Fortier Class 1955 Classmate Memory Book (2/26/10)
Morris,
Virgil Dixon (Dick) 
2010
Interview
Name of Classmate: Morris, Virgil Dixon (Dick) Spouse: Yonezawa Midori
8 years together
Further Educational accomplishments: I dropped
out of Fortier to go to college early. In fact, I finished with the class of 1955
after taking a final exam in a correspondence course at LSU on my way back to
New Orleans from Shreveport, where I had already finished the final exams for
the second semester of my freshman year. I finished Centenary College with a B.A.
in History and then took a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle,
jumping past the master's degree in the process. My specialty was Japanese history,
and I spent three years doing research in Tokyo on a Foreign Area Fellowshp (Ford
Foundation) and slightly later spent a year as translation editor for The Japan
Interpreter on a Fulbright.
Family history: I married my college sweetheart
and stayed with her until cancer took her after twenty-five years of marriage.
We had a son and a daughter. I have four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
After my first wife died I thought marriages were arranged in heaven and quickly
remarried only to discover that some marriages are arranged in the other facility.
Fortunately, I was lucky to have another chance and married my present wife,
a Japanese named Midori, whom I met at Cambridge University. She now teaches Japanese
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Achievements and Occupational History: I had an
academic career, teaching history. I taught briefly at Nihon University in Tokyo
and at Temple University in Philadelphia before moving to the University of Hawaii.
(It's dirty work, but someone has to do it.) After over two decades there I moved
to another university in Kobe Japan, Ryutsu Kagaku University, from which I retired
in 1999 to California. When I remarried in 2002 I moved with my wife to Pennsylvania
so she could teach, and then I went back to work teaching history at Gettysburg
College (a good place to teach history). I am proudest of awards I won for excellence
in teaching at the University of Hawaii and for an award for research and teaching
at my university in Japan. I have done some academic writing. I am most satisfied
with a difficult translation I did on the history of tea in Japan, published by
University of Hawaii Press. Most recently I translated a best-selling novel, Two
Homelands by Yamasaki Toyoko, that was the basis of a television series on
NHK Television in Japan.
Fortier Reunions attended: None but look forward
to celebrating our 55th in New Orleans.
Other personal comments: I am looking forward
to seeing one and all.