Zanoni cousins: Celebrating birthdays together at age 1 – and 81
The March 12, 1942, Zanoni items in the Ozark County Times reported “quite a gain in population.”
The correspondent continued, “Rayburn Loyd Morrison was born to Mr. and Mrs. Loyd Morrison. Two days later, little Aaron Dwain arrived to make his home with Mr. and Mrs. Dawse Morrison. Later, Robert Leroy came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Bernice Morrison. Then still later a little girl, Judith Ann, came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Faye Shanks. All the youngsters are cousins.”
Loyd, Dawse and Classie Morrison Shanks (Judi’s mother) were siblings. The siblings’ father, A. P. “Doc” Morrison, was the brother of Leroy’s grandfather, Joe Morrison.
Sometime later that year, the cousins were treated to a birthday party at Smith Chapel, the little church near Zanoni that all four families attended. Somehow the parents managed to get all four toddlers settled onto the grass against the church’s south wall long enough to snap a photograph of them looking with interest at four little birthday cakes set before them, each adorned with a single tantalizing candle.
Last week, the four Morrison cousins, now in their 81st year, gathered again at Smith Chapel to re-stage the photo against the church’s south wall. While all of them moved away in their later lives, the little church on N Highway has always been a cherished place where they sometimes gathered with family members to reconnect, especially during the annual Morrison reunion, held each year on Memorial Day.
Recently, another cousin, Dave Morrison, and Leroy’s wife, Norma, had the idea for the birthday-cake-photo re-enactment. Norma and Dwain’s wife, Betty, baked the four cakes. Then Dave had another idea for the get-together as well.
Rayburn, the oldest of the four cousins, laughed, recalling the phone conversation. “It’s funny,” he said. “David called and said he hoped a bunch of us would come and do some work on the graveyard. Then we’d have cake and ice cream. So there I was, out there at 81, working in the graveyard.”
Zanoni childhoods
Rayburn, whose parents were Loyd and Gertrude “Gertie” Hunt Morrison, was born at the Osteopathic Hospital in Springfield, but he was delivered by Dr. M. J. Hoerman, who had a medical practice in Gainesville from 1940 until 1972. The precaution of a hospital birth may have been due to the tragic deaths of his parents’ two previous children – a son, Durnell, who was stillborn, and a daughter, Vanina, who lived only one day.
Dwain was born Sept. 27, 1941, in the Christy Hogan Hospital in West Plains. He was the only child of Dawse and Evelyn Patterson Morrison. The family lived in a house they built on the ridge west of Zanoni until Evelyn’s father, John “Jack” Patterson, died of cancer in 1953. “Before he died, he made my mother, since she was the oldest, promise to take care of Grandma Nellie as long as she lived,” Dwain said last week. “So then we moved in with Grandma.”
A few years later, they moved back to the Morrisons’ Zanoni home when Nellie Patterson’s house off what is now County Road 310 burned.
“It was the fall of the year. We had built a little fire, and my grandmother went to bed. She always put a brick on the stove to get warm, and then she’d wrap it in a towel to put at the foot of her bed,” Dwain remembered. “A little later, she came down and said, ‘Is it raining outside?’ Mom said no, the sky had been clear when she was outside milking the cow or something. Grandma was hard of hearing, but she said, ‘It sounds like it’s raining.’ Mom went out on the porch, and when she got to the sidewalk and looked back, there was a red spot the size of a washtub on the tin roof.”
The fire quickly spread and destroyed the two-story wood-frame house that Nellie and Jack Patterson had built several years earlier. Dwain’s dad, Dawse, was in northern Missouri when the calamity occurred. “He had bought a load of hay and was going to bring it down here. He was up on top, tying a rope, and he fell and broke his wrist. He stayed in Kansas City with Aunt Flona Isom [his sister and her husband], while his wrist was healing, and then Uncle Afton [Dawse’s brother[ and Clay [Afton’s son], went up and got him.
With Evelyn’s mother, the Morrisons moved back to their house near Zanoni.
Evelyn Morrison was a schoolteacher, and for his first five years of school while they lived with his grandmother, Dwain accompanied Evelyn to the one-room Sallee School where she taught. Dwain remembers, “Sometimes we would walk through the snow, down the creek to school. Mom had to get there early to build a fire in the stove so the kids could stand by it and warm their hands when they got there.” After they moved back to Zanoni, he transferred to the closer Bushong School, to be taught by his aunt Earlene Morrison (his mother’s sister) for his last three years of elementary school.
Leroy was the third of the four Morrison cousins born near Zanoni in 1941; his birthday is Sept. 30, and he is the only child of the late Bernice and Velda Kastning Morrison. They had lost two previous babies, a stillborn boy, born in 1939, and another boy, born in 1940, who lived only a few hours.
