John Vergil “J.V.” Morgan, 88, retired school psychologist and former wheat farmer, died Thursday at The Gardens at Columbine Retirement Community in Littleton, Colorado, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
John is survived by his wife Dana, who, until recently, when she required extensive physical therapy, also had been living at the Gardens at Columbine.
The two moved to Colorado from Western Kansas in the early 1970s to work as school psychologists. They were drawn to Denver by the skiing, the views, and all that the city of Denver and the mountains had to offer. They were together in Colorado for 51 years.
John started his career in the schools, he once explained, at a time when schools were only beginning to add psychologists to their staffs. He said that at this early stage, those coming into the profession had a bit more room to shape policy than any would have later. He would continue to work with students in schools across the Denver area for years. Over time, he noted changes in what troubled those students and how schools dealt with them. Early surprises—like walking into schools where some classrooms were carpeted, and students flicked their cigarette ashes onto that carpet—faded and new challenges appeared. He never, however, lost interest in young people’s behavior and why they made the sometimes inexplicable, sometimes sad or hilarious decisions they made.He had grown up, the oldest of four, on a wheat farm near Atwood, Kansas. He remembered a childhood that included a lot of helping on the farm; his mother, reminiscing decades later could sharply recall the dangerous play she would hear about at the end of each day. She remembered asking J.V. to read to his younger brothers for some quiet time one afternoon, only to have him come down the stairs a short time later and shake his head. “They’re just too young,” he told her.
The town had a small lake with a bridge which he once claimed, while driving over it with his children, that his high school peers called “the James Dean bridge,” although, of course, this very likely could have been impromptu invention to keep the Atwood tour lively.
At 21, he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War, and was stationed at Fort Knox and later Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. He took the line that required soldiers to train as paratroopers because the sign above that table promised they would make $50 more a month. But the actual jumping from a plane part that followed? He promised that it never got easier with practice and that in fact, with each jump came more terror. And finally, he suggested it might not have been worth the extra $50. The war ended before he could test his skills from Korea skies.
He returned home. His parents convinced him to study at least one year at the extremely conservative Bob Jones University in Greeneville, SC. (The university even regulated dress codes and dating protocol of its students. Young men were expected to ask women on dates by sending notes rather than phoning them.) For reasons unknown to their parents, John and his cousin Cadette, also attending the school, sawed off the top of a red Chevrolet, leaving them with what they saw as a slick-looking convertible. The cousins never explained to their mothers’ satisfaction doing that, or why they had introduced themselves to classmates as cousins from the King Ranch of Texas. John, or J.V. as he was called growing up, never returned to Bob Jones; instead, he found Fort Hays State College a more comfortable fit.
There he met Priscilla Taylor from Kinsley, KS. He married her and moved to Kinsley and began farming there. The two had two children, Elizabeth and Barry. After finishing at Fort Hays, he farmed wheat in Kinsley; he also worked at schools in Pratt and then in Dodge City, KS, on teams working to get Head Start off the ground. Head Start is a government program that had its beginnings in the mid-60s as a practical intervention during the summers for economically disadvantaged children under six to assure they would arrive at school as prepared as other children. (The program is now going strong, and their website studies show that even as adults, those who participated as children tend to have better health, higher levels of education, and higher incomes.)
He had been an early (from his college days at least), loyal and feisty defender of conservative political theory. Way back when, he was a fan of Barry Goldwater, a reader of Ayn Rand, and a consistent viewer of William F. Buckley on Sunday mornings. He viciously criticized left-wing local and national politicians' shenanigans—and occasionally even those on the right.
So, yes—he remained a true conservative believer, a Republican while helping to build a new government education program to help fight poverty during the Vietnam War.
(In his last years, however, after standing steadfast by conservatives through the Reagan years and Bush years, his previously unshakable faith in the US voters to eventually prove they did not suffer fools or worse, conmen, gladly, wavered.)
He divorced Priscilla and moved to Colorado to complete his MA in psychology at the University of Colorado at Greeley.
