Westend man nears 100 years

Ken Morrison is going to be 100 soon, but he’s not one to make a fuss about it.

“It’s kind of strange,” he said.

It’s not something he’s spent a lot of time thinking about and his family isn’t particularly long-lived. Morrison said, “One day is pretty much like another.”

There’s a pack of playing cards crisscrossed with rubber bands on Morrison’s dining table by the deck overlooking Deep River. That’s where Morrison was sitting when a bear walked by one day, “and he wasn’t in much of a hurry,” Morrison said, giving a glimmer of a smile.

Morrison’s brother, Earl lived along Deep River and convinced Morrison and his wife, Marie, to move to Wahkiakum County from Happy Valley south of Portland when he retired in 1973. Marie Morrison died of colon cancer in 1977, and Morrison has never remarried.

“Mom was the assertive, outgoing one,” Morrison’s daughter, Kathy, said. “Left to himself, he might never have married.”

Ken Morrison was born in Hulett, Wyoming. His father was from Nebraska and his mother from South Dakota. The family can be traced to Revolutionary War times. He went to a very small school and helped his family raise cattle near the Black Hills. The family moved to Portland when he was nine years old. Morrison became a truck driver.

Drafted into the US Army Air Corps when he was 30 years old, Morrison spent the war years driving and repairing trucks on Saipan in the northern Mariana Islands, the site of fierce fighting in the Pacific theater during World War II.

Morrison said he was present when Japanese prisoners of war were kept there. Kathy said her father has gruesome photos from the war. He remained friends with men from Maine and Texas, visiting them years later for fishing trips.

Morrison worked as a truck driver, delivering general freight for most of his life, although in 1928 he logged at Malone Creek in Washington. He worked at Bonneville Dam until it was completed.

Morrison can’t say there’s much that’s good about being 99 years old.

“It’s better than being dead,” he says with a faint smile.

He was mowing the lawn until October, when he tripped inside his house and broke his neck. These days he reads, and watches news on television, and enjoys solitaire and the occasional bit of whiskey in his coffee.

Morrison has been a good bachelor all these years since his wife died, his daughter said. He cooks healthy meals for himself and took over his wife’s canning activities, putting up peaches until last year.

His daughter said he quit smoking 50 years ago. “One day he lit up, it tasted bad, so he threw the whole bunch away and hasn’t smoked since.”

He only takes two medications now. Kathy said when she came to the house in the fall, the only medication she found was a bottle of aspirin from 1977.

For Morrison, one of the hardest things about getting older is the loss of friends and family. He attended senior lunches for awhile, until it became too loud and too hard for him to hear, he said. His brother, Earl, lived next door until he died 10 years ago.

Morrison’s only child, Kathy, moved in when he broke his neck. In the past, the two traveled to Hong Kong and New Zealand to fish, where he fixed the bus that broke down in the middle of nowhere, Kathy said.

Kathy is giving a 100th year birthday party. Morrison said his 80th birthday party was one of his favorites. All of his truck-driving friends came, and the vehicles were all lined up, backed in and squared away.