Beloved former Springfield mayor and state legislator Bill Morrisette remembered for his distinctive style 

They called him “Mayor Bill” and “Wild Bill” and sometimes had to shield their eyes when glancing at his loud and colorful ties. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Springfield who would have wanted it any other way.

After all, Bill Morrisette was the walking, talking embodiment of all things Springfield.

The former teacher, mayor and state legislator, who championed regional cooperation with Eugene and the rest of Lane County, opposed anti-gay ordinances and helped shepherd his city through the 1998 shooting at Thurston High School, died Tuesday of natural causes at The Cottages Senior Living, a memory care facility in Portland, his family said. He was 93.

“Bill Morrisette embodied what it means to serve community with compassion and clarity,” current Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon said in a statement. “His work lives on in the civic institutions he helped strengthen, the students he inspired and the countless lives he touched. He was a true public servant and a pillar of Springfield’s story.”

Born and raised in Montana, Morrisette and his wife, Janice (who died in 2013), moved to Springfield in 1961 after spending seven years in Portland. They raised eight children in Springfield, and Morrisette taught social studies at Springfield High School from 1962 to 1990.

A centrist Democrat, Morrisette’s political itch started long before he retired from teaching, serving as chairman of the Lane County Democratic Party starting in 1980. He served a term on the Springfield City Council from 1987 to 1989 before running for mayor, defeating incumbent Rich Gorman in the November 1988 election.

Morrisette served a decade as Springfield’s mayor, leaving halfway through his third term after he ran unopposed for state representative in 1998.

“Bill was a cantankerous soul, but he had a heart of gold and he had the public interest foremost in his mind,” said former Register-Guard columnist Don Bishoff, who served as Morrisette’s legislative aide in Salem for several years after he joined the state senate in 2002.

‘A Herculean task’

Morrisette was born in the Montana mining town of Anaconda on Oct. 18, 1931, according to his Wikipedia page. He was a star athlete at Anaconda Central High School, becoming the first student in school history to letter in four sports — football, basketball, baseball and track and field — according to a story in the Nov. 18, 1948 edition of the Anaconda Standard newspaper. 

He went on to play football and run track at Carroll College, in Helena, Montana. 

An Oct. 22, 1952, story in Helena’s Independent Record newspaper, titled “Carroll Spirit Exemplified Best By Working Student Who is One-Man Practice Squad Pupil,” detailed how Morrisette quit football after marrying Janice, whom he met in Helena, in 1951 so he could earn money working at Foley Mill and Cabinet Works. 

But his coach, John Gagliardi, wanted the 175-pound tackle back on the team, so he offered to coach him one-on-one — even serving as a personal blocking dummy — whenever Morrisette had time, so long as he could get off his swing shift for games.

“It just goes to show you what a fellow who likes football will do to play the sport for his own satisfaction and the benefit of his school,” Gagliardi told the newspaper.

Morrisette’s competitiveness, which included being a conference champion miler at Carroll College, would serve him well in politics.

During his first year as Springfield mayor, Morrisette got wind that another Springfield, the one in Massachusetts, had set a Guinness World Record mark for the most pancake breakfasts served at 33,869.

Never one to back down from a challenge, Morrisette thought the 1989 Lane County Fair would be a good spot for a new world record, even flying the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, Mayor Mary Hurley, out for the event, where he poured batter for four and a half hours, according to an Associated Press story. 

Alas, it was not to be, as city of Springfield staffers served 17,125 pancake breakfasts between 7:30 a.m. and noon that day.

“It is indeed a Herculean task to break the world record of 33,000,” Morrisette said. “We came halfway there, and I believe that we’ve learned a lot about what we have to do in the future.”

If that was all in good fun, many of the things Morrisette had to deal with during his decade as mayor were not.

He found himself in the middle of a state ethics investigation in 1991 over something he thought was ludicrous.

“I guess I have to decide whether or not I’m going to run again,” Morrisette told Bishoff for a June 5, 1991, column in the R-G. “I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

Morrisette was reacting to the news that the state Government Ethics Commission was filing charges against him and Eugene Mayor Jeff Miller over the two having accepted all-expenses-paid trips for them and their wives to the University of Oregon football team’s appearance in the 1989 Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Ducks first bowl game in 26 years. 

Bishoff opined the mayors should not have accepted the gifts because it just didn’t look good. 

The mayors argued they were representing their cities in an official capacity. Miller decided to reimburse the UO the $1,358 in expenses for him and his wife, but Morrisette refused.

“I see no reason for it,” he said. “I don’t want to give the appearance that I did something wrong in the first place, and that’s the message I believe repayment would send.”

That was typical of Morrisette, Bishoff recalled. “Once he made a decision, he wasn’t going to back down. I sort of admired that.”

The case was ultimately dismissed after the state commission missed a 120-day deadline for legal action, according to news reports. 

