100-year-old Moses Lake woman lives remarkable life

MOSES LAKE — Delight Morrison Leas is one of those people who didn’t talk much about her life. But her son Terry Leas said he wishes she’d reminisced a little more, since it’s been remarkable.

Morrison Leas, now of Moses Lake, celebrated her 100th birthday last month, but it was a bittersweet celebration.

She is battling dementia.

Morrison Leas went overseas in World War II and spent most of the war years in London, working as a telephone switchboard operator. Occasionally after the war she’d read a story, or see something on television, which would spark a memory she would pass on to her son. But she wasn’t the sort to reminisce, Terry Leas said.

“She never spoke much about it (her military service),” Terry Leas said. “She comes from that generation where they were pretty tight-lipped.”

Morrison Leas graduated from high school in 1939, and went on to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. World War II started on Labor Day weekend that year; the German army invaded Poland on Sept. 1.

Kids like Morrison Leas lived the lives of college and high school students, or as young people just getting a start in the workforce, against the background of war raging in Europe and trouble brewing in Asia.

Life went on in the U.S., a little uneasily, for more than two years. She was 19 on Dec. 7, 1941, when the U.S. was swept into the war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

She was the fourth of the five Morrison kids. In the aftermath of the attack, young people rushed to enlist in the armed forces, and her two older brothers and older sister were among them. Morrison Leas followed them, her son said, enlisting in the Women’s Army Corps in August 1943.

She shipped out to London, part of the tsunami of young Americans who crashed over Great Britain. She ran a switchboard and was a clerk-typist.

It was different in 1943 — Dwight D. Eisenhower couldn’t just text Omar Bradley or George Patton. Radio and telephones provided the fastest communications, but both needed operators. That was where girls like Morrison Leas came in. She took the call, and it was her job to make the connection with a series of plug-ins.

Terry Leas said she must’ve had a pretty high security clearance, since she recalled taking calls from the highest-ranking generals. World War II was a fight for the highest of stakes, and tension ran pretty high. Morrison Leas could remember some pretty explosive words sometimes when she connected the parties.

“She had insight into the relationships and the personalities,” Terry Leas said.

Morrison Leas was in London on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944.

“She talked about the sky being full of aircraft,” Terry Leas said.

By 1943, London wasn’t under attack, but that changed in 1944. The German military invented a pair of unmanned aerial vehicles, equipped them with warheads and aimed them at London.

The switchboard girls and the clerk-typists took their chances just like any other resident of London. Morrison Leas was in a building that was hit by a buzz bomb, as one of the weapons was called, and told her son about being blown across the room. She sustained only minor injuries, but other residents of London weren’t as lucky.

She also remembered seeing British troops on cleanup duty at impact sites, removing parts of human bodies.

“It must’ve been a horrible, horrible experience,” Terry Leas said.

When the Allied headquarters made the crossing to France, Delight went with them.

The war ended in September 1945, six years and one day after it began, and she was discharged with the rank of sergeant in November 1945.

For her service, she was awarded the Victory Medal, the American Service Medal, WWII, the European-African-Middle Eastern Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.

The war left ruin in its wake, from the French-Spanish border to the Volga River in Russia.

Millions of people were refugees, their families dead and their homes destroyed. Millions more had survived concentration camps, or lived in camps set up for displaced persons. Morrison Leas was proud of the work she did with women who survived the war.

She told her son one of her most fulfilling

jobs in the Army was teaching English to women and teaching how to use military switchboards.

She came home, married and had a child.

Her husband Harry Leas was a career Air Force man, and the family spent time overseas, Terry Leas remembered.

Harry Leas died in 1965, and left Delight Leas as a single mom.

“She had to be mom and dad,” Terry Leas said. “She was the one who would get out in the yard with my friends and me and pitch (baseball).”

And as a military veteran, military wife and military mom, she was strict. She liked order, her son said.

“I think that’s why I’m pretty much a neat freak,” Terry Leas said.

After her son graduated from high school, she took off on a series of adventures.

“She’s always had this burning desire to travel, and see, and do,” Terry Leas said.

She liked visiting Europe, and she took the tours, but she also went her own way.

She climbed glaciers in Norway and stayed in a yurt in Mongolia.

She rode camels in Egypt and climbed the mountains of the Greek island of Santorini.

She traveled throughout central Asia, and she didn’t waste a minute.

“I don’t know if they (Morrison Leas and her traveling companions) ever slept,” Terry Leas said.

She was an artist and collector who loved to paint china and brought home keepsakes from places around the world.

Her son still has her memorabilia and photos.