50 years ago today, I met my best friend: Remembering Bob Morris 
by Bill Jones

It’s been a year-and-a-half since Bob Morris, my best friend (outside of family), passed away, and I had the honor of eulogizing him at his funeral.

On March 18, 1974 – 50 years ago today – Bob and I met when we both started work as telephone operators (on the old classic cordboard) at the Southwestern Bell operators building in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

A friendship born of Watergate
I had graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) the previous year with a music education degree that – for reasons explained in a previous post – I had no intention of using. During my senior year, I had started dating Joanna Wong, a freshman, so – in March 1974 – I was still hanging around Shawnee to be near her.

Bob was only recently honorably discharged from the Army following a tour in Vietnam, where – among other duties – he served as a CQ runner. He had come back to Shawnee, where he was born and grew up, and where his parents still lived.

So here we were, two guys looking for work – one of us (me) to make some money while figuring out what to do with the rest of his life, and the other (Bob) looking for a career with the phone company.

I stayed with Southwestern Bell only 15 months. For Bob, Southwestern Bell was the family business – his brother and older sister both worked for the phone company, as did an aunt. Bob turned out to be a telephone company lifer – he spent around 40 years with Southwestern Bell before retiring in the 2010s.

My memories of those 15 months I spent with Southwestern Bell are pretty vague and hazy. However, through the years Bob would remind me that – whenever he and I were seated next to each other on the cordboard – we would play games and have contests with each other; for example, keeping a tally of how many calls each of us took during a specified period. Hey, it could be a pretty tedious job, so anything to relieve the boredom was helpful.

So how did these two guys from different backgrounds become lifelong best friends? First of all, we trained together for 6 weeks – just the two of us, under the direction of Wanda Rutherford, a very sweet woman who constantly mixed us up, calling Bob “Bill” and me “Bob.” When there are just two of you going through a training regimen for 6 weeks, you have plenty of time to talk.

In one of our first conversations, the subject of politics inevitably came up, both of us being political junkies, and we discovered that both of us had – in 1972 – cast our first presidential vote for Democrat George McGovern. Friends, George McGovern had not only been swamped by Richard Nixon in a national landslide; conservative Oklahoma had shoveled the dirt onto his political grave. I mean, if you lived in Oklahoma and found another person who had voted for McGovern, you’d better latch onto him, because he might be your only friend!

That revelation – that we had both voted for McGovern – gave us plenty to talk about. In those early days of our friendship, we both usually worked 1-10 shifts. When we’d get off work at 10 p.m., we’d stand out in the parking lot, talking politics, especially Watergate, which was heating up in those months leading up to President Nixon’s resignation in August.

Other operators would get off work at 11 p.m. and even midnight, and ask, “What in the world are you two guys doing, standing out here and talking ’til all hours?” (In the years to come, our wives would ask the same question about our into-the-wee-hours phone conversations!)

It’s not an exaggeration at all to say that Watergate cemented our friendship. It also began what was to be a pattern that would last until Bob’s passing in September 2022 – of LONG, LONG conversations.

Joanna and I married in 1976 and moved to Colorado in 1977. So the next 45 years of my friendship with Bob was carried on remotely, with him living in Oklahoma, and me living in Colorado and, eventually, Texas. Visits to see each other were few and far between.

And how we did burn up the telephone wires! This was back in the day when we had to pay for individual “long-distance” calls – the longer the distance, the costlier, and the meter was running until you hung up. One Saturday night in 1978, when Joanna and I were living in Denver, Bob called me around 10:30. He had been drinking a little, so he was very talkative. I was on the couch in our living room and nodded off around midnight, with Bob talking up a storm. It was around 4 or 4:30 a.m. when I woke up to find Bob still talking away. He had gone on for over 4 hours without ever realizing I had fallen asleep and had been silent all that time. Funny thing was – he never got charged for that call, which would have cost at least $40 or $50, even at reduced weekend rates. We figured that some Southwestern Bell Central Office worker saw that call on the computer tape and said, “That can’t be right, must be a malfunction,” and just wrote it off.

My Best Man
I spent the summer of 1975 – after resigning from Southwestern Bell – working in Reno, Nevada, a 24-hour gambling town where it was easy to get two jobs. I needed to make some money, because I would be entering the Oklahoma University School of Law that fall. (That’s a story for another day.)

During the summer, I called Joanna almost every day from a pay phone at a 7-11 store that was along the 10-block walk I made every day from my apartment – which I shared with several Chinese friends from OBU – to the casino district, where both of my jobs were located. On the day before I left to return to Oklahoma, I called Joanna and told her the time I would be calling the next afternoon. She always took my calls at a pay phone in the laundromat that was beneath the apartment where she was staying with friends that summer.

