Marjorie Morse Crunden Papers

Marjorie Morse was born in China in 1913 to Dr. William Reginald Morse and Anne (Anna) Crosse Kinney Morse of Canada who were Baptist medical missionaries in China from 1909 to 1937. Dr. Morse grew up in a large family in Lawrencetown, Annapolis County, Nova Scotia. Marjorie, an only child, came with her parents to the United States in 1924 and remained there for her education after her parents returned to China. She lived with relatives and friends as she attended Newton High School in Newton, Massachusetts (graduated 1930), and Wellesley College (1930-1934), where she majored in sociology. In 1934, she began a three-year program for an R.N. and masters degree in nursing at the Yale School of Nursing. In New Haven in 1934, she met Allan B. Crunden, Jr. of Montclair, New Jersey, a graduate of Georgetown University, and a member of the Yale School of Medicine class of 1937. By the end of the year, she had agreed to marry him after completing her training. Crunden decided at this time that he did not like the "Yale System" with its lack of examinations, and thought that hospital training would be better in a larger city. He returned to Montclair, where he lived with his recently widowed father, and took laboratory and social science courses at Columbia University in the spring of 1936. In the fall of 1936, he resumed his medical education, taking his clinical years at Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia. Marjorie Morse continued her nursing education, much of it in hospital wards, in New Haven, West Haven, and on rotations to Rhode Island until her graduation in 1937. Much had to be decided on where and when they could be married and who would marry them. She was a Baptist and he a devout Catholic, she was not an American citizen, and she hoped her paents could attend. In the end, they married in July 1937 in London in a Church of England ceremony. Her parents were able to meet them in London on their way home from China to retirement in Lawrencetown. The Crundens lived in Philadelphia in the school year 1937-1938 where she served as a nurse-administrator at Temple and he completed his medical degree. The following two years, while Allan Crunden was serving hospital residency appointments in Jersey City and New York, Marjorie Crunden obtained an M.A. in education from Columbia University Teacher's College. She served briefly as an assistant in nursing education at Columbia. In 1940 they spent a year in Chicago with Allan Crunden's father. Allan Crunden was called into medical service in the Air Force in World War II. After the war, they lived in Montclair and other locations in New Jersey. He practiced as an obstetrician, while she was active in numerous civic and charitable organizations including the Montclair Board of Education, the Essex County Board of Health, the Montclair Public Health Nursing Service, and the Community Child Study Group of Montclair, which she organized. She was an expert tennis player and a local champion. The Crundens had two children, Robert Morse Crunden, later a prominent professor of American Studies at University of Texas, Austin, and Joan Crunden Lewis.