Terry Morrison

1938 - 2022

Terry Morrison
September 2, 1938 - July 24, 2022
Terry Morrison died of heart failure on July 24th at the age of 83, twenty-eight years after his first of three heart attacks. He was born in poverty in the coal-mining town of West Frankfort, Illinois to deaf parents who often left him and his sister with his Grandma Pannie while they searched for work in Detroit. Pannie was a hard working woman who carried a pistol when collecting the pay for her miner husband and 2 stepsons who would otherwise have drunk it away. She taught her young grandson to stand tall and dream big. Shuffled between West Frankfort and Detroit, Terry from an early age was helping put food on the table with a paper route, caddying, and setting pins in a bowling alley.
His formal education ended at the 8th grade, and at age 16 Terry moved out on his own flipping burgers in a local diner until his 17th birthday when he joined the Air Force with a buddy because, as he put it, "I needed 3 squares and thought I looked better in blue." He hoped to be assigned to the motor pool, but by a fluke ended in Information Services, was trained to shoot photographs and write press releases, then sent to Loring Air Force Base in northernmost Maine, a Strategic Air Command base of nuclear armed B-52's. During those 4 long winters, he and two Air Force buddies dreamed of starting an ad agency in San Francisco, so on discharge in 1958 he drove across country to the City.
The ad agency didn't happen, but he did get a job as a night guard at KPIX News where he worked his way to film editor, and then, with a move to KRON, to newsreel cameraman. From 1963 to 1971 he covered the City, from the protests for equal hiring at auto dealerships and hotels, to demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and for Free-Speech in Berkeley; from the Patty Hearst kidnapping to the Zebra and Zodiak killings, all in the uniform of the day – sport coat and tie with a light meter on one hip and sometimes a gas mask on the other. He watched local news grow from 15 minute telecasts in black and white silent film to hour broadcasts in videotape, before leaving to freelance for the networks in 1971.
Then for the next 20 years he shot documentary film for ABC, CBS, NBC, the BBC, and National Geographic with his wife Donna as his camera assistant across the country and sometimes abroad. By 1994 videotape had so eclipsed film that he chose to be semi-retired when he suffered a massive heart attack at age 55. He turned completely to the hands-on restoration of his many loves – his 1891 San Francisco Victorian, his 1965 Porsche, his 1969 Maine-built sailboat, and a string of vintage German and English motorcycles.
He was a talented and well respected motion picture photographer who captured much of our changing times and survived some of life's crippling blows with determination and a sense of humor to the end. He is survived by a younger brother, 3 children by an early marriage, and Donna, his wife and partner of 50 years. Terry requested no memorial save for gifts to the Golden State Div. of the Salvation Army.