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Mississippi State athletics

More than a half century later, four  members of the 1962 SEC Championship track and field team kneel in front of their team photo. The four are from left to right: Malcolm Balfour, Jimmy Taylor, Bob Morrison and Mike Sanders.

You couldn’t make up Grammy-winning song writer Bob Morrison’s life story, but then there’s no need for that. Morrison has lived it – all of it – and can tell it. He could write a song about it and sing it, too, and we’ll get to that.

Such a story…

About how he was born and raised in Biloxi with sand between his toes and music in his ears. About how his daddy, who operated juke boxes all over the Gulf Coast, brought home hundreds of records – music from all genres, which he listened to at length. About how a handsome young fellow drove his Cadillac down from Memphis to perform and how that that guy with the slicked-back hair stole the hearts of all the young Biloxi girls.

Rick Cleveland

About how Morrison was inspired. “Mama, I need me one of those guitars like Elvis,” young Morrison said.

About how his mama bought him “the worst guitar in the world” when he was 14, and how he began to teach himself to play.

About how he was “always good at math and science” – and also athletics. About how he grew long and lean and fast. About how he won the half mile in the state high school track meet. About how he was recruited to Mississippi State to run track and field and how he majored in – get this – nuclear engineering. About how he was one of several sophomores who helped State win its first and still-only Southeastern Conference track and field championship in 1962. About how he and some friends, including track teammates, formed a band and played fraternity house gigs for spending money.

“We didn’t make anybody forget The Beatles, but we did make a few bucks, and we did have some fun,” Morrison said Wednesday on his 78^th birthday.

There’s so much more…

About how he never really used that hard-earned nuclear engineering degree, because “my heart just wasn’t in it,” Morrison said.

Courtesy of Bob Morrison

Bob Morrison has persevered and succeeded as a song writer.

About how he wanted to make music his life and how he struggled for years to make that dream come true. He performed solo as a folk singer. He moved to New York City to try and make his mark there – and didn’t. On his agent’s advice, he moved to Hollywood in 1967, signed a contract with Screen Gems and made a pilot TV show that nobody bought. About how Screen Gems let him go.

About how he moved to Nashville in 1973, began to concentrate on writing songs and experienced far more failure than success at the beginning.

“My first 100 songs were turned down; nobody wanted them and I thought I was going to crash and burn,” Morrison said.

In retrospect, Morrison says, “I think I was always a good writer. I just had to learn to write Nashville songs.”

In other words, he needed to learn to tell stories, and he did.

His first “hit” was “The River’s Too Wide,” recorded by Olivia Newton John. That was 1975. “After that, I was rockin’ and rollin’,” Morrison said.

Yes, he was. He was ASCAP’s (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) Country Songwriter of the Year in 1978, 1980, 1981 and 1982. His and Debbie Huff’s Grammy-winning “You Decorated My Life” became a No. 1 hit for Kenny Rogers. Meanwhile, in Gulfport, two school teachers and aspiring song writers, Patti Ryan and Wanda Mallette, saw Morrison on TV accepting his Grammy for that song. They sent Morrison some of their songs, and he at first rejected them. They sent him some more songs – better songs – and one of those was “Lookin’ for Love.” Morrison saw promise in that one. So he revised some of the lyrics, cut the bridge in half and slightly altered the chorus medley.

Morrison says the song was turned down by various artists more than 20 times before he gave a cassette to an old Hollywood friend, who dropped it off at Paramount Pictures, which was filming “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta. “Lookin’ for Love,” recorded by Johnny Lee, became the theme song of the hit movie and then became a No. 1 country music hit and rose to No. 5 on the pop charts.

“You gotta know what you’re doing but you also have to have a little luck,” Morrison said of all the happenstance involved in that one song.

Morrison also has written songs recorded by the likes of Conway Twittiy, Barbara Mandrell, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gary Morris, The Carpenters, the Oak Ridge Boys, Bobby Vinton, Highway 101 and Bobby Goldsboro, among many others. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016.

Says fellow Mississippi songwriter and performer Tricia Walker of Cleveland: “When I first moved to Nashville to pursue song writing, the first person on my radar was Bob Morrison. He was the gold standard for writers and he was a Mississippian, which was encouraging for me.”

Morrison is well-remembered by his Mississippi State track teammates, including Jimmy Taylor, his roommate for four years, who later became a successful college basketball coach and then a banker.

“Bob is one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, could have done anything he wanted,” Taylor said. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you he once scored 44 points in a high school basketball game or that he could out-kick the guys who were punting for the Mississippi State football team.”

Morrison played a key role in State winning that SEC track and field championship in 1962. State went to the meet in Baton Rouge as a dark horse, rated behind perennial champion LSU and Auburn. The Bulldogs’ chances were hurt early in the meet when Mike Sanders, one of the team’s top runners, pulled a hamstring. Sanders, for whom the track facility at State is named, was the anchor on State’s mile relay team. As fate would have it, the championship came down to the mile relay. State had to finish ahead of LSU to win the title. Morrison, who normally was a half-miler, was moved into the Sanders’ anchor position.

