Meeting Hugh Morrison

It was late on a Friday night and I was the last one in the building. Oops, I looked at my calendar and saw I had RSVP’d for an Alumni event across the street from my building. I was buried in work. Just could not go.

Then I thought, “My name badge will be sitting on the welcome desk: a no-show.” The alumni event was in the Horowitz Theatre, right across the street from my building. So I thought, “OK, I will go for five minutes and then get right back to the office.”

The Horowitz Theatre was packed, and I almost left. Then I noticed an elderly man, alone, who was bristling with energy. I thought, “Hmm, this will be the one person I’ll meet.”

That man was Hugh Morrison. He was a Rhodes Scholar who graduated in 1930. Hugh started to tell me about life on campus in the 1920s. Story after story! I was enthralled – but I also felt cheated that for all the years I had been on campus getting my BA and MA, I hadn’t known anything about the life lived in the buildings I passed by every day. I was hooked.

Meeting Morrison made me look at campus not just as a physical place, but as a place where people lived their daily lives.

Hugh and Ellen checking out his yearbook. Hugh’s stories were so engaging that day at the Faculty Club! People kept coming over to say, “Hi Ellen, and who is your guest?”