He and Dana Snook Pyle, who moved to Colorado from Dodge City, took positions as psychologists in Denver schools. In their off-time, the two loved skiing, and fiercely competing against each other in lightning-speed games of backgammon and tennis; they engaged in always-heated political arguments, weekends in the mountains, and family gatherings (some planned, others that were every bit as crowded might be spontaneous).
The two thrived on dining out and going to the movies. John and Dana almost always chose to have meals out rather than at home, and often with family and friends. He kept up with the ever-changing local scene of small, out-of-the-way places in Denver as well as restaurants joining the city’s top places. Once, they read an article describing the actual number of restaurants serving dinner in Denver and realized, with great disappointment, there would be hundreds of local restaurants they’d never have the time to try.
Over time, golf emerged as the pastime he wanted to perfect and knew he couldn’t.
He was asked to babysit his three-year-old grandson one afternoon and brought along a golf club and plastic ball to teach him how to swing. He watched, knowing the kid was swinging just right but with a plastic toy ball it would never go anywhere. He brought over a real golf ball and had his grandson have a go at it. Sure enough, the first time and then again and again, the ball sailed over the fence. Granddad was apparently too elated to consider what yard the balls were landing in. Later, his son would have to talk nicely to his neighbor, to calm him down, a football coach not impressed at all with John’s pride in his grandson.
Another grandson, eight or nine and knowing he was going to see his granddad at a reunion, practiced his golf game until he felt pretty good about it. (This was a granddad, after all, who had tracked down one of the last X Boxes one Christmas in Denver.) And then that day his swing fell apart. He tried so hard to recover that it only made things worse, as did Granddad trying to explain that this is just what happens in golf. Some days are like that.
Dinner with John, at whatever restaurant, was unlike dinner with most anyone else: someone contributing an opinion to a conversation might assume he wasn’t paying attention but would learn quickly enough. He had a commanding way of reentering a discussion, even when almost muttering his pronouncements, but he might have been surprised to know how often people considered him wise.
Often his telling of a story was hilarious because of the way he was overcome with amusement. Or his overreaction to his own retelling was so obviously a sign of his lack of concern for how uniquely he viewed others. Was he serious? Did he really believe his personal intervention in one person’s business choices or an angle on world affairs was the world’s only hope?
He talked about this once. He claimed to be baffled that some people at a recent party he’d gone to found him funny. Two nuns who he’d met had told him they thought he was so funny. “But” he said, “all they had to go on was that I had laughed at them the whole evening.”He often—at least, maybe usually--came across as a curmudgeon, or as a constant critic—someone quite sure there was a better way to wash the dishes than you just had.
About a decade ago, a five-year-old was having dinner with the family for the first time and sat across from him. It seemed only fair—just in case she had gotten the wrong idea and thought he had a problem with her—an adult told her later not to worry if he had seemed grumpy at dinner.
The two had carried on a conversation between watching the divers sail into the waters at the restaurant. But she did not need some expert adult to comfort her or explain John Morgan to her.
She was not troubled at all by what—as John would have called it, her assessment—of the situation.
She said, “No. I’m a kid, so he liked me.”Likely she was right: Humans are interesting creatures, but children’s unpredictable thinking, funny, illogical or even super-logical, long after he retired, to him was pretty close to priceless.
Other survivors include grandchildren, Clinton of Scottsdale, Sarah of Denver; Caleb Rosencutter of Wichita; four great-grandchildren; two brothers, Stan of Wichita and Kent of Wichita, and a sister, Janelle Rominger of Oklahoma. He is also survived by sisters-in-law April Snook, Jana Lewis, Robyn Schoonover, Barbara Snook, Sally Snook, and brothers-in-law Jim Snook, all of Colorado, and Charlie Snook of Newton, KS, and nephews and nieces.
A graveside memorial service will be held at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 20, 2024, at Chardon Cemetery, Chardon, Kansas. A to celebrate his life will be held at the home of Barbara Snook of Denver, CO, contact the family for more details.
A memorial has been setup for a tree to be planted at Wellshire Golf Course in Denver, CO. Donations accepted at: https://everloved.com/life-of/john-vergil-morgan/