Obituary of Hughlett Morris

Hughlett Lewis Morris has passed away at the age of 92 in Tucson, AZ, on June 13, 2023. He and his wife, Joan Marie Bodenham Morris (deceased 1998), had three children: Scott, Amy, and Dirk (deceased in 2020). Hugh Morris was born in 1931 in Big Rock, Tennessee to a very poor family. With incredible grit and ambition he made his way through college, working at a pharmacy, a restaurant, and in the corn fields of Iowa earning a PhD in Speech Pathology at the University of Iowa.

As a professor of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa, he was a project director of multimillion-dollar grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for over 20 years. He authored 89 peer-reviewed articles and wrote multiple textbooks involving speech disorders and evaluation and treatment of children born with cleft palate. An editor for multiple research journals, his work was recognized and respected all over the world. He received honors and awards from state, national, and international academic and research organizations. Although he himself was a stutterer, he was a gifted and admired speaker, teacher, and mentor. He loved to encourage his students to become good thinkers, to ask good questions, and to be caring and skilled clinicians.

After retirement, he wrote six books of fiction and traveled the world, in wonder of the distance he had come in his life, from the Great Depression all the way through the Mars landing and beyond. He saw the value of people above all else, and as a husband, father, clinician, scholar, leader, and teacher, will be remembered by scores of those who knew him.