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Note: {Morris M. Whitaker died at Jacksonville, Fla., on 30 Jan. 1944, after a heart attack. He was seventy years old.
Whitaker studied Naval Architecture at Cornell and in England (London school of Diesel Engineering) after graduation from Yale (Class of 1896). and was said at one time to be a motor boat specialist. In the First World War he did work for the Russian Navy as well as the U. S . Navy and Emergency Fleet Corporation. Recently he had been engaged with a company in Jacksonville ( Gibbs Shipyard) constructing Liberty Ships.
Mrs Whitaker, who with a young daughter survives him, may be addressed at "Harbor Lights, " Milford, Conn.. death announcement from the Yale Class Sec.
This is my dear father. I was unprepared for his death. He died on a Sunday morning. We were living outside of Jacksonville Fla. in a log house near a river. We had moved in there just a week previous after an extended period in a Motel, while my father searched for a rental house. He wrote to his friend Grace Truman Albertson, � It is easy to find a place that will take a child but not one that will take a dog.� (King)
I accompanied my father, in the car, to go to buy a Sunday paper. On the way back he slowed the car and pulled it over to the right. We must have been going 10 miles an hour. I looked at him and he was gray with sweat running down his face. I said, �Daddy, what�s the matter� I think he must have said, � I don�t feel well.� or something to that effect. We continued in this manner and I became more and more alarmed. I was begging him to let me drive. � I can do it, I know I can� He continued to gently say �No� I was supprised that he didn�t get angry with me as I was really insisting. We finally arrived at the little house and my mother helped Daddy into the living room and on to my single bed that was near the front door. She told me to go to the neighbors and call an Ambulance. The nearest house was about a mile up the road. It seemed to take for ever to get there. They called and I started back. When I arrived my mother said, �Don�t go in, he�s gone. Go back and tell the neighbors that your father has died.� I did peek in at him and saw him lying there on the bed with his mouth open and a hankerchief tied around his head to hold his chin closed. I can still see the whole scene. I was 2 months into my 11th year. I walked back to the neighbors to tell them and they looked very sad. On the way back to the log house I lost my hearing temprorarily. I remember thinking, �Even the birds aren�t singing�.
Nyack, Oct. 16th. 38
Sara dear,
The attached manuscript was writen by your grandfather to the Editor of the North Adams Transcript, discribing the escape of the Harriet Lane from the port of Galveston, loaded with cotton to England, during the civil war. Father was an officer of the Lackawanna, and the escape of this vessel was a sore point to the Northern blockade fleet. For your information I will say, that during the civil war, aside from any patriotic motives, the officers and men of the blockading fleet, received a part of the prize money derived from the sale of the captured vessel and its cargo, which gave an added incentive to their efforts. I remember father telling of being one of the prize crew (that is the crew put on board of a captured vessel, to take it to a port controlled by the northern fleet.) The vessel he spoke of was called the Planter. It was captured by the vessel in which hewas, and was a stern wheel river type of boat, which made its navigation along the Atlantic coast much more dangerous. He tells of the trip north to New York and of being hailed one dark foggy night. It seems that the rebel officer wol was retained as navigator, was planning to run the vessel under the guns of some Confederate port, and have ot recaptured by the rebles. The hail asked what ship it was. The reply was "Prize ship Planter, bound for New York". "Do you know where you are" "No" "Well you are at the entrance of Charleston harbor." It was a narrow escape from re-capture, but the crew brought the ship safely to New York. During the civil war, the rebles, tried to ship cotton to England (the english cotton mills were almost all closed, because of inability to secure raw material) and with the money derived from the sucessful sale of cotton Southern army would buy arms and materials to carry on the war against the North. (they had no arms or munitions factories to speak of).
I was born shortly after the Civil war, and heard father and mother discuss incidents in it with their friends, until it seemed to me as a boy, that I had almost lived through it and its experiences.
As you grow larger, you will probably hear discussion of the word war until you in turn will live through its struggle and horrors.
That dear, seems the way of the world. I have lived through the period of two wars, and I hope you may be spared such an experience.
Daddy
{Greenport, June 2nd, 1943
Sara, dearest,
As the days go by, and I ponder more on the principles of life it seems fitting that I should transmit them to you, who will carry on when I am no longer here. So, as these things came to me, out of my experience in life, and out of the great reservoir of nature, who surrounds us, I want you to know them, and think over them, when the realization of maturity, makes you able to understand them. You will not see them now, for you are too young to understand.
My father always tried his best to put me wise, as far as he knew. When I asked questions, if he knew the answer, he told me straight. If he did not know he told me so, saying, I believe this to be the truth. This in turn, I am trying to do for you. Your mother and I have had opportunities, which come only to the few, who are ready to absorb them, and make use of them. You remember my telling you the principles of learning. SILENCE, that is making your mind blank of your own thought. LISTENING, so that you may hear what the one trying to teach you is saying. REMEMBERING, that you may think over what is said thinking this over that you may UNDERSTAND, and when you fully understand, that you may act on what is imparted to you.