Leroy was born in what was then called Caney Mountain Refuge (now Caney Mountain Conservation Area) in an old, two-room house where his parents lived with his grandfather, Joe Morrison, who managed the newly opened refuge. Leroy says he’s been unable to determine how old the house was, but he knows it had already been standing many years when his grandfather moved into it. Today, in the headquarters section of the conservation area, one part of the old house, which the family used as the kitchen, still stands; it resembles a log cabin.
Leroy grew up there at the foot of Caney Mountain, below the place higher up the mountain where his father, Bernice, had been born in his family’s cabin on Christmas Day 1917. As an adult, Bernice worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation to help build several miles of fence that surrounded the new refuge. He also helped with the Conservation Department’s efforts to reintroduce wild turkey and deer populations in the refuge after they were killed out in most of Missouri in the early 1900s.
Bernice and Velda, with young Leroy, lived in Kansas briefly from 1943 until the end of 1944. Then they returned to land adjoining the refuge, where they built a home and started a small farm. Bernice worked at other jobs until 1956, when he rejoined MDC to work in the refuge.
Like his Morrison cousins, Leroy got his early education in the one-room schools in the area, often with a teacher who was their aunt, uncle or cousin. He attended Caney School for six years and Upper Brixey for two.
Judi Shanks Fridge, the youngest of the four cousins, was born Nov. 29, 1941, at Zanoni, where her grandparents, A. P. “Doc” and Alpha Bet Morrison, owned the Zanoni store and mill, now Ozark County landmarks. Judi and her parents, and younger sister Jan, lived in Phoenix, Arizona, for a few years but moved back home to Zanoni when Judi, whose official name is Judith, was ready to start first grade.
Judi was delivered at home by Dr. M. J. Hoerman, and she believes she was probably named for Hoerman’s wife, Judy, who accompanied him on his baby-delivery house calls. “I think it was probably Judy Hoerman, but I guess it could have been Judy Garland,” she said with a laugh.
Like her cousins, Judi attended one-room schools. For her, that meant first grade at Caney, and the next seven at Bushong.
High school and beyond
Rayburn attended one-room schools in Ozark County for his eight elementary years – three years at Caney and five years at Bushong – but went to high school in West Plains, where his parents moved so his father could operate a lumber- and planing-mill business there, continuing the work he’d done earlier in Ozark County. Before Rayburn graduated from West Plains High School in 1960, he spent his school-year summers working with his dad in the family business. He continued that work for a total of 55 years before his retirement in 2011. He continues to live in West Plains with his wife, the former Cynthia Hall of Dora.
The other three Zanoni 1941 Morrison cousins attended Gainesville High School. Dwain and Leroy graduated in 1959. Like Rayburn, Judi, with her November birthday, graduated in 1960.
Afterward, the cousins scattered.
Leroy spent most of his working years doing aircraft maintenance and production-line maintenance in Springfield. Now retired, he and his wife, Norma, live back in the Zanoni area.
After graduation, Dwain first headed to Kansas with his uncle Doug Patterson to work in the oil fields. “We went out there with very little clothes, and we about froze to death out on those plains,” he said.
Next he headed to Kansas City, where he met his wife, Betty, while working at Hallmark Cards from 1960 until 1973. Like Leroy, he and Betty are now retired and living near Zanoni – on the same land where his parents built their house.
After high school, Judi headed to Rolla with her first husband, Charles Luna, working as a medical office assistant while he attended university classes. Later, in Kansas City, she worked for Squibb Pharmaceuticals. For a while, they lived in Branson, and she and Luna owned the gasoline division of Ozark County Gas. After a divorce, she moved to Springfield and spent several years owning other commercial real estate, including the Gainesville convenience store formerly known as J Mart (now Bullseye). Now retired, she continues to live in Springfield with her husband, E. R. Fridge.
A family connection
Rayburn, Dwain, Leroy and Judi are but four of the many Zanoni-area cousins who grew up together and have kept in touch through the years. Dave Morrison, who organized last week’s get-together, is the son of the late Afton and Earlene Patterson Morrison, making him doubly related to Dwain because their fathers, two Morrison brothers (Afton and Dawse) married two Patterson sisters (Evelyn and Earlene).
A. P. “Doc” Morrison and his wife, Alpha Bet, the grandparents of Rayburn, Dwain and Judi and the great-uncle and aunt of Leroy, raised 12 children in their Zanoni home. Doc’s brother Joe Morrison and his wife, Linna, raised 10 children in their Caney Mountain cabin. Some of Doc and Joe’s other five siblings had big families as well. And those families had families . . . who had families. But, some of them would surely say, you can never have too many Morrisons!
Editor’s note: Sue Ann Luna Jones is related to the Zanoni Morrisons through her great-grandmother, Florence Morrison Hunt, who was Doc and Joe Morrison’s sister.