclusion was discouraging—I thought this lead had been so promising. Could it have been Harry Truman, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Marcella had met with? But as Truman’s library was in Independence, Missouri, I decided to let it go. One research trip to Missouri per book was all I could hand
le.

  The more I thought about the absence of Marcella from just about every public detail of her life, the more the feeling grew that it had been intentional on her part. Like the phone number being listed under Malvina’s name. I also worried that my not being a trained genealogist or historian or even an experienced researcher was the reason I couldn’t seem to find anything. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even if she had been mentioned in some obscure financial document tucked away in a company archive or presidential library, she still wasn’t mentioned in any newspaper article during her entire life or in any place that a layperson would have found her. And that in itself seemed significant.

  Several days later, I saw that an event was being held at the New-York Historical Society library—an introduction to the library’s genealogical resources by its librarian and then a presentation from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This, I thought, could be a way for me to learn how to become an expert researcher—or at least a better one.

  I signed up, and when the day came I showed up at the New-York Historical Society headquarters, on Seventy-Seventh Street and Central Park West. When I arrived, I realized I was the youngest attendee by about forty years. I felt a spring in my middle-aged step.