Last Updated

15 Nov 2002

Source: Washington Post, October 26, 2001.

Two Men Who Were Just Doing Their Jobs

A Team Player: Thomas Morris Jr. Was a Model Worker and Avid Bowler

By Lisa Allen-Agostini, Washington Post Staff Writer

Wanda Morris remembers her father-in-law, Thomas L. Morris Jr., as a thoughtful, humble man. He once bought her a subscription to Reader's Digest without telling her, she recalls. When she got it in the mail she was surprised and pleased; she mailed him a thank-you card but never thanked him in person.

"I didn't have a lot of time" with him, said Wanda, who has been married for eight years to his son, Thomas L. Morris III, "and now, I can't."

And it makes her sad and angry about her father-in-law's death. "I was already grieving" for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, she said. "Now that this has happened on top of that, it's . . . more to bear."

The loss of his father has left Thomas III, 33, sounding shaky and numb. They were close, he said. Both lived in Suitland, and Thomas III says he saw his dad often. He talked to him last week.

"When I called him he said he wasn't feeling well," Thomas III said, his voice catching slightly. "He didn't know. He thought he was coming down with something, like the flu."

Mary Morris, Morris Jr.'s wife, thought the same thing. But by 8:45 p.m. Sunday, the 55-year-old postal worker was dead. Authorities say it was from inhalation anthrax.

A distribution clerk, Morris worked at the Brentwood facility in Northeast Washington, which was shut down this week after the deaths of Morris and his co-worker Joseph P. Curseen Jr.

Morris was the first of the workers to die this week. He will also be the first to be buried. His funeral service is today.

Every day Morris showed up for work with his lunch in a brown paper bag, his colleagues say. He'd been with the U.S. Postal Service since 1973, and had spent half a lifetime handling letters and packages. Among his duties was unloading the 18-wheeler mail trucks that arrive at the vast Brentwood plant, putting the sacks of mail onto tables, and sorting it all before it was sent out to different routes, said Ray Williams, executive vice president of the Nation's Capital Southern Maryland local of the American Postal Workers Union.

Morris, Williams said, was a model employee.

"Thomas Morris was always a straightforward person," Williams said. "He was one person that you expected to do right."

One part of Morris's routine was bowling. He was the president of the Tuesday Morning Mix bowling league for the past four years, said Larry Williams, a league member. Everybody at the Parkland Bowl in Silver Hill called Morris "Mo," he said.

"He got along well with everybody in the league," which meets weekly between September and May, Larry Williams said. "To us, he was a good guy."

Thomas III says his dad bowled every week, with an average in the 200s.

His father also "loved people. He was active. . . . I never knew him when he wasn't talking," said Thomas III.

Before joining the postal service, Thomas III said, Morris served at Kincheloe Air Force Base in Michigan. His father will be buried today at the Cheltenham Veterans Cemetery in Maryland.