What Joanna didn’t know was that I had set it up with my operator friend Bob – whom she had not met until then – to pull a little trick on her. Bob picked me up at the airport in Oklahoma City, drove me to Shawnee, and dropped me off just outside the laundromat. Then he drove to a nearby pay phone, called the laundromat pay phone – where Joanna was waiting for my call – and, in his best operator voice, announced that she had a call from Bill Jones, whereupon I walked through the door of the laundromat, walked up behind her, and said, “Hello?” She turned around, saw me standing there, and the shocked look on her face was priceless! It was probably the only time I was able to surprise her until the surprise 60^th birthday party I arranged for her in 2013. Then Bob walked in, and I introduced her to the guy who would be Best Man at our wedding – just a block away from the laundromat – a little over a year later.

In September 1976, Joanna and I got married at University Baptist Church in Shawnee, and Bob was my Best Man. I spent most of the summer working in North Carolina. Joanna and I would be living in student housing in Norman, where I was entering my second year in OU Law School (it would be my last – I withdrew in spring ’77, deciding I wasn’t cut out for a life in law).

Joanna went ahead and moved into our new apartment, while I spent the month of August with Bob in his apartment in Bethany. The wedding was on the afternoon of Saturday, September 4. That morning, I got nervous about something. No, I wasn’t having second thoughts about marrying Joanna – far from it! However, I started thinking about having to lift her wedding veil and kiss her at the end of the ceremony and realized I had no idea of how that worked.

So Bob and Peter Cheung, my Groomsman, came up with an idea. They draped a towel over a pillow and had me practice lifting the towel and kissing the pillow. Even as I write this, almost a half-century later, I can’t keep from laughing, and I have no idea how – or whether – Bob and Peter kept a straight face that afternoon as I reached for the veil and kissed my bride.

In 1990, Bob married Emily. They did it pretty quietly before anyone – including me – knew what had happened. I occasionally kidded Bob – I made him my Best Man, and he doesn’t even invite me when he gets married? Hmmm! After Bob passed away, Emily sent me some things Bob had written in his last months to help me prepare his eulogy. Among them was a note saying that, if they had had a traditional wedding – with guests, etc. – I would have been his Best Man. He had never told me that. It warmed my heart to read that.

Bob, the Family Man

By the time Bob married Emily, he and I had been friends for over 16 years. He had been “unattached” throughout that time, so I never really imagined him as a family man. When he married Emily, he had a ready-made family, for she had children from a previous marriage. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful as the way Bob embraced Emily’s family – eventually to include grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and the way they embraced him. There was no “step” attached to those relationships. They loved him as their father and grandfather, and he loved them with all his heart.

Through the years, in our many conversations, he spoke with a pride and affection for Emily and her kids that was simply bursting within him. Bob loved to travel, and he especially loved taking Emily, and the kids and grandkids, on driving trips (he so enjoyed driving across the country), exposing them to the natural wonders of our country – especially our national parks, as well as historical sites.

Bob and Emily shared a love for Democratic politics, often volunteering (especially Emily) as poll workers on election day. Whenever a Democrat was to be inaugurated as president, they headed for Washington, D.C., with the kids and grandkids to experience history firsthand.

Bob was a Democrat because he believed in justice and equality for those who had been denied it – the poor, people of color, any who had been disenfranchised and oppressed – and he believed that the Democratic Party offered the best hope for such people.

Our Conversations
Besides politics, our epic conversations touched on a wide variety of subjects:

• Old movies & TV shows, as well as favorite actors
  • His favorite actors were Jimmy Stewart and William Powell.
  • On the other hand, there were certain actors that – he usually couldn’t explain why, just a feeling – that disturbed him, rubbed him the wrong way; two that come to mind were Glenn Ford and June Allyson.

• Sports
  • We were both huge baseball fans and had both grown up as St. Louis Cardinals fans. His favorite player from those 1960s Cardinals teams was Bob Gibson; mine was Lou Brock. I once bought Bob, for his birthday, a plaque with a picture of Bob Gibson and his more noteworthy stats.
  • At the end of the 1974 NFL season, we decided to predict the playoff games against each other. We continued to do this every year for the rest of his life. In 2007, we invited my son Travis, and son-in-law, Adam, to join us in the competition, and added a few others in succeeding years. After Bob passed away, I renamed the contest – for which I’ve recorded the stats on a website since 2007 – the Bob Morris Memorial NFL Playoffs Predictions Contest and invited his nephew, Mike Dixson, whom I met in the early years of my friendship with Bob, to take Bob’s place in the contest. This year, Mike’s second, he won the championship. Bob would be so proud!
  • In 2001, Travis and I drove up to Oklahoma City, where we picked up Bob, and the three of us drove to Denver to see the Broncos play only their third game in their new stadium. While there, we also drove a few miles west of Denver to Clear Creek Canyon in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.
    • In addition, we drove by a couple of the houses in which Joanna and I lived in Denver in the 1980s. This was more nostalgic for Bob (who visited us in Denver several times) and me than Travis, who was several months short of turning 2 when our family moved from Denver to the DFW area in August 1987. As I stopped briefly in front of one of our old houses, Bob began snapping pictures of it. (It’s hard to cover everything in a post about someone’s life. Suffice it to say that photography had been more than just a hobby for Bob ever since I met him – he could have been a professional photographer.) I told him to put away the camera; it was about 8:00 Sunday morning, and people might be walking through the house, getting ready for church, etc., and look out the window and wonder why we’re taking pictures of them. Bob said I was worrying for nothing. We rounded the corner and stopped at a stop sign. Then I noticed a police car behind me, flashing his lights. Sure enough, the neighbors had complained about Bob taking pictures of their house, and I had to do some fast talking and explaining to avoid any further trouble. Of course, I never let Bob forget this, though he always defended himself and blamed the neighbors for being too sensitive.
    • That wasn’t the only time that I found myself in trouble with the law partly because of Bob. Back in the early 1980s, Bob took one of his many skiing vacations, in which he would stay for a night with us, then head up to the slopes. This time, I drove him out to Copper Mountain. On the way, I noticed that my car registration sticker on the windshield had expired and started worrying about being stopped by the police. Bob’s advice? Just take a clump of snow and put it on the windshield over the sticker. That’ll fool the police! Sure it will. I got back to Denver okay, but then I took an exit that curved around, and there was a police car sitting off the road on that curve, just waiting for someone like me. Sure enough, he pulled me over and gave me a ticket. The snow on the windshield didn’t fool him at all. Not really Bob’s fault – I should have renewed my registration on time, but his “advice” didn’t help a bit!
• Bob loved The Simpsons – without a doubt, it was his favorite TV show of all time. I’m sure he had seen every episode, especially the older ones, at least 25 times each. Every conversation we had over the past 30 years – no matter what the subject was – would elicit at least one, usually more, Simpsons reference.

