Ben O. Morgan was born in Antlers, Oklahoma on December 12, 1911.  He was the last of six children.  His father was John S. Morgan, who was born in 1865.  John was an Indian scout and later a railroad man.  He eventually settled in Clarendon, Texas in about 1916.  His wife was surnamed Disharoon.  We do not know much about her.  Ben Morgan’s grandfather was John Morgan of Antlers, Oklahoma.  He was a hard-shelled Baptist missionary among the Choctaw Indians.  His wife was a Choctaw.

Ben Morgan’s oldest brother was Otis Morgan, owner of Morgan Pipe and Supply of Wichita Falls, Texas.  His other brother was Otho Morgan, owner of General Machine and Supply Company of Wichita Falls, Texas.  Ben Morgan went to Draughn’s Business College in Wichita Falls, Texas.  After graduation, he went to work for his brother, Otho at General Machine.  General Machine was initially a main line machine shop that did work for oil field equipment using lathes, drill presses, shapers, and other machine tools.  Ben became fascinated with internal combustion engines and persuaded his brother to purchase a defunct LeRoi engine to take apart and repair.  The repaired engine was sold at a handsome profit.  Ben persuaded his brother to let him open an engine repair station in General Machine.  Soon the repair business was booming and became a major part of the business.  General Machine became a dealer for LeRoi engines in about 1938.  At that time, LeRoi had a branch office in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Odessa, Texas became an oil boomtown of note in about 1939, and Ben persuaded his brother to allow him to open a branch office in Odessa.

In 1940, Ben moved to Odessa with his small son, Ronnie, and his wife, Margaret.  He opened the first branch office of General Machine on 2nd Street in Odessa, across from the long-time office at 713 W. 2nd.  In December 1941, World War II started.  Most of the employees of General Machine were drafted or joined the service.  During WWII, Ben repaired engines used for drilling oil wells and pumping oil.  New engines were unavailable.  Ben was diabetic and was not drafted.

After WW II, Ben managed the branch office in Odessa successfully.  In March 1947, Otho Morgan died.  The Morgans moved back to Wichita Falls so Ben could manage the main shop.  Ben sold the Wichita Falls operations to Nortex Engine and Equipment from Lubbock in 1948.  The family moved back to Odessa in November 1948.  They initially lived in apartments above the shop at 713 West 2nd Street.

During the stay in Wichita Falls in 1947-48, Ronnie found a college textbook on astronomy in a window seat in his bedroom.  The book was “Astronomy,” by Dr. John Charles Duncan, of Lowell Observatory and Mt. Holyoke College.  (I still have the book.)  Ronnie read and reread the book with the aid of a dictionary and some kind teachers at Ben Franklin Elementary in Wichita Falls.

A neighborhood boy named Dick Nelson, the son of Dr. Nelson, Ronnie’s pediatrician, had an 8-power refractor and a 40-power refractor that he ordered from Sky and Telescope.  (Ronnie has been a continuous subscriber to Sky and Telescope since 1947.)  Ronnie begged Dick to let him look through the telescope.  After some urging (and a great deal of whining) Dick let Ronnie look through the 8-power telescope at the Moon.  It was love at first sight!!  Eventually, Ronnie got to look through the 40-power telescope, but it had no tripod and was a pain to operate.  It also was difficult to focus.

After the Morgans moved back to Odessa, Ronnie begged his father for a telescope.  On June 26, 1948, Ronnie received a Brownscope 2-5/8 inch refractor for his birthday (I still have the telescope).  It had a black baked enamel tube and a hardwood altazimuth tripod.  Ben and Ronnie set up the telescope in the alley between 1st Street and 2nd Street at 713 West 2nd.  Ronnie asked Ben what star he should look at.  Ben said “any star you want.”  Ronnie put a 45 power erecting eyepiece in the Brownscope and aimed at a bright star.  “Holy cow,” Ronnie exclaimed.  “It’s Saturn.”  Ben said, “Let me look.”  The two, father and son, spent many hours exploring the sky with that Brownscope.

In August 1948, the Morgans vacationed in Flagstaff, Arizona, where they usually went.  Ronnie was looking at a map of the area and noticed a small red square west of Flagstaff marked “Lowell Observatory.”  He begged his father to take him there.  Reluctantly, Ben and Ronnie drove up a steep dirt road to Lowell Observatory about 2PM on one week day.  The Observatory was having an open house.  Ronnie looked through all the photographs of clusters and planets in the Rotunda of the Observatory with wide-eyed amazement.  An older man was taking them on the tour.  Ronnie asked the man, “What’s your name?”  He replied, “John Charles Duncan.”  Ronnie exclaimed, “I’ve got your book.”  Thus became a fast friendship between Ronnie and the old man until Dr. Duncan’s death.

