Written by my dad -- Sunday 12 June 2005
Since there is sometimes said to be a link between grandparents and grandchildren that “skips a generation”, I asked Grammie (my mother, Marjorie Mendenhall Hoffman), on behalf of my daughter (who, by universal agreement, greatly resembles Marjorie), to tell me about her grandmother, Geneva Pedlar Morrison.
Geneva (called “Neva” by her friends and family) was the daughter of Franklin and Glendora Hurlburt Pedlar, born in March 1875 in Woodland, California. Her father was a schoolteacher and later assistant director of the San Francisco Mint. (His activities in protecting the Mint after the great San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906 are another story.) One day when Neva was going home from a party, at the age of 18 or 19, she and her friend heard music and followed the sound to discover a Salvation Army band playing on the street corner. She became involved with the Salvation Army and their evangelistic work, which embarrassed her family. Her parents sent her to live with her grandmother in Sacramento, to distance her from the influence of the Salvation Army. Not long after her arrival, her grandmother (Mom…which grandmother? Do we know? This story is about grandmothers, after all!) took Neva to a camp meeting where a traveling evangelist from Kentucky was holding services. The evangelist,
Henry Clay Morrison, was a widower with three young children. He was about eighteen years Neva’s senior, and evidently a convincing suitor, for they were married a short time later.
Geneva Pedlar Morrison gave birth to five children. She had studied at California Polytechnical College (?) to become a schoolteacher, but after marrying, she traveled with her husband between California and Kentucky, spending two years in each location alternately, until Henry Clay Morrison became president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. After this, he continued to travel as an evangelist and fund-raiser for Asbury. During his absences, Neva directed operations at the college.
Once, at a camp meeting in Indian Springs, Georgia, a very poor young man came up to the Morrisons and told them he wanted to become a preacher. Neva told him if he would come to Asbury, she would see that he had a place to live and that he could go to college. The man’s name was
Zachary Taylor Johnson. Neva prepared a small storage shed near her house for Zachary and his wife, and she ensured that he graduated from the college.
(Mom, add details about Neva’s leg injury and wooden leg.)
In 1910, when Neva was pregnant with her fifth child, H. C. Morrison left on a year-long world tour with a group of other evangelists. During this time, she operated the school. One night in winter the heating plant of the college failed. Neva got up in the middle of the night and walked on her wooden leg down to ensure that the plant was repaired. Neva died in March 1914, at the age of 39. Marjorie never knew her grandmother.
One time in the middle 1940s, Marjorie was visiting college and walked into the cafeteria, where Dr. Zachary Taylor Johnson (now president of the college), called her aside and told her she looked like her grandmother Neva Morrison. Z. T. Johnson called Neva a “saint” (perhaps because she had been so kind to him years before, and perhaps partly because she put up with H. C. Morrison!) All her children thought of her as a saint, too, and adored her.