Bob Saves Sesame Street
In the fall of 1981, expecting our first child, Joanna and I chose Sesame Street wallpaper for the nursery. No one would ever confuse me with a handyman – I’m all thumbs. Oh, I can assemble the kids’ toys okay, but anything more complicated than that? Forget it! Joanna was better than I am – especially when it came to things like hanging pictures on the wall, etc. However, when we tried to hang that Sesame Street wallpaper? It was a disaster! We just couldn’t get it right.

By the grace of God, Bob came for a visit about that time. We prevailed on him, and he came through big time; he did a beautiful job of getting that wallpaper on the wall of the nursery. After Alison was born on December 1, her crib was right next to the wall with that Sesame Street wallpaper, and she would stare at it for minutes at a time, with a look of joy and excitement. Good job, Uncle Bob! I’m not sure where Joanna and I would have been without him – it brings to mind the old George Burns joke – “In 30 years of marriage, not once has the word ‘divorce’ come up. Murder, yes, but divorce? Never!”

Bob and Religion
Bob was raised in the Church of Christ; however, as he told me many times, from an early age he was skeptical, regarding the stories in the Bible as little more than fairy tales. By the time he was grown, he had abandoned any pretense of a religious faith. For many years, Bob called himself an agnostic; in his later years, he began referring to himself as an atheist. Yet we were best friends throughout those years. He felt great disdain for Christians who tried to impose their faith on others, especially through force of law, and I shared his disdain. He respected the way I practice my Christian faith and asked me to do his eulogy, trusting me not to turn his funeral into a worship service.

We could talk about religion, but I knew there were certain boundaries I wasn’t to cross. On the one occasion that I did cross them, it caused a rift between us that was mended only when he finally told me what had upset him, and I regretted my action, apologized for it, and assured him it wouldn’t happen again.

Bob had integrity. Some Christians had suggested he “hedge his bets”; after all, what would it hurt to profess faith in Christ, even if he didn’t really believe? In their minds, it was “fire insurance.” In the early 1980s, I remember Bob telling me about a Christian friend who had suggested this to him, and he found the idea an insult to his integrity. He wouldn’t compromise his integrity, no matter what the cost. In response, I suggested that his friend had a pretty low opinion of God if he really thought God could be fooled by such a pretense.

Bob and I had a mutual respect for each other’s integrity and adherence to principle.

I was also honest enough to tell Bob that he was in my prayers when he had a particular need – and, whether or not he believed those prayers would have any effect, he appreciated the spirit behind them.

There was only one time when Bob asked me to pray. That was when Emily was facing a potentially serious health problem. Bob got very emotional, saying, “Bill, I don’t want to lose her,” and asked me to pray for Emily. He cared too much for Emily to let his unbelief stand in the way of prayer that might help her.

I mentioned earlier that Bob had a passion for justice and care for the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the oppressed. In Bob’s last years, I told him that my theology about the afterlife had evolved quite a bit as I had gained what I believed to be a greater understanding of God, and that I believed that – regardless of his unbelief – God loves him and had a place for him in heaven. At his funeral, I cited Matthew 25, where Jesus makes the criteria for salvation not belief but action and attitude – how we treat what Jesus called “the least of these,” those who had been ignored, those who were oppressed, those who were suffering. In my eyes, Bob cared for “the least of these” as Jesus commanded us to do. He was more Christian, as I see it, than many of those who claim the name of Christ, and I’m proud to call him my best friend and to know that he regarded me the same.