Dr. Duncan arranged for a student intern at the Observatory to show Ben and Ronnie through a large telescope that evening.  The intern’s name was James Schaldach.  He was a student at Cornell.  Ben and Ronnie met Schaldach at the Observatory about 8PM that night.  They went to the 13-inch Pluto Telescope dome and observed Saturn through the 7-inch Clark guide refractor for the 13-inch.  It was an unforgettable experience.  The seeing was perfect and the telescope was first rate, even though it had a crosshair guiding eyepiece.

Ben was an avid amateur photographer.  Even during World War II, he managed to hoard film to take pictures of his family and the business.  He had a CiroFlex twin lens reflex still camera and a Kodak Magazine 16 movie camera.  Black and white film was all that was available until after the war.  In 1948 Henderson Drug Store had a fire.  Ben and Ronnie went to the fire sale.  Among the items for sale was a Brownie Darkroom Kit.  The kit contained a contact printer, a small graduated beaker, three metal trays, and some chemicals.  Ronnie learned to develop film in a kitchen in one of the apartments above General Machine.  Ben soon became excited about developing photographs, and converted the kitchen into a darkroom.  Ben was not as excited about astronomy as Ronnie until they began to photograph the moon through the Brownscope.  The results were terrible, but the fun was definitely worth the long hours photographing, developing, and printing.

Ben bought some property in the Country Club Estates in Odessa in 1951.  Ben and Ronnie selected a Tinsley 12-inch Dall-Kirkham reflector to go into a small 10-foot dome on a small guesthouse on the property.  In 1954, Ben and Ronnie made many fine photographs of Mars during the summer opposition.  By that time, they had met Dr. Earl C. Slipher at Lowell Observatory.  Prints of the Mars photographs were sent to Dr. Slipher.  Ronnie was offered a position of being Dr. Slipher’s assistant for his expedition to use the 27-inch refractor at Lamont-Hussey Observatory in South Africa.  Ronnie’s parents were afraid Ronnie would be attacked by wild animals in Africa, so he spent the summer of 1956 at Lowell Observatory as a primary observer of Mars during the opposition.

In 1955, Ben ordered a 24-inch reflector from Tinsley Laboratories.  It was erected in a 24-foot dome on the Country Club Estates property.  The instrument was a classical Cassegrain-Newtonian.  The Newtonian focus was f/4, and the Cassegrain foci were f/16, f/32, and f/100.  The f/16 was used for lunar photography, the f/32 was used for close-up lunar photography, and the f/100 was used for ultra-violet and infrared photography of the planets.  Eyepiece projection was used with the f/16 Cassegrain for other planetary photography.  The instrument had a two-pier English mount with selsyn dials for setting circles.  These worked very well.  (Update February 2009 - This 24-inch Cassegrain telescope is now located at the Dark Ridge Observatory in New Mexico where it will be placed back into use as a research instrument.)

In 1956, while Ronnie was at Lowell, Ben was photographing Mars every night with the Cassegrain.  Ben and Ronnie had always been a team.  Ben was dissatisfied that Ronnie was growing up and about to go to college.  Ben realized that Ronnie would leave home some day and possibly never return.  He offered the 24-inch reflector to Lowell Observatory as a gift.  The instrument was moved to Flagstaff and served as a photometric instrument and as a test bed for image intensifiers for many years.

Ronnie went to the University of California in 1958 and majored in astronomy there.  Part way through his education, he became interested in apochromatic optics through articles written by Taylor, Cook, and Hobson in the 1880’s.  He found these articles in the library of Lick Observatory, where Ronnie had many astronomy laboratory assignments.  Ronnie had a hand-crank Monroe calculator in his office at the University and spent many hours of his spare time running G-sum designs and ray traces of possible apochromatic astronomical objectives.  He found three fairly good designs, but the most promising required a rare-earth flint glass in the Schott catalog that had never been manufactured in large sizes.  Ronnie told Ben about the designs, and forgot about the matter.  Several months later, Ben called Ronnie and said, “I am thinking about having Tinsley Laboratories make a 20-inch f/16 apochromatic refractor based upon your design. Are you interested?”  Of course I was!!  The design was submitted to Fisba in Switzerland, who had a large computer capable of running detailed ray traces of the design.  The final design was corrected for third order chromatic aberration, coma, astigmatism, and with the three lenses, curvature of the field.