“We had a big lead when I got the baton, but I still had to finish ahead of LSU’s anchor man who was a lot faster than I was,” Morrison remembers. “My strategy was to burn it up the first 200 meters and pray the last 200 that I could hold on. Somehow, I did. We didn’t win the event, but we finished third and we finished ahead of LSU.”

Just as he would in song writing, Morrison persevered and succeeded.

Fifty-eight years later, that championship  is the only SEC track and field team title State has ever won.

•••

Cleveland’s Grammy Museum will feature Bob Morrison in a live-streamed event August 17 as part of its Words and Music series. Details here.

The post Biloxi’s Bob Morrison: a half-miler, a nuclear engineer and a Grammy-winning song writer appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Meg Fuller teaches her second grade student at Ambition Prep in Jackson, Miss., Friday, August 7, 2020.

Donna Boone was ready for her school to reopen.

The superintendent at Forrest County Agricultural High School said her teachers received professional development, plans were in place, and parents had already decided whether they wanted their child enrolled in traditional or virtual learning for the new school year, scheduled to begin Aug. 10.

But then news came that Gov. Tate Reeves would make an Aug. 4 announcement about whether to reopen schools across the state, which has become one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 hotspots. Boone said she knew “there was a possibility that he was going to push it back, but we thought it would be for all of us.”

She watched the governor announce his decision in real-time Tuesday afternoon, when he said districts in just eight counties deemed coronavirus hot spots would have to push back their reopening date to Aug. 17 for grades 7-12. Her county, Forrest, was one of those counties, along with Bolivar, Coahoma, George, Hinds, Panola, Sunflower and Washington.

The school now plans to open its doors with in-person learning on Aug. 17. Parents have the option to opt-in to virtual learning, but most chose face-to-face instruction, she said.

“I won’t tell you that I wasn’t surprised,” Boone said of the governor’s announcement. “We find out everything when the public finds out everything.”

Boone is one of several school leaders forced to make last minute adjustments to already complicated school reopening plans. Before Reeves’ announcement this week, schools across the state were directed to decide for themselves how and when to open their doors this fall.

But Reeves’ decision further complicated those previous plans for several school districts affected by the order. Especially in districts previously scheduled to reopen virtually, there is confusion about whether they can do so.

Reeves’ order affects less than 7% of students in the state. However, 13 of the 21 school districts were planning to open before Aug. 17, so the other eight are not affected by the order. Six of these districts were already planning an all-virtual opening before Aug. 17 and are now fielding mixed messages about whether that’s allowed under the governor’s executive order.

The language in the executive order simply strips the power of local school boards in those eight counties to set the date for the opening of the school term for grades 7-12, and it sets the start date 2020-21 school year for these grades in these counties at Aug. 17. But the order does not mention virtual learning.

When asked by a reporter on Tuesday whether schools that had already planned a fully virtual opening could still do that before Aug. 17, Reeves responded: “There is absolutely no prohibition of virtual learning, of teaching, of catching kids up.”

But this answer conflicts with guidance school leaders are receiving from state education officials. In an email to superintendents, the Mississippi Department of Education wrote they reached out to the governor’s office for clarity on the executive order.

“We were advised that the delay in the academic year applies to all types of school schedules: virtual, traditional or a hybrid schedule,” the department wrote to the superintendents. “Therefore, school districts in the eight counties identified in the order may not start school for grades 7-12 until August 17.”

The mixed messages have spurred confusion at the local level.

At the Leland School District is in Washington County, officials were planning to start school Aug. 10 completely virtually. Alexandra Melnick, a high school English teacher at the Leland district, said when she first heard the governor’s announcement she thought her school wouldn’t be affected.

“This is the most confusing part. We all were very confident that (Reeves’ order) does not affect us at all because we’re doing the right thing. He even said in the conference that he’s not talking about us (districts going back virtually),” Melnick said.

Since the order came down, Leland has pushed all school — virtual or otherwise — back to August 17.

“There’s no good line of information from the governor’s office,” Melnick said. “I totally get why (the change) happened because nobody wants to be found out of compliance with an executive order.”

She’s frustrated that the order came this late in the pandemic, this close to the start of school and at this point in time when schools have spent months nailing down their plans for reopening. Instead of having adequate time to interpret the order and plan accordingly, districts are realigning their entire calendar year on a moment’s notice.

“That’s what’s so ridiculous about how Tate Reeves and MDE for that matter is behaving,” Melnick said. “They’re acting as if the decisions they’re making give us enough time to discern what’s going to happen. But in reality it’s causing an immediate, next-hour impact to all of these districts that were planning for three months.”

