Molly Morris was a gleeful and gifted storyteller. What made her a respected journalist was that she also possessed a most unique gift. Molly was a first-rate listener.
Ask anyone whose story she ever wrote.
Before you begin your query, make sure you have a month or two to spare. In her decade and a half with the Virgin Islands Source, she recounted hundreds, if not thousands of community tales, while also covering the V.I. Legislature, where she was so well loved and respected, most of the senators assumed she was the founder of the Source. But what is really important is they trusted her. Never once in all the years she covered government did anyone ever accuse her of misquoting them or any kind of bias or conflict of interest.
Hal Hatfield, whose eulogy Molly penned for the Source, was her mentor.
I had known Molly for about 15 years before I founded the Source.
I do not know for sure if it had always been her dream to be a journalist, but I suspect so. Before her words became part of the Source’s daily news stories, she had verbalized many, many times that she had been a “copy boy” for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin.
Another hint about her life’s dream: She idolized Walter Cronkite, whom, after several failed attempts, she finally met in her beloved Frenchtown.
So, very soon after founding the first and only nonaffiliated newspaper of general circulation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the balls I was juggling began to hit me in the head, recalling Molly’s background I asked her to lunch.
At first, I simply wondered if she would be willing to write a few “fluff” pieces to augment the press releases that, in the beginning, comprised the bulk of our content. It went something like this:
“Would you consider doing some stories for the Source,” I asked, pleading into her beautiful, clear, blue eyes. “I can pay you in phone cards,” I offered.
“Yes,” she said. I handed her the entire pack I had received as payment for an advertisement.
Little did I know what she was truly capable of.
By the time the Source was in its fifth year and three years after he had left St. Thomas for good, Molly Morris had followed in Hatfield’s footsteps to become the foremost territorial expert on government issues. She worked tirelessly — often with little reward — always without complaint — to make the Source what it is today. She was an integral part of the foundation.
She was also a Frenchtown fixture, living for “donkey years,” with her husband Dan Stecher, who preceded her in death, also on Easter weekend, in March 2016.
One of her very favorite self-generated “assignments” year after year after year was to cover the Frenchtown Christmas Tree Lighting.
Molly loved Frenchtown. It seems it was the community she longed for as a child.
Before settling into the two-room cottage where she and Dan lived together for more than 40 years, Molly had endured a rollicking, to hear her tell it, more likely rocky, childhood spent between California, Washington state and Alaska and back again.
She would regale her friends with humorous stories (that probably weren’t that funny in the actual living of them) about being shuttled from a one room school house in the Last Frontier which she reached by dog sled back to a boarding school north of San Francisco that burned down (she swore she had nothing to do with it) and on to a foster aunt in Washington state.
And who can forget the pet beaver story, which in the absence of what could have been an award-winning memoir that we wish she had written, we offer here in her memory as recounted to her longtime friend Becky Luscz:
Molly: We were living in Alaska, which is one thing. And, Leonard Monsach, who was a trapper, had found this little beaver on the trap line. We lived in Magrath, Alaska, in the interior, in the McKinley range. It was really remote. And it was on the Kuskokwim River.
Becky: Did your mother know what to feed him?
Molly: No, they didn’t have Google at the time, so she just fed him baby food. So Skeezix became part of our family. And he became the light of my mother’s life, and of course, I was jealous of him. He was a wonderful little animal. He didn’t like me especially. He wasn’t cuddly. He just kind of went his own way. We had the roadhouse, and there was a kitchen and dining room. It was a regular roadhouse, with a long log table. Skeezix had his own way around there. When we would wake up in the morning, my stepfather would get so mad, because Skeezix was a beaver, and he built things. He would build things in the doorway every night. He would use anything that was handy – like a table leg – any piece of wood. And he would just erect himself a little dam. Skeezix was very funny. And he never complained about not being near the water; but he still needed to build dams. He never asked, ‘where is my water.’ We had him for several years. My mother eventually brought him to Seattle and gave him to the Woodland Zoo. And then, she moved down to San Francisco, and left him there. She would go up to see him. Skeezix died of a broken heart – he really did.
Sometime after attending journalism school at San Francisco State and her stint with the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, Molly made her way to the Virgin Islands with her then-boyfriend. The boyfriend didn’t last long, but Molly made her home on St. Thomas for 60 years. About as far away from the cold and dark days of the Northwest as she could get.
One of her first jobs was as the operations manager for Antilles Airboats, which she loved to report was owned at the time by movie star Maureen O’Hara and O’Hara’s founder husband, Charles “Charlie” Blair.
Molly had so very many stories.
It is fitting that her final trip originated from the little wooden cottage she called home, where she and Dan lived together until his death and where she insisted she would die. She was also stubborn in the way of those who know themselves.
Molly died Saturday in her own bed with two of her loving community “sisters” holding and soothing her tired body as their 92-year-old friend and neighbor was whispered away on the gentle tropical breeze.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Author’s note: Becky Luscz and Elizabeth Sheen contributed to this story.