Tinsley Laboratories ordered the glass from Schott.  The rare-earth flint glass had a small striation near the edge of the blank.  It was determined that the defect would grind off during manufacture, if the steep curve were ground on the side with the striation.  The optician at Tinsley made a mistake and ground the steep curve on the wrong side.  Tinsley contacted Ronnie and asked if it would be permissible to deliver the telescope with the imperfection while a new blank was manufactured.  Unfortunately, Ronnie said “yes.”  The telescope was delivered and the objective had poor definition unless it was stopped down to about 16 inches.  Ben never forgave Ronnie for the “deception.”  The new blank was ground and the objective was assembled.  The performance was astounding, as long as the telescope remained on the side of the pier from which the lens was collimated.

Before the telescope was manufactured, Tinsley called Dr. James Baker, optical designer at Harvard College Observatory, to ask what he thought about a large apochromatic refractor.  Dr. Baker said that the lens should perform well, but that the cell should be made of invar, a low coefficient of expansion metal, or the lens would go out of collimation as temperature changed.  The engineer at Tinsley was John Darsow, who was basically an aircraft engineer.  He said that he could make a lens cell out of aluminum that would not suffer from problems Dr. Baker mentioned, but that the lens would basically have to be mounted by the center element.  The temperature effects were minimized by the design, but the rigidity suffered.  The weight of a 20-inch triplet lens held by a thin ring around the center element made the cell sensitive to the balance of the instrument.

When the 20-inch lens was moved to Lowell Observatory, the lens required frequent collimation.  The operation took a great deal of time and cut down on the observing time.  Later, a graduate student from Austria (I think) tried to make some modifications to the cell to reduce the problem, but was unsuccessful.  Prior to the manufacture of the instrument, a 4-inch prototype was made that performed well (I still have the prototype.)  The sheer mass of the lens and cell on the 20-inch was too great for the design.  The lens in now lying in a crate at Lowell Observatory.  The German mount for the 20-inch is now used for an 18-inch Baker-Nunn instrument that is used for precise measurements leading to minor planet occulations.  It is possible that the lens could be brought into useful service if computer sensors and correction were used to collimate the lens in real time, much like the process used on large second-generation reflector optics.  Perhaps someone will resurrect the lens someday for a particular purpose.  I personally will never forget the bright, clear view of star clusters and planets with the lens, devoid of chromatic aberration.

When he ordered the 24-inch reflector from Tinsley Laboratories, Ben tried to interest Odessa College into taking the 10-foot dome and the 12-inch reflector to build an observatory.  The first president of Odessa College, Murray Fly, refused the offer.  “No one in Odessa is interested in astronomy but you and your son,” he exclaimed.  Ben sold the instrument to Joe Maybe, whose father owned Maybe Drilling in Midland, Texas.  After Joe got tired of the telescope, he gave it to an astronomy club in Midland.  In the 1980’s, Ben and Ronnie tried to find the telescope, but Joe did not remember the names of any of the astronomy club members after 20 years.  Perhaps somewhere in West Texas, Morgan Observatory still lives.

Ronnie continued on to graduate school and got a Master’s Degree in Environmental Science.  He is employed by the Hopi Tribe as a hydrologist.  He has authored many professional papers and reports in his field.  He served as a member of the International Mars Committee from 1953 to 1957 and on the Lowell Observatory Board of Trustees from 1983 to 1992.  He still observes with a 4-inch and a 6-inch refractors made by Ben in the late 1980’s from Jaegers objectives.  He also has a 5-inch f/6 refractor and an 8-inch f/10 computer-controlled Celestron NextStar reflector.  He is married to Loretta Morgan, a geographer and graduate student in forestry at Northern Arizona University.  Last summer she completed studies with Geographic Information Systems technology of the Big Chino surface water drainage basin and the Verde River basin for the Arizona Department of Water Resources under grants to the University.  She is studying for the Ph.D. degree in forestry with the dissertation topic of the impacts of cattle grazing management alternatives on the soils of the rangeland.

The story is not complete without mentioning the Assistant Director of Morgan Observatory.  His name was James C. Corn of Phoenix, Arizona.  He had a home-built 12-inch f/8 reflector.  He and Ronnie ground a 10-inch f/3.6 RFT mirror in 1955.  I still have the instrument.  He was a collector of antique astronomy books.  At his death in 1958, he willed his collection to Ronnie.  He was the radio dispatcher for the Phoenix Police Department.  He retired in 1956 and sold electronic equipment at a music store until his death.  He was like a second father to Ronnie and a good friend to Ben.  They met through an ad Jim placed in Sky and Telescope in 1953.

I welcome any correspondence from persons interested in astronomy in West Texas.  I am a life member of the Ventura County Astronomical Society in California (past president) and a member of a fledgling astronomy club in Flagstaff.

(If you would like to contact Mr. Morgan directly, please email me at les@ector911.org.  I'll pass on your contact information. - Les)