In the Forrest County School District, superintendent Brian Freeman said the executive order led him to make the decision to postpone all grades’ return to school to Aug. 17, rather than have grades K-6 return on the Aug. 10 as was originally planned.

“We could have opened the younger grades, but what that would have done was have our students on two separate calendars and our staff on two separate calendars, which would mean technically your staff would have to work an extra week somewhere at the end of the year or however you made up the days for those students,” Freeman said. “That could have been a budget killer.”

Like Forrest County AHS, Freeman’s district reached out to the community to ask what they wanted and landed on in-person instruction with the option for parents to choose all virtual. So far only about 20% of families have chosen virtual, he said, but after the governor’s announcement the district reopened virtual registration in case parents changed their mind.

South Panola School District, Coahoma Early College High School, and others moved their start dates back in compliance with the order. But others like Greenville, Clarksdale Municipal, and Sunflower County Consolidated districts had already made this decision ahead of the governor’s announcement, so the executive order did not technically affect them.

Sunflower County Superintendent Miskia Davis said the district pushed school opening back until September 8 more than a week ago. Instead of planning for a hybrid model, students will participate virtual only.

“We were closely watching the numbers, and noticed that the trajectory did not support our initial hybrid plan,” Davis said in an email. “The Sunflower County Consolidated School District is committed to doing whatever it takes to safely navigate these treacherous times, even if it means scrapping a plan that we have worked months perfecting, or implementing a plan that we’ve only had days to create.”

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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America

Capitol Building

The Legislature plans to reconvene Monday afternoon amid a battle with Gov. Tate Reeves, who has vetoed bills and refused to call lawmakers back into session, saying too many of them might still have coronavirus.

On Wednesday Speaker Philip Gunn and Pro Tem Jason White, the top two leaders of the GOP-controlled House, sued Republican Reeves over his line-item vetoes of much of the public education budget and parts of a federal COVID-19 relief spending bill for health care providers. They said Reeves does not have the constitutional authority to selectively pick and choose such items to veto in legislative spending — a long-running battle between the Legislature and governors, in which lawmakers have generally prevailed in court.

Reeves blasted the lawsuit as a “power grab,” accused some of his fellow Republican leaders of being “liberal,” and said his vetoes were protecting taxpayers from “payoffs from friends” and “pet projects” in Mississippi’s federal coronavirus relief spending.

Reeves, in his first year as governor after two terms as lieutenant governor, has frequently clashed with his fellow Republican legislative leaders. They have fought over whether the governor or Legislature has authority to spend $1.25 billion in federal COVID-19 aid for Mississippi — with the Legislature prevailing — and other issues. Reeves often clashed with his fellow Republican leaders when he was lieutenant governor, as he used a heavy hand in controlling spending and other legislation. As governor, he has relatively little power over legislation.

Reeves this week noted that lawmakers’ ability to call themselves back into session is very limited, per the Legislature’s own resolution. Otherwise, Reeves has sole authority to call lawmakers back for a special session and said he’s reluctant to do so now for lawmakers’ own health and wellbeing because of an outbreak of COVID-19 at the Capitol that infected about 50 lawmakers and staff in July.

The resolution legislators passed earlier this year allows Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, to jointly reconvene the Legislature for COVID-19-related issues. It could be argued that Reeves’ partial veto of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Acts bill for health care provides gives legislators the authority to reconvene as does changes in the federal rules on how states can spend the CARES Act money.

Of Reeves’ five vetoes or partial vetoes issued in early July, the most pressing is the partial veto of the bill funding kindergarten through 12th grade public schools. It will take a two-thirds vote to override any veto.

It also will take a two-thirds vote of both chambers to take up any issue other than coronavirus-related legislation, based on the resolution passed by legislators.

Any effort to try to override the education budget bill partial veto or the CARES Act partial veto would begin in the House.

The Legislature, with a two-thirds vote, also could try to pass a budget for the Department of Marine Resources, which provides regulatory and law enforcement services on the Gulf of Mexico. The Legislature adjourned on July 1 without being able to reach agreement on a budget for the agency.

Reeves also opined legislative leaders “don’t have the votes to override the vetoes” so they filed the lawsuit as a “Hail Mary.” He said many Republican lawmakers don’t want to fight with him and are concerned the Legislature is running amok with liberalism.

But legislative sources say the Republican leadership has the votes to override the vetoes and Reeves is overstepping his constitutional authority as governor.

Gunn and Hosemann on Friday issued a formal call for the session to reconvene at 1 p.m. on Monday.

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On the lawsuit, the Governor Tate Reeves said, “There’s a small group in the House that only wants to pick fights with me—some liberal Republicans who’ve joined forces with liberal House Dems. They run the show these days: Democrats and some left-leaning GOP politicians. (Republican) Trey Lamar and (Democratic caucus leader) Robert Johnson lead that crew around.”

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