SILENCE
LISTENING
REMEMBERING
UNDERSTANDING
ACTION
Nature is a wonderful thing, it is all there is, and ignorance of it brings about almost all the crime and sadness of this world. Nature is God and God is nature. There is none other.
What we call death does not always come with the stoppage of breathing. To one who is healthy, that is who has followed the dictates and principles of nature, may suspend breathing for long periods, and yet come back to what we call life. The Hebrew bible says, "Be still and know that I am God" To me, that means that stilling the wanderings of the mind, permits one to see and know intuitively, more than is given to the run of mankind.
When one is healthy, the sympathetic nervous system, carries on life's functions, and this nervous system, carries on beyond what we call death. It gradually disintegrates, and then the particles of matter emit various forms, solid, liquid and gaseous, return to the great reservoir of the universe. So , dear girl, and interference with this process, I think to be wrong, cremation, or other means of hastening natures method will interfere with this gradual transition, which occurs when one is placed in the ground.
In nature, there are pairs of opposites, light and dark, truth and falsity, up or down, male or female. These act on each other and through action and reaction, which is its opposite, the world as we know it, goes on. Why, we don't and cannot know, so why worry about it. The action and reaction of these principles constitute all of knowledge, that is given to mankind to know.
The action of male and female, in creation, is one of these principles, which it is supremely necessary to know. It is called sex, and sex knowledge. This is the basis of all religion, and religion is the practice of a philosophy, be it Christian, Buddhist, Mohamedism, or what have you. All are based upon this. In the Christian philosophy, sex is thinly veiled, that those who know may understand. Jesus said, "to you it is given to know the truth." to all others he spoke in parables, that is he told a story, which his followers and disciples understood. Voltaire said, "Language is used to conceal thought as well as express it." Thus those who can read beneath the double talk, can understand the truth, concealed within it.
So dear girl, as you grow older, your mother and I will try to convey to you an understanding, of what lies beneath----- the kernel of the truth, covered by the husk, to keep the unthinking from learning and prostituting the truth. As Jesus said, "They have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, neither do they understand."
Sex, and sex expression, is a beautiful thing. It is unclean only to the unclean. In sex expression, the participants, become in fact creators, like unto what we call God. The Hebrew bible, speaks of the "temple, not made with hands". This refers to the female generative organs, in which the new life is formed. Holy communion refers to the sexual act, and that is the highest act and most sacred of life.
Over the arch of a church in Florida, I saw this "The lord is in his holy temple" That symbolized the union of the male and female principles in creation.
Most so called Christian people, and the ministers who are supposed to lead them do not know this.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity refers to the organs of the sexes, and the resulting progeny (father mother child). It also refers to the three elements of time, past, present and future. This use of symbology, is intended to convey a truth of nature, to those ready to receive it.
The Christian doctrine of the "Immaculate conception" means conception under immaculately clean conditions. Clean both is the minds and bodies of the participants in the act. The church, so called do not know this and tries to give it an improbable and foolish explanation.
This explanation, is given to you dear girl, because I love you, and think you worthy to know. It is a philosophy commonly known as Phallicism which underlies all religion. It is so called from the Greek name of the male organ of generation. It is in this world today, with the depraved thought of the masses, a term of reproach, and must never be referred to, unless you want the world at large to consider you, as depraved as themselves.
The above, dear girl, is the real stuff, as I have learned and believe it. It should not be imparted by you to any one, except and only when you are assured in your own mind and heart that they are worthy of his sacred knowledge, and are ready to receive it, and act in accordance with its teaching. May I add that those worthy are few and far between. It should not be imparted even to your own husband, until you have known him intimately forell/rs, and feel deep down inside that he will hold these truths inviolate. If your children are immaculately conceived, you can in turn pass this on to them but not otherwise.
This is Monism-- the philosophy of the oneness of all.
Daddy}
April 9 1943
Our minds, or our thinking power, is part of the great universal "mind" that cause of every manifested thing.
"Manifested" to my mind means that which our senses can understand which are understandable through the faculties with which we are endowed at birth, and which as the years go on, of our life, we increase in perception. Our minds are limited in their scope, but some individuals, through meditation can understand more than those whose whole existence on the earth, is given to pursuit of money, and other things which in the end must be given up.
"All we can carry in our cold dead hands is what is given away" This to my way of thinking means, that we have a duty and pleasure of helping others not so well situated in life, who have not had the chance to learn, absorb and live, the truths of existence. In other words, we live and die alone, meeting , loving, and participating with all humanity in the common things of life, but in the end go to the long sleep, alone, as we came, leaving to those who follow us, just what we have acquired on our journey, which we are able to get them to understand.
Your mother and myself, have had opportunities given to few. In as far as we are able so to do, we have tried to transmit these qualities, as part of your being. Make the most of every chance given you, that in turn you may transmit these things to your own children.
In what goes before, it is my effort to set down for you, some of the knowledge and understanding, I have so far acquired in life.
Daddy}
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