An appreciation

William Jason Morgan always went by “Jason.” Although he grew up in Savannah, Georgia, he spent most of his life in the Northeast, where he remained bemused by people’s inability to understand the Southern tradition of using middle names as one’s name. His family could always tell when someone absolutely didn’t know him. They were the ones who asked for “Bill” or “William.”

Jason had planned to visit his beloved friends Lincoln and Sarah Hollister, and Bede and Maria Liu in Princeton on August 4-5, just a few days after his passing on July 31, 2023. He was looking forward to touring Guyot Hall with Lincoln, visiting with whomever might be there. He had his list of things that he wanted to see that had changed, often in ways that caused him to grumble that Princeton was changing too much, or that it was shifting its scholarly focus too much. How could his beloved alma mater and home for more than 40 years change? His carefully prepared travel clothes were neatly folded next to his bed. Anyone who knew Jason as a travel mate, knew that he: a) prepared well in advance of the trip; and b) he was as meticulous in folding his clothes and travel accessories into intricate patterns in small spaces as he was in unfolding the secrets of the earth’s intricate patterns of structure in grand spaces.

Jason was born in Savannah, Georgia on October 10, 1935 to William Jason Morgan (also known as Jason) and Maxie Ponita “Nita” Morgan (née Donehoo). Jason had one sister, Nita Donehoo Morgan Williams, who was born in 1938.  He was fond of pointing out that his father had served in the U.S. Army in WWI in France as a blacksmith. Jason’s father and uncles ran a general hardware and marine hardware business in Savannah that was prosperous — Morgan’s Inc. His father died in 1944 at the age of 47, leaving his mother to raise Jason and Nita on her own. Jason attended Savannah High School and then, bucking expectations, went to Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship instead of the University of Georgia. Jason would later say that he went to Georgia Tech because he chafed at the segregation of UGA. An innate hatred of social and political hypocrisy, along with a firm commitment to social and political equity, were hallmarks of his later life. He was proud of Georgia Tech and made sure each of his grandchildren had heard his warbling version of “I’m a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech.”

Jason graduated from Georgia Tech in 1957, having changed his major from Engineering to Physics along the way. He then completed his Navy service commitment mainly teaching Nuclear Physics and Navigation to submariners in Groton, Connecticut. It was there that he met Carolyn (Cary) Elizabeth Goldschmidt at a dance in 1957. She was a senior at Connecticut College. He gave her a ride home. Except for her short time working and living in New York City following Cary’s graduation in 1958, and his occasional scientific ocean cruises, Cary and Jason remained inseparable from that time until her death in 1991. They married in 1959. They had two children, William Jason (1959) and Michèle Elizabeth (1962). Michèle’s French name attested to Cary and Jason’s abiding love of France. They spent a sabbatical year in Brittany in 1972–1973 and returned frequently, with another half-year stay, this time in Paris, in 1982. After Cary’s death, Jason spent another sabbatical year in Brittany in 1995.

After he finished his Navy service, Jason entered Princeton University for graduate school in physics, having learned from colleagues in Groton that graduate school was a possible career path. He originally worked on gravity and astrophysics. However, his dissertation advisor, Bob Dicke, suggested he try a geophysical approach to look for gravity waves – he searched for signals in the historical earthquake record that could reflect the passage of gravity waves through the solar system. He received his Ph.D from Princeton in 1964.  Dicke recommended him as a post-doctoral candidate for Walter Elsasser, a former quantum physicist who had switched to studying geophysics and who had started to work in Princeton’s Geology Department. Jason switched to geophysics, where he would remain for the rest of his scientific career. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1966 as an assistant professor, then associate professor (1971), then full professor (1975). In 1988 he was named to a chair, the Knox Taylor Professor of Geography. He held this position until his retirement from Princeton in 2004.

After his retirement from Princeton in 2004 — when he was faced with losing the five-minute-walk-from-work faculty housing that he had lived in for decades — he decided to move to the Boston area to be near his daughter and son-in-law, and their family. He bought a modest ranch-style house around the corner from them in Wayland, Massachusetts, and set about recreating the feel and functionality of his Western Way faculty apartment, with the academic richness of his Guyot Hall office. To the untrained eye, the academic richness of Jason’s office/house might have seemed like clutter, but that would be an uninformed mistake. Everything he kept — and he kept a lot — had an academic-intellectual purpose, and he knew where everything was, even if that “where” was “that side of the room on the love seat, third pile from the left, at the bottom.”

