Cantankerous to the End, and a Great Friend

Cantankerous to the End, and a Great Friend

En route to Old Welbourne.

PHOTOS BY CROWELL HADDEN AND TIFFANY DILLON KEEN

By Winston Wood

They’ve lowered the lights at Galatoire’s, a hush has fallen over the bar at Peter’s Tavern near Gramercy Park. On Wall Street, the smart money is shorting shares of A. Smith Bowman Distillery, knowing that its sales of Virginia Gentlemen whisky will drop sharply. And in a lonely office in the bowels of Citifield in Flushing Meadow, Mr. Met sits slumped in a chair, a tear trickling down one cheek of his bulbous baseball head.

Nat Morison has departed all that he loved in life—classic jazz, dogs, baseball, ice hockey, the University of Virginia, bourbon, his pipe, good books, good conversation, the family home Welbourne, his many friends and extensive family -- and has gone to the big DKE house in the sky. A stroke claimed him October 10 at age 83.

To say he was one of a kind begs understatement. If you look up the word “cantankerous” in Merriam-Webster’s Illustrated English Dictionary, you’ll see his picture there. Cantankerous, though, in a good way, based on firm (yes, one might say stubborn) personal standards rather than sour attitudes.

He insisted, for example, that per tradition there are no “freshmen” at the U., only First-Year Men (especially men). It was the Battle of Sharpsburg, not Antietam. That people who wouldn’t want to live in New Orleans, Manhattan or Piedmont Virginia need psychiatric attention. And don’t get him started on opera or rock ‘n roll.

In the 40 some years I knew him, I never once saw him without a necktie, even once driving a tractor around the farm. I regularly offered to take him to watch his beloved Mets play the Nationals when they came to town, get good seats and chauffeur him back and forth, but he always declined.

“I’ve never liked Washington,” he’d say (all those statues of Yankee generals?), “And I’d be out of place with all those slobs dressed in red tee shirts.”

Do I exaggerate? Hardly. His standards, character and, again yes, his eccentricities, are there for all to see in Crazy Like a Fox, the movie that Richard Squires wrote and produced in 2004 inspired by Nat and filmed around the area. My children have never forgiven me for taking them on vacation when the casting call went out for people to appear as extras.

Hundreds turned out to show their regard and affection at his memorial service late last month at the family home. Lest you think it a spontaneous outpouring by family and friends, though, in typical Nat fashion he scripted the whole thing in instructions drafted years ago, including the music to be played and the eulogies NOT to be delivered.

The skirling of bagpipes signaled the start of the ceremonies, followed by a procession in New Orleans fashion of jazz musicians leading a horse-drawn wagon carrying Nat’s simple pine coffin down the long drive to the house.

Readings of prayers and psalms were followed by a second procession to the family cemetery three miles away for a graveside service, again to musical accompaniment dictated from the beyond. As his coffin was lowered into the hand-dug grave, friends and family members filed past dropping in assorted small tributes: flowers, a horse’s lead rope, Virginia Gentleman bottle caps, and a favorite stick ball bat. The crowd then trekked back to Welbourne for a celebration of Nat’s life that lasted well into the night.

According to his wishes, Nat Morison was buried in a simple pine box.

The service, on the iconic front porch of Welbourne, included prayers and psalms.

What with the Sunday stickball games, summer jazz camps, the justly famous Welbourne Cakewalks, Christmas Eve, 12th Night and Mardi Gras parties, milk punch after the 11:30 service at Trinity Church, and all the several other ways he brightened our lives, the consensus among his many, many friends is that things around Middleburg may never be quite the same.

En route to Old Welbourne.

The funeral cortege pulls out of the drive at Welbourne.

The casket is carried to its final resting place.

Sherry Morison extends a greeting to a young attendee.

In true New Orleans style, jazz musicians were very much a part of the service.