Adventurer Karol Morphew is 100 years young

How refreshing to meet Karol Morphew, who turns 100 August 5, and will be celebrated at a party Aug. 10.

Karol’s niece Marli Jenkins invited me to write about her uncle, who, with his late wife, her Aunt Alicia, created a legacy of a life well-lived, while weaving in the love of family and friends along the way.

Marli and her family, who live with her uncle at their home in Clinton, have been preparing the past few months for the upcoming celebration to be held on acreage framed by tall evergreens. She expects a crowd of about 100 family and friends for the afternoon soiree.

I’ve written about Marli Jenkins in the past, impressed with her appreciation of our community’s generosity, and at her skill at infusing meaning to everyday life. Marli founded Woodhaven, an alternative high school on South Whidbey in 2019.

On the last Monday in July I met Uncle Karol—who was watching a PBS Nova program—when Marli and I stepped in his room to chat. Dressed in a dark blue-green plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans and black Birkenstocks, I was taken in by his wizard’s eyes and flowing beard. Was I in the presence of a modern day Gandalf?

I asked him what he might say to those gathered for his hundredth birthday party.

“Gee whiz,” he laughed. “It’s been a long trip. Sometimes I think about it, and fill in the parts I didn’t recall immediately, but on the whole, I think I have a good memory. Probably this is because there is no one to tell me what is missing. I look at life as a total experience. It began, and it’s gone on a long time, and it’s operating. There is a continuity.”

Karol is a natural born storyteller, and he recalled a time when he was 18, living on a dairy farm in Minnesota.

“The most traumatic experience of my life took place when I was in my teens,” Karol recalled. “On our farm in the morning my first job was to go get the cows to bring them up to the barn so we could do the milking. On this morning I went down to the pasture and we had a yearling bull, a Holstein bloodline my father was very proud of.

“This young bull decided I was something that was needed to gotten rid of. He quite suddenly began to behave as though I was his enemy. I had formed a habit of taking a pitchfork to the pasture when I went down to get the cows. He charged me and I began beating him about the head with the pitchfork as effectively as I could. This didn’t slow him down. He came on and knocked me down and his head was across my chest. He had a ring in his nose. The way his head was lying, I had a hold of the ring with my left hand. I twisted the ring. This caused him to stop being aggressive almost immediately. I was able to move out from under his head and stand up, and he stood up also. I led his head between a narrow opening. His body couldn’t go through. It served as a stanchion. I pulled his head around to hold it to his left side and I had him totally under control.”

Having subdued the bull, Karol looked around him and saw a sight that he still finds humorous when he recalls it.

“My younger brother had gone to get my dad as soon as he knew the bull was giving me problems,” Karol recalled. “Dad was in his pajamas without any shoes on, walking through a pasture with a generous amount of cockleburrs. When Dad noticed I had the bull under control, his adrenaline dropped and he became aware of his feet in the pasture. My favorite memory is my dad walking quite gingerly through the cockleburs. It still amuses me to think about it.”

When World War II broke out, Karol enlisted in the navy after his graduation in 1942 from Sioux Valley High School. In the navy, he was first trained as a signalman and assigned to Ebeye Island in the Kwajalein Atoll,  Marshall Islands. Because of his high scores on the general classification test, he was selected to attend the officer training program. He left the Pacific with two other sailors who also qualified to attend the Navy’s Pre-Midshipman’s School at the Berkeley Hotel, Asbury Park, NJ.

Becoming a career navy man, Karol later rose to the rank of commander and was commended in 1966 for helping facilitate those who were recovering nuclear weapons the Air Force had lost in Spain.

In the navy’s commendation letter to Commander Karol Morphew, we learn: “On 17 January, 1966, a mid-air collision occurred between two U.S. Air Force aircraft: a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker. As a result of that collision, a large quantity of wreckage and debris, including nuclear weapons, was scattered over the countryside and sea…vicinity of Palomares, Spain.”

Karol facilitated the naval crew that was assigned to “return the area to its original condition by removing the wreckage and debris, and recover a missing nuclear weapon.”

His team spent long hours from January through April performing the task with, according to the commendation letter, “…exceptional ingenuity, determination, perseverance and efficiency in support of Task Force…your outstanding contribution to this operation was in the highest traditions of the naval services.”

“The Air Force not very gracefully lost a couple atomic bombs, one off the south coast of Spain, another inside Spain, in the Andalusia region,” Karol recalled. He remembered his impressions of the Moorish influence in the region, describing a Catholic Church set in the middle of a very large mosque in Cordoba. Of the two different faiths coexisting as neighbors, he mused, “One of the blessings of that is that people can learn to accept a foreign culture if they just get over the fact that the ‘culture’ is their enemy.”

As part of his officer training, Karol graduated from the University of Minnesota and later attended graduate school at Stanford earning a degree in business administration. After retiring in his forties from the navy, Karol found work teaching at a new community college in Arapahoe County in Colorado.

There he was hired “because of my masters degree” by Dr. Crawford, who Karol liked, but seldom agreed with. Perhaps because of his age and having lived some, he was chosen by the freshly minted faculty—still in their 20s—who had just earned masters degrees—to be their faculty president. But soon Dr. Crawford would find Karol had a mind of his own when it came to advocating for his fellow teachers’ well-being.

