Local native Winsor ‘Verd’ Morrison celebrated 101st birthday Monday

Ozark County native Winsor Verdon "Verd" Morrison has achieved many accomplishments in his long, colorful life, but few can match the one he celebrated this week. On Monday, Feb. 16, Verd marked his 101st birthday. 

Asked how it feels to have lived more than a century, he quipped, "Nobody wants to live to be 100 – unless you're 99."

Due to work and family schedules, his children and grandchildren joined him early to celebrate the event. They gathered Feb. 7 at the home of his son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Missy Morrison, in Oxford, Mississippi, where Verd now lives in an apartment within a senior-living facility. 

He moved to Oxford in 2024 from his longtime home near Branson, where he and his wife, Byrdella, retired in 2002. Tragically, Byrdella died of cancer in 2003. They were married 60 years and had lived in Ozark County, West Plains, St. Louis, Arizona, Tennessee, Hawaii, Alaska, New York, Washington State and North Dakota. 

A high school dropout – and distinguished physician

Verd and Byrdella lived in most of those places because of Verd's long, distinguished medical career – not what one might have expected, given his early years in a remote Ozark County village where he helped his family run a water-powered mill and sometimes cranked the bellows while his dad fitted horseshoes in his blacksmith shop. In fact, many might have considered Verd one of the unlikeliest people ever to become a doctor, let alone become a doctor who headed up hospital otolaryngology (ear-nose-throat) departments and led medical schools in multiple states, as he did. 

To begin with, there’s the fact that he is a high school dropout. Sometimes Verd enjoys wondering whether he might be America’s only physician without a high school diploma.

Here’s the abbreviated version of how that happened: 

Verd was born Feb. 16, 1925, in the tiny, one-family village of Zanoni, where his parents, A. P. “Doc” and Alpha Bet Morrison operated a store, post office, blacksmith shop and water-powered mill. Verd, delivered at home by a local “granny woman” (midwife), was the next to youngest of the Morrisons’ 13 children. 

Like his siblings, Verd attended one-room elementary schools and grew up helping his parents in their store, mill and blacksmith shop. Later he rode a school bus to attend high school in Dora for a year. That’s where he met Byrdella Martin, whose family lived in Dora. 

Verd and Byrdella were enjoying a Sunday afternoon drive in Verd’s dad’s car in 1941, listening to the radio, when the bulletin reporting the attack on Pearl Harbor came through. That event brought about the end of Verd’s high school education when his brother Van, four years older than Verd, “went off to the Army Air Corps,” Verd said in a Times interview in 2016. “That left Dad shorthanded at the store and mill. He told me, ‘You’re going to have to stop school and help me here at the mill.’”

Verd reluctantly dropped out of school and, for another year, worked alongside his dad and another brother, Bron, in the mill and store. Zanoni (and most of Ozark County) had no electricity then. Verd remembers family and friends gathering in their Zanoni home listening to news reports on an old Crossley battery-powered radio. “When the battery ran down, you had to take it into Gainesville to re-charge it,” he said. 

In December 1942, Verd married Byrdella when they were both just shy of their 18th birthdays. The teenage newlyweds headed to Arizona to work in an ice cream store owned by former Ozark Countians. From there, a few months later, Verd enlisted, hoping to join the Army Air Corps. 

“I wanted to be a pilot so bad,” he said in the 2016 interview. Instead, he became a bombardier on a B-24 bomber crew. After training in California, in early 1945, they were ordered to ferry a new bomber to Hawaii. “It was 15 hours in the air,” Verd said. “If our navigator had missed the island we’d be in the Pacific right now.” 

Verd and his fellow crew members were still in Hawaii, training and flying patrols while hoping for combat orders, when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.

 “I’d never heard of an atomic bomb. Our copilot was a college grad, and the pilot had had some college. They knew about atoms,” he said. 

The Japanese officially surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. Back in Ozark County, Byrdella gave birth to their daughter Katherine five days later, on Sept. 7. The Air Corps let Verd fly home for a two-week break. 

When those two weeks were coming to an end, Byrdella and Katherine accompanied Verd to Seattle, where he would rejoin the Air Corps and bid his wife and baby daughter good-bye. They made that trip from Ozark County in a 1939 Plymouth outfitted with four front-wheel tractor tires (because car tires were too hard to find during rationing). That trip was an adventure story in itself, which Verd now enjoys telling.

Surprisingly, when they finally got to Seattle, they learned that Verd had accumulated enough service points to be discharged – but he had to go back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to make it official. He had served three years and was discharged as a second lieutenant. 

From bombardier to confectioner to doctor

Verd’s next stop on his road to becoming a talented doctor was in West Plains, where he and Byrdella, with Verd’s sister Fiona and her husband Andy, opened Cinderella Confectionery, an ice cream and sandwich shop like the ones they had worked in back in Arizona. The shop was a success, but Verd grew restless, aware of the time limit for using the recently created G.I. Bill that paid for veterans’ college. 

In 1951, at age 26, he enrolled at Mizzou as a sophomore with 42 hours credit – 30 for his score on an entrance exam and 12 advanced military credits extended because he had been an officer in the Air Corps. Next thing you know, he was graduating from the University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis. That was in 1957. For the next 45 years, Verd helped patients from coast to coast with his medical skills and humble demeanor. He began by spending several years with the U. S. Public Health Service. 

In 1966, he completed his otolaryngology (ENT) residence at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and eventually became, in addition to a practicing physician, the ENT Department head in the V.A. hospital in Memphis as well as in the University of Tennessee Medical School there.

His current residency in Mississippi is the second time he has lived in that state. He and Byrdella were Mississippians for 12 years in Jackson while Verd served as director at the University of Mississippi Medical School and hospital. Byrdella, who had become a nurse, managed Verd’s private practice there.

After that, in 1993, they made their first attempt at retirement, settling in Branson briefly, until Verd accepted a temporary job with the Public Health Service in North Dakota. It was a two-month medical assignment – that turned into a six-year stay.     

Then they moved back to Branson again, living near their son Tom and his wife, Linda. They had just completed a new home there when Byrdella died of chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2003. 

More joy than sorrow

Besides his rewarding half-century in medicine, Verd has also enjoyed decades of family and church activities. He and his sons have been regular participants in Ozark County deer seasons, gathering on land they own near Zanoni. Verd has also been active in the Church of Christ wherever the family lived. He’s been a familiar face at many Smith Chapel services, as well as the annual Morrison family reunion held there each Memorial Day weekend. 

One of his most rewarding accomplishments has been the remarkable family he and Byrdella raised. Katherine, called “Kate,” their oldest, lives with her husband, Jack Cohen, in New Jersey; she is a retired teacher and director of business development at major New York architecture firms. Both of Verd and Byrdella’s sons became doctors. Michael Morrison is an anesthesiologist in Oxford. Tom Morrison was a successful ophthalmologist who practiced in Branson for 35 years before his unexpected death in 2022 due to medical complications. Tom and Linda Morrison’s son Aaron, like his granddad, is an ENT doctor now living in Springfield. Other grandchildren have equally rewarding careers.

Today, Verd looks back on his life and sees 101 years of love and joy, challenges and achievements. Such feelings ease the sorrow that has come with the losses he has also known, including the deaths of his wife and son, as well as an infant daughter who died early in their marriage, while Verd was away, serving in the Army Air Corps. They are buried at Smith Chapel, amid generations of their family and loved ones.

As Verd considers the years he’s lived and the family he has loved, he sees more joy than sorrow.

“I always think God has been good to me,” he said.