Willie Lee Morrow

Willie Lee Morrow was born October 9, 1939, in Eutaw, Alabama to the parents of Olean and Hollie Morrow. As a child growing up in the south, Willie knew at the young age of four years that he wanted to be a barber. He first took to hair-cutting when he was twelve. It became his ticket to bigger things. Morrow recalled that only the "A" students had a shot at college, and lacking that, "you couldn't be nothin' but a cotton picker or a brick layer or nothin' but a sharecropper." From earliest childhood, however, he dreamed of achieving far more. The answer seemed to lie in the barbering to which he was first exposed at the age of thirteen, when he began cutting his seven siblings' hair. He worked very hard in the cotton fields being the son of a sharecropper. There were many chores on the farm that needed to be completed before the day was finished. The story goes is that Morrow's father, Hollie, ran bootleg whiskey in his spare time as a sharecropper, and from the proceeds of both, he scraped up the money to send his eldest son away to barber college in San Diego, California. Willie lived with his uncle near 30th Street and Logan Avenue while he attended classes at the ...[more]

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ependent Barber College downtown on Fifth Avenue. He graduated Barber College in July of 1959 and returned to his home in the south, but Willie said, "When I got back, it didn't look the same anymore." "The fields seemed harder." And again. ''The sun seemed . . . hotter." So he came back to San Diego where a barber named Horace Smith gave him a job and he earned seventeen dollars in his first week of work at "Smitty's." Smith's shop stood in the middle of the same block that would later become the Morrow Facility, a two-story California Curl Company complex, on the south side of Market between Forty-second and Morrison streets. Dr. Willie Morrow joined St. Stephen's Church of God In Christ under the leadership of the late Bishop George Dallas McKinney in 1977. Willie was called home to glory on June 22, 2022 after succumbing to an extended period of illness. This multifaceted giant of a man blazed a trail of which few have paralleled. It is not possible to summarized his contributions and achievements on a few pages, so suffice it to say, the world is a better place because he came this way, and many that had the priviledge of meeting him are better for it. Dr. Morrow was preceded in death by son Todd. He leaves to treasure his memories and continue his legacy his loving wife Gloria Morrow; daughters Cheryl Morrow and Angie Morrow; four sisters and three brothers; other family members, and many friends and associates. Dr. Willie Morrow will be dearly missed . . .