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Bill Morgan – RIP

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D. D. Degg May 9, 2021 1 minute 0 comments

Sports writer, promoter, cartoonist Bill Morgan has passed away.

William Edwards (Bill) Morgan, Jr.
December 13, 1931 – February 9, 2021

From the obituary: 

He was sports editor for the Lufkin Daily News from 1953 to 1955, when he went to the Dallas Morning News as a sportswriter. In 1960, the fledgling Dallas Cowboys hired him away from the Morning News to work in their public relations department.

He worked for the Cowboys until 1965, when he went back to his first love, the newspaper business. He was on the city desk at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1966, then worked the city desk and as a feature writer for Sunday Magazine with the Dallas Times Herald from 1966 to 1969. He left the Herald in 1969 to take a job as public relations director for the Southwest Conference, where he stayed until he retired in 1986.

During the time he worked for the SWC, Bill created and drew a syndicated comic strip called Sport Day, and he illustrated the NCAA football, basketball, and baseball rules books.

Bill Morgan’s Sport Day ran from 1981 to 1984, mostly in Texas newspapers.

More from the obituary:

A tremendous artist, in the early ’90s, he sketched old churches in Dallas County, researched their histories and architecture, and compiled them into a calendar for 1992 called Covenants on the Prairie.

Inspired by his elder daughter’s law practice, he began researching and painting Texas county courthouses as a hobby, starting with Dallas County. Following the Covenants on the Prairie calendar, he put together a series of courthouse calendars for 1995 through 1999 based on his paintings and histories. He was approached by a Fort Worth publisher to turn the calendar subjects into a coffee table book, which resulted in the publication in 1999 of Old Friends: Great Texas Courthouses.

Here are examples of Bill’s writing about the Great Texas Courthouses.

Bill is remembered by a longtime family friend:

In many families there is a close friend whose good humour, talent and kindness illuminates their lives in many immeasurable ways. Our friend Bill Morgan exemplified the type of family friend with whom you would one day trust with your father’s ashes. There will be more about the ashes later.