Murray Morgan is truly one of the Pacific Northwest's (if not the nation's) most valuable resources. Morgan's work has guided three generations of readers to a deeper understanding of who, what and where we are through a remarkable series of journeys of exploration and discovery of our region's history. As a teacher he has inspired others to view the possibilities of the present through the perspectives provided by the past. Born and raised in Tacoma, Morgan is the son of a Unitarian minister who published a small Christian magazine with world-wide circulation. His mother wrote children's plays and poetry. A graduate of Stadium High and the University of Washington, Morgan worked on both schools' newspapers, and was hired on by The Grays Harbor Washingtonian in Hoquiam immediately after he completed college. Two years later, he married his childhood sweetheart, Rosa, and together they kayaked down the Danube for their honeymoon, sending regular accounts of their adventures to The Tacoma News Tribune.

Morgan earned his Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University and his career took flight. In addition to writing for CBS, Time, and the New York Herald Tribune simultaneously, Morgan earned the Pulitzer Fellowship for Outstanding Student, providing him the opportunity to study the press in his country of choice - Mexico. His year of study ended by being called into the army. Morgan was stationed in the Aleutian Islands where he wrote his first two books; Day of the Dead, a mystery set in Mexico, and A Bridge to Russia, a history of the Aleutians.

Murray and Rosa returned to the Northwest - the place they would always call home- in the late 1940s. Their daughter, Lane, was born shortly thereafter and Morgan began teaching journalism at what was then the College of Puget Sound. During his five years with the college, Morgan produced his worst and best selling books. The Viewless Winds sold 242 copies. Skid Road, a history of Seattle through the 1930s, sold many times that amount.

Over the next 30 years Morgan's career blossomed. He wroteThe Dam and The Last Wilderness in the mid 1950s before traveling to 22 countries researching Doctors of the World, a history of the World Health Organization. During the 1960s he produced another four books - Northwest Corner, Century 21, The Hospital Women Built for Children, and One Man's Gold Rush - before resuming his teaching career at Tacoma Community College.

In the 1980s he has authored and co-authored many books, including Puget's Sound and South on the Sound, as well as books on the Pike Place Market, the St Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company, and the Northwest sea otter fur trade.

Murray Morgan died on June 22, 2000.

Murray C. Morgan was born in Tacoma in 1916, the year the Smelter was rebuilt and Pierce County began commandeering land to present to Uncle Sam in return for the Camp Lewis payroll. The room in which I was born looks out over the gulch that Allen Mason bridged to open the North End to residential development. From that room one sees the bay, the Cascades, the Mountain.

The enclosed world of the ravine with its singing stream (now buried as part of a storm sewer project), the expanse of salt water leading off to every seaport in the world, the ethereal bulk of the Mountain sometimes manifest on the eastern horizon still mean, to me, living in Tacoma.

One of my first memories is of being held up to look over the railing of the balcony on the second floor of the house to watch a long line of great gray warships steam down the East Passage, round the point where George Vancouver dined with the Puyallup, and anchor in the bay Charles Wilkes named Commencement.

The war to end wars - the first war of my lifetime - was over, though children still sang, "Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France; Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants." The visit of the Pacific fleet marked victory. Marked, too, Tacoma's linkage with the military, a growth industry more reliable than railroads.

From our house on North Thirty-first Street on quiet nights one could hear the trains clanking along the waterfront on track laid by the old tunnel builder, Nelson Bennett; hear, too, the long whistles, mournful and romantic. We used to play by the tracks, though we were not supposed to, and the great game was to put a penny on the rail, then retrieve it after the train had passed

The penny would be paper thin, misshapen, and almost too hot to touch. The money from the railroads was thinning out too. Tacoma's romance with rails was fading.