“I think he learned about the rest of me after he hired me,” Karol said. “I was roughly 20 years older than the rest of the faculty he hired. Dr. Crawford was a controlling sort of personality, so he had the rest of the faculty under his control. He had a bit of a problem with me, because I was not nearly so controllable. Dr. Crawford was authoritarian at heart. I react in a difficult way to authoritarian behavior.”

What did Karol do? He became a faculty organizer. Without experience in education and having retired from an institution where he always followed orders, he consulted with the Colorado state education board for help. Its people could offer no advice, because, at the time, it dealt only with K-12 faculty and not community colleges. Still looking for answers, Karol was referred to the National Education Association in Washington DC. There he became immersed in the art of collective bargaining.

“Getting the momentum going—the great conundrum I faced was that I’m a naval officer. I’ve never done much organizing within a structure,” Karol recalled. “I did my best to keep it (community college administration) from controlling me as much as necessary.”

As a result of Karol’s success at organizing state’s community college faculty into unions, his superiors tried to thwart his efforts by scheduling him to work late on Fridays and early on Mondays, knowing that he was involved in working with other faculties across the United States with the NEA. His weekends involved flying to various locations to help with organizing efforts.

“My poor wife at the time didn’t see much of me,” Karol recalled of his five-year employment at the community college and immersion into managing labor unions. “My college administration took any action they could to restrict my travel, which eventually allowed me to become a national level organizer.”

Imagine the thrill for Karol when NEA offered him a job at double his current teacher’ salary to become the higher education representative for the Northwest. He accepted the post and moved to Seattle, settling into the iconic Smith Tower, as the sole representative covering Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Oregon. NEA even provided a company car for him to drive. He chose not to drive the company car, preferring his Volkswagen camper bus, so that he could travel with his wife, Alicia.

Karol met Marli’s Aunt Alicia when she was a student in his economics class; she had returned to school at age 28 and graduated from Arapahoe at the top of her class in 1970. During her time there she became active in the student body and worked as a student representative for the NEA. Karol found in Alicia someone like him, someone who wanted to get things done. They fell in love and were married in September of 1971. Alicia passed away just before their fifty-second wedding anniversary.

Karol and Alicia bought 10 acres of property on Whidbey Island in 1983. Karol had visited Whidbey once before, while serving as a supply corp officer on the USS Lexington.

“I was on board the USS Lexington and we went to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard for four months’ overhaul,” Karol recalled. “When I first came to Whidbey in the 60s, I brought my first wife here. It was interesting back in those days. That’s when I should have bought land! It’s why I came back in the 1980s. I liked the ethos, the South Whidbey ethos. This is a very distinct part of the world.”

Karol and Alicia bought and lived aboard a sailboat named the KarAlicia. Karol retired from the NEA, and the couple enjoyed sailing to Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska–and down the Inland Passage from Alaska to Seattle.

It was Whidbey Island that attracted the couple as a permanent home, though they had years of adventure to experience before living here full time.

“Mostly I like South Whidbey because it tends to be like me, rather anti-corporate, anti-capitalist,” Karol said. “So, when we bought the land, we weren’t ready to settle down. Eventually we sold KarAlicia and bought a converted Greyhound bus we called KarAli. We spent 10 years living out of KarAli, traveling all the way through southern Canada, most of the United States and through every state in Mexico.”

The couple parked their bus in the shade of trees while building their house and wintering in Puerto Vallarta. They started building their home in 1987, based on a home design they’d seen in The Sunday edition of The Minneapolis Tribune when previously visiting Karol’s Minnesota family. By 1992 the couple left to spend a year teaching in China.

“When the house was completed, but still unpainted, my wife saw an ad about teaching in China for a year,” Karol said. “My wife was utterly fascinated with teaching in China.”

The couple spent eight weeks at the Western Washington campus in Bellingham, orienting them for their upcoming experience.

While he taught economics and U.S. business practices in China, Alicia taught spoken English to 35 students, mostly male graduate-level engineers from a petroleum enclave in western China. Alicia whole-heartedly promoted her culture, even teaching her class the Hokey Pokey song and dance.

“I characterize her relationship with her class as the largest love affair I ever watched,” Karol recalled. “Her students absolutely loved her.”

When Karol taught, he worked with a Chinese woman, Miriam Cao, who translated his words for the class. He has remained friends with Miriam, who plans on attending the 100 year birthday celebration next week with her husband James.

“God, I’m glad they’re coming,” Karol said with anticipation of her visit.

Having nearly reached the 100-year milestone himself, Karol said the only other person he knew to reach the same age was his great grandfather, Eli Hutchinson, a Civil War veteran.

I asked Karol if he thought about getting that old when he was 12 and attending Eli’s hundredth birthday celebration in Iowa.

“That old man with white hair and a gray beard? I don’t know whether I thought about getting old then,” Karol replied. “You bring up an interesting point, I don’t think about myself as old. I say, ‘Good grief, man you’ve got to learn something.’ I’m engaged. I’m on the internet and I go all over the world with it. It’s a fantastic resource.”

Alicia passed away last August. Her spirit still infuses the home Karol shares with Marli, her husband Jason, their five children and three cats. Marli suggested that her family might be part of what keeps her uncle young at heart.

And here’s a Happy Birthday to a gentle man who made my day.