Jason’s relationship with Harvard University began in 1997, when he was awarded a PhD honoris causa from the University. His sister, Nita, who had long championed his work from her home in Savannah, joined him for the ceremony, in all its pomp and academic glory that Harvard is famous for. When he retired from Princeton, Harvard offered him the position of Research Associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), which afforded him the two things he really wanted: 1) an office close to colleagues in the field and good coffee, and 2) access to a first-rate earth sciences library. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with Harvard. His daughter, Michèle, was already at Harvard, having started there in 1985 for grad school, receiving her doctorate in Anthropology and then continuing on in the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology where she currently serves as a Curator and is also a research associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. So, it was natural that they would commute together into Harvard. They did this from 2004 until the Pandemic. His last visit to EPS was just a few weeks before his death.

Jason never self-promoted. His wife, Cary, was zealous in her protection of him and his reputation. She was a powerful centerweight in Jason’s universe, anchoring his family and home, traveling the globe with him, and providing the impetus for him to explore the world outside his office. Cary died in 1991. She was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia the day she died. Jason never remarried. His life became his family, friends, and scholarship.

During Jason’s investiture into the Academy of Sciences of France, a friend of the family, himself a prominent scientist, remarked to Jason's daughter, Michèle, “Your father has had two great results in science. I would be happy with even one of them.” The first came in 1967 with his realization of the mechanics of plate tectonics, something that is now the accepted model of how the Earth’s crust works, but at that time was radical. His second great achievement was a model of how mantle plumes work — popularly called the “hot spot” theory — which he published in 1971.

If you were to ask Jason what his most important scientific legacy was, he would quickly reply, “my students.” He continued to travel with students, both undergraduate and graduate, on field trips and field work —  to the American West, Hawaii, Canada, and the Caribbean — well after he retired from Princeton. He kept in touch with his students and post-docs, and promoted their work.

Jason was devoted to his family, immediate and extended. He retained his love of Savannah and visited as often as he could. He was very close with his sister, Nita, who died in 2008 from acute leukemia, like his wife, Cary. He also was especially close to his cousin, Morgan Kuhn, and his nephews Edgar (“Ned”) Williams and Morgan Williams. His last trip to Savannah was for the funeral of his brother-in-law, Pomeroy Williams, who passed away in July 2022. 

Jason had long contended with chronic health issues but had also long defied the odds, remaining active well into his 80s. Through each of his various hospitalizations he had one goal — get back to home, family, his friends, and his work. When it was clear that he no longer had the energy to safely maintain a house, his daughter and son-in-law moved a town over into a house in which he could have an in-law suite. There, he could talk with his close friend Lincoln Hollister in Princeton almost daily, while sitting in his favorite chair in his living room; likewise with his son Jason, wherever his son happened to be at the movement. He was fond of British television mysteries, especially if they had a comic sensibility. He was fond of good wine and fine cheeses. And sushi and good company.

That was enough. Jason had worked through the expanse of the entire globe, but he could fold all that he needed into that space in Natick, too.

Jason is survived by his son Jason Morgan and his daughters Ariane and Ilona Phipps-Morgan (with his former wife Melanie Phipps), and Anna Luna Morgan (with his wife Paola Vannucchi); his daughter Michèle Morgan and her husband Robert DeLossa and their children James, Jason, and Elizabeth “B” Morgan-DeLossa.

He passed away at home in his bed, as he always had wanted, peacefully and in his sleep in the small hours of July 31, 2023.

July 31 was Cary’s birthday.

Awards and Honors (partial list)

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August 5, 2023, Natick, Massachusetts (revised August 26, 2023) This website is a work in progress, created and maintained by Jason’s family. We will add material as we receive it and are able to create it. Priority will be given to posting reminiscences and photos that we receive for the website.

To contact the family, please use this e-mail: wjm-in-memoriam@hotmail.com.

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