Opposing the OCA

Morrisette found himself dealing with what he said was another injustice, this one on a much larger scale and of greater societal impact. 

In the fall of 1991, half the Springfield City Council tried to abolish the city’s Human Rights Commission for trying to add gay rights to its work. After a heated six-hour meeting, Morrisette cast a tie-breaking vote at 1:45 a.m. to maintain the commission. He then called for the three councilors involved to resign or face a recall vote.

“The commission will limp along, intimidated by the three councilors who feel it shouldn’t exist,” he told The Oregonian newspaper. A recall vote will amount to a cleansing process. Otherwise, this could tie up what we do for the next three years.”

The anti-gay effort in Springfield didn’t die there, though. The conservative Oregon Citizens Alliance put a measure on the city ballot in 1992 that would bar it from protecting homosexuals against discrimination and promoting, encouraging or facilitating homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism. It passed with 55.4 % of voters approving. 

That brought the city national attention that Morrisette found embarrassing. 

“Oregon Town Embroiled in Gay Rights Controversy,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

“Oregon Measure Asks State to Repress Homosexuality,” read one in The New York Times.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Springfield over the ordinance in 1993. “Good,” Morrisette told The Oregonian. “I’m saying good because it needs to be settled in the courts.”

In 1995, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld a state law that bars cities and counties from enforcing anti-gay rights ordinances. By then, the OCA had led 27 Oregon cities and counties to pass anti-gay measures, according to a Register-Guard story that year, but Oregon voters turned down statewide measures on the issue in 1992 and 1994.

‘The right mayor’

Morrisette would deal with more than one tragedy during his years as mayor, including the 1997 beating death of 3-year-old Tesslynn O’Cull, by her mother’s boyfriend, Jesse Caleb Compton, who was later sentenced to death. That and other child abuse tragedies led Morrisette to fight for anti-child abuse measures in Springfield and the rest of the state throughout his 12 years in the state legislature.

And there was May 21, 1998, the day Thurston High School student Kip Kinkel unleashed a firestorm of bullets on his classmates, killing two and wounding scores of others the morning after shooting his parents to death at home. 

“Bill Morrisette was the right mayor to be in that position,” said Sid Leiken, who served as Springfield’s mayor from 2000 to 2010, noting Morrisette’s many years of service as a high school teacher. “He was a calming influence in the community. He did it with grace and humility, and it was pretty amazing to watch him work.”

Morrisette would travel to Memphis, Tennessee, in June 1998 to meet with the mayors of four other cities devastated by school shootings during 1997–98 school year.

“The only thing that can be worse than what happened is if we don’t do something about it,” Morrisette told The Oregonian. “There are many little time bombs in the towns ticking and waiting to go off. We need to find a way to defuse them.”

Early in his term as state representative, Morrisette pushed for school safety measures, including a 24-hour hold on any student found to possess guns at school as Kinkel did the day before the killings at Thurston, and a bill in the legislature that would have established safe school alliances around Oregon and modeled after one formed in the Bend-LaPine School District. But it ultimately died in committee on the same day as the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999.

“I am thoroughly disgusted that some of my pro-gun colleagues are unwilling to provide hearings on school safety bills that deserve public debate, including one of mine, House Bill 2563, which encourages schools to establish a Safe School Alliance,” Morrisette wrote in an op-ed piece in The Oregonian on May 1, 1999.

‘Wild and colorful’

Morrisette was known for his collaborative efforts, remembered former Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey. They would often call one another when both were serving as mayor of their respective cities in the 1990s.

“Bill, what do you think about this?” Torrey would ask Morrisette more than once, and Morrisette would do the same. 

“He was a big part of making the Eugene area a success, and we were a big part of making the Springfield area a success,” Torrey said. 

Morrisette was also known for those ties. 

“They were wild and colorful and before their time,” Leiken said. “Later on, I ended up buying a bunch of Jerry Garcia ties, just to keep up with him.” 

To others, Morrisette was just a good friend, let alone the city’s leader.

“He just really, I felt, put Springfield on the map,” said longtime Springfield resident and journalist Rob Romig, who worked at the now-defunct Springfield News in the 1980s and ’90s, serving as editor before moving on to The Register-Guard, where he served as graphics director and senior editor for 21 years.

“He was so dedicated to the community,” said Romig, now a photo editor for The New York Times. “He was selfless, always had a kind word, always had a story that would make you laugh. He was just someone you wanted to be around.”

When the Morrisettes asked Romig and his wife, Cami, to go to the movies one day in the mid-’90s, “Well, why not?”

They went to see “Grumpy Old Men,” Romig recalled with a laugh. 

They even asked him to marry them (in 1995) Romig said. “He’s Mr. Springfield. He’s Mayor Bill. And he’s larger than life, and we thought, ‘We should ask him to officiate our wedding.’”

And?

“He did such a great job,” Romig said.

Funeral arrangements for Morrisette are pending, his family said via the city of Springfield.