“Leona was a legitimate member of the Eyewitness News team,” said Marty Bass, longtime WJZ-TV personality and a friend.
“She opened the eyes of parents and baby boomers to the world of seniors and she wanted to help them. She cared, and the guys she worked with, like her longtime cameraman Wayne Butrow, felt her energy,” he said. “She was on the cutting edge and brought a new way of looking at senior life.”
Leona Sara Morris, who was born in Baltimore, was the daughter of Samuel Morris, a merchant, and his wife, Sadie Morris, a homemaker.
Miss Morris grew up in small towns in Virginia, the Eastern Shore and Union Bridge, before returning to Baltimore, where she graduated in 1931 from Western High School.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Goucher College in 1935 with a degree in history and received a master’s degree in the same subject in 1937 from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Miss Morris also studied at Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, American University, San Francisco State University, the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto.
Miss Morris began teaching English and history in 1940 in Baltimore public schools, Southern High School and Polytechnic Institute, and seven years later joined the original faculty of what was then the newly established Baltimore Junior College as an instructor in history and sociology.
She was named assistant dean of the college in 1958, a position she held for two years, until being appointed dean of student personnel in 1960 at what eventually became the Community College of Baltimore, and in 1992, Baltimore City Community College.
Miss Morris retired in 1974.
After 13 years, she was lured out of retirement when a retired businessman and acquaintance who had read a story about a 65-year-old Los Angeles woman had been hired by a local station to be their senior citizen beat reporter wrote to officials at WJZ-TV suggesting that Baltimore needed to do the same thing.
