William Isaac Morey 1887 - 1940
Hazel Edrie Harvey Morey Quade 1889 - 1965
William I. Morey taught music at an academy and three Seventh-day Adventist colleges during his career. He enjoyed success at all three schools and is credited, along with George Greer at Pacific Union College, with organizing one of the first a cappella choirs in SDA colleges.
William was born in Valley Center, Kansas, on March 23, 1887, the oldest son of Ellis A. and Thena Thompson. He attended Union College and after graduating with a certificate from the Sacred Music course in 1907, taught church school for four years while also leading the Missionary Volunteer work in the Arkansas Conference for two of those years.
While a student at UC, Morey had met Hazel Edrie Harvey who had been born in Pueblo, Colorado, the only daughter Edward B. and Ella Brockway Harvey. She was an accomplished pianist who had attended a music conservatory in Pueblo for a year. Following their marriage in June 1910 in Pueblo, she assisted him in his work and taught piano and secretarial classes wherever he was employed and with him provided music at camp meetings in the midwestern and western U.S. during the summers. They would have a daughter, Mildred Elaine.
He attended Friends University and then graduated from the Power-Myers Conservatory of Music in Wichita, Kansas, in 1913, before teaching grade school in Pueblo for a year and then music at Oak Park Academy in Nevada, Iowa, for four years, continuing to study voice with several teachers during that time.
In 1917, Morey accepted leadership of the choral program at Walla Walla College, now University. He was ambitious and hardworking and inspired the students with his enthusiasm. By his fourth year the choir numbered 120 and he presented the Queen Esther Cantata to a sold-out house in a performance which was widely praised.In addition to conducting the college and children's choruses, he conducted two other choirs, sang in a male quartet, gave forty lessons each week, and taught "theoretical classes" as needed. He also led the department for the last three of his five years at WWC. He was invited to form and conduct the choir at the 1918 General Conference Session in San Francisco.
The Moreys moved to the Chicago area in 1922, where he completed bachelor's and master's degrees in music at the American Conservatory of Music. Following a year as chair at Union College, where he organized one of the first a cappella choirs in Adventist schools in 1926, he accepted an invitation to teach at Emmanuel Missionary College, now Andrews University, in 1927 where he again organized an acappella choir and taught into the 1930s.
The family moved to Arlington, California, in the mid-1930's and were living there where he died on August 30, 1940, at the age of 53. Hazel worked as a secretary in the Southeastern California Conference from 1936 to 1951, when she married Harold Nicholas Quade, a former student of William morey, whose wife had died a year earlier. She was living in Paradise, California, when she died on December 29, 1965, at age 76.
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Sources: Obituaries, Review and Herald, 26 September 1940, 23, 25; Pacific Union Recorder, 30 October 1940, 18; Lake Union Herald, 8 October 1940, 13. The Educational Messenger, 1926, 27; WWC student newspaper, The Collegian, 1917-1923; and WWC Mountain Ash yearbooks, 1918-1923; 1900, 1920, 1930 U.S. Federal Census Recordsand California Death Records, Ancestry.com.