ADELE FERGUSON: Harry Morgan had marital link to Washington state

WHEN I READ and saw the news stories about the Dec. 7 death of Harry Morgan, best known in his longtime acting career as Col. Sherman T. Potter in the TV show “M*A*S*H,” I searched through them for any mention of his connection to Washington State.

I found none, although I remembered that years ago, I had read in my local newspaper, the Bremerton Sun, that he was in trouble with the police for abusing his wife. I remembered that Port Orchard was mentioned in the story although not why. He did not, and I checked into it, reside there at the time. Anyway, I put my computer junkie daughter to work researching the facts.

THE MORGANS never lived in Port Orchard so far as I knew either as Morgan or Bratsburg which was the name he was born with in Detroit April 10, 1915, changing it later for his acting career. Actually, he started out as Henry Morgan but changed it to Harry because there already was a fairly well known actor named Henry Morgan. He was married twice. His first wife, Eileen Ann Detchon, was born June 26, 1913 “in Washington,” according to the computer search, which never gives the city unless you pay a membership fee to the search source which I did not choose to do. Her parents were Daniel D. Detchon and Myrtle Clark.

I did call the Department of Health vital statistics office in Olympia to see if I could find out Eileen’s birthplace in Washington but no soap. I would have to furnish her name, parents’ name and city and county of birth to get that. The city is what I am trying to find out from you, I told DOH, but no way.

According to the computer, Eileen was living in Spokane in the l930s. She was married for 45 years to Harry Morgan. They had four sons, Chris, Charles, Paul and Daniel, who died in 1989. The Morgans were married until her death in 1985 in Los Angeles.

MORGAN MARRIED again Dec. 17, 1986, to Barbara Bushman Quinn, a granddaughter of the famed silent films actor, Francis X. Bushman, who survives him. It was Barbara that Morgan was accused in 1997 of abusing a year earlier, a beating that left her with injuries to an eye, a foot and an arm.

There is no explanation as to why the charges were brought a year after the abuse but prosecutors dropped them after Morgan completed six months of domestic violence counseling.

Eileen, however, apparently was the love of his life. He got her name into many of his movies and television shows.

The photograph on Cot. Potter’s desk in M*A*S*H that he refers to as his wife Mildred is an actual photo of Eileen. Morgan was on that show from 1975 until it ended in 1983.

When Morgan played Bill Gannon, the police officer partner of Jack Webb in “Dragnet,” he used Eileen for his wife’s name.

Her name also was used when he played a businessman in “High Noon,” and when he was a crook in the western comedy, “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”

The drawing of the horse that hung on the wall behind Col. Potter’s desk was done by grandson Jeremy Morgan.

Morgan was 96 when he died of pneumonia in Los Angeles after 70 years of acting on the stage, in the movies and television. His favorite role, says the Los Angeles Times, of the hundreds he played, was in “The Oxbow Incident.”

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)