William Leo Morrison lost his long and valiant battle with cancer on the evening of Dec. 4, 2013. William Leo Morrison died peacefully in the home he had made for 59 years with his loving and beloved wife, Kate.
The immediate cause of death may be linked to the crushing defeat of the Chicago Bears the Sunday before, which he weathered with his son.
Bill was born January 19, 1931, in Nampa, Idaho, and raised in the (then) small town of Aberdeen, SD, by James and May Morrison. He played high school football, worked in his father's grocery store, fished with his brother and father, but avoided hunting. He forged friendships and memories that sustained him to his final days.
He left Aberdeen to attend Harvard College, where he encountered Kate, close friends, and a world of literature - all of which, he felt, shaped the man that he became. After law school, he and Kate moved to Chicago, where they raised their family and he practiced law at the firm of Gardner, Carton and Douglas.
He was a man of great intelligence, integrity, and humor. He was generous in the extreme. He was a voracious reader - fiction, non-fiction, history, mystery and the news of the day. On the table beside his bed at the time of his death were the collected short stories of William Trevor, Alice Munro's "Dear Life", and "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder. His stoicism as a 50-year supporter of the Bears approached the quiet hope and resignation of a private religion. He loved advice columns, Scrabble and the Word of the Week.
