Elizabeth Morris: 100 Years of Memories in Austin

Elizabeth Randerson Morris (photo by Jana Birchum)

Elizabeth Randerson Morris does not seem 105. She only quit driving at age 99, soon after selling her house. These days, you can find her keeping up with the news in her comfortable room at Brookdale Senior Living in Round Rock, just about 14 miles from where she was born in Austin. She admits to getting tired after lunch, but her mind is sharp. If you ask her about Austin in the 1920s, she can see it.

She remembers baking pies each Saturday. She remembers being caked in dirt after hours playing with her brothers outside. She remembers sitting with her siblings on their screened-in back porch in East Austin each evening and listening to their grandmother’s stories. That grandmother came to Texas from Alabama as a little girl in a covered wagon, so her stories were full of rangers and American Indians. She described being in the woods, seeing a dog, and going up to it so she could pet him, before realizing that the animal was, in fact, a crouching Indigenous Texan wearing a furry hide. Where that side of Elizabeth’s family settled in Rocksprings, they grew vegetables, kept chickens, and fed themselves. There’s a photo of them, sitting stoic outside. “They weren’t easygoing,” Elizabeth said. “They were tough.”

That back porch where she learned about her grandmother’s life is the setting of many of Elizabeth’s early memories. It was the early 1920s when her family moved into their big house in the Pecan Springs neighborhood. It had a metal roof that boomed when it rained, and no bathroom – just an outside Johnny, and a wash basin that the kids would bathe in each evening by a wood stove. The road to their house was named after her father, a postman, because the area was so rural that to build a house, they had to build the road first.

At night, her brothers slept on the back porch. But Elizabeth shared a bedroom with her grandmother, who didn’t want to sleep alone. Through the walls young Elizabeth would listen to her parents talk politics. As she remembers it, they were always in agreement, and their focus was always local. “They were not for the Fergusons,” Morris said, laughing.

Elizabeth said she couldn’t remember the specifics of their gripes, but we know the Fergusons were highly controversial at the time. James Ferguson was an anti-Klan and anti-prohibitionist (“wet”) governor whose time in office from 1915 to 1917 was marked by corruption. Ferguson was ultimately indicted, impeached, and barred from holding further Texas office. So his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson picked up the baton, running for governor in 1924. During rallies, she simply introduced her husband and let him take the platform. She won, despite the fact that many suffragists opposed her, and many pro-Klan Democrats crossed party lines to vote for her Republican opponent.

“I had a chance, one time, to pour tea at the Governor’s Mansion,” Elizabeth said. “And I went over and poured tea one day at a party. And [my parents] thought it was very nice that I did, but that I shouldn’t have gone to that one.”

Her parents were Methodists who she thinks were, in hindsight, very lenient, though Elizabeth grew up thinking the opposite. They danced at home but worried about Elizabeth attending school dances. (She went dancing anyway, of course.) She also had the notion that they thought movies were “bad,” but that might have just been an idea that her Victorian grandmother stuck in her head. “My brother and I sneaked off one day and went to a movie. I don’t remember which. And I told my mother and she said, 'Well why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve said that you could go.’”

Even though Elizabeth loved to dance, she didn’t meet her future husband at a party. She said they partnered up in a chemistry class at Austin High School on 12th and Rio Grande. Her first impression: “Well, I thought he was pretty good.”

At that time, Elizabeth was still wearing clothes made by her mother, Dimple. That was about to change. In 1935, Elizabeth became a local model. At the high-end department store T.H. Williams at 500-502 Congress Ave., she made $11 per week wearing their new ensembles and walking around the store – which concerned her father. “He said, 'I don’t think you need to work right now.’ And I said, 'Well Daddy, I just want to.’” He didn’t fight with her about it, but it was Dale, her boyfriend from chemistry, who picked her up and drove her home after work.

She said their first real date saw them shooting fireworks off at Zilker Park. And then there were more dates. “First, we rode bicycles. And then we went skating.” she said. They didn’t go Downtown much, but if they did they walked on the side of the street designated for white Austinites.

After graduating high school in 1936, Elizabeth left for finishing school in Kentucky. “I had two roommates. The two of them cried all night long, every night – crying for mommy and daddy. And they lived about 30 miles from the school while I went clear across to Kentucky. So I got to move down by the dining room and have a room by myself. I thought it was pretty nice.” Did Elizabeth cry? Nope. “I enjoyed it.”

After a year in Kentucky, Elizabeth studied home economics at UT, and Dale was ready to join the war effort. In 1941, she quit school and they married. Soon, he was flying soldiers and ammunition from Detroit to Africa, England, and France. Two of her brothers were across the Atlantic in the war, too.

Dale and her brothers all survived the war – though one brother’s close call deserves its own article. It was in 1962 that Elizabeth’s life turned upside down. “Dale just came home from work one day and he said, my stomach is killing me. I took him to the hospital and went to the airport and picked up my mother and by time I got back to the hospital, he was dead. It had a rupture, but they didn’t know what to do with him. So he died in ’62.”

The youngest of their three sons was just starting first grade, and 44-year-old Elizabeth, having spent two decades out of the workforce, found herself starting over.

It was her father who helped her find a path forward. He called up a longtime friend at the Dunaway School of Accounting, and the experience would change Elizabeth’s life. The family friend allowed her to take classes in the morning and work for him in the afternoon so she could make money to support her family as she worked through school. She described her boss even taking time to deliver things to her home. “It was just a different Austin,” Elizabeth said. “It was a hometown.”

Despite her massive loss, she said life raising her sons was good. “We had a nice place to live. I thought the world was pretty good.”

Elizabeth said Austin stopped feeling like home in the early Nineties; 1991 was the year she ended her subscription to the Statesman, after getting the paper all her life. Everything in its pages felt too negative, she said. “At that time, I said, that’s it. I just couldn’t do it.”

For Austinites today who care to listen, her advice to live life well is simple: “I’m just telling everybody, just take it easy and slow. Enjoy life. That’s what I’m trying to do. Sometimes you can’t do what you want, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”