It is strange. But Jim Morrison, the archetype outrageous stoned-out rebellious rock‘n roller and lead singer of The Doors—the proclaimed Lizard King—was once a member of the Midway family.

When I first reported aboard in the fall of ’57 assigned to CIC, my immediate boss the Operations Officer was Commander George Stephen Morrison. One evening at a dependent’s dinner in the wardroom while we were home ported in Alameda, Commander Morrison introduced me to his son Jim, then a freshman or sophomore in high school. “Mr. Setlowe here, one of our promising young officers, went to the University of Southern California.” The introduction made an impression because of its awkwardness.

Rear Adm. George Stephen Morrison was Midway’s Operations Officer in 1957-58, later becoming Captain and then Flag Officer of the carrier Bon Homme Richard while commanding U.S. forces in the South Pacific during the Vietnam War. After a long and distinguished Navy career, Morrison died in 2008, thirty-nine years after his son Jim, lead singer for The Doors, died in Paris, France. The “Admiral and the Poet” never resolved their conflicted relationship.

For one thing, even the senior officers called me “Rick,” as we had “salted down” together taking the newly converted and recommissioned Midway on its shakedown trials and first air ops. But Morrison, in memory, was a formal, aloof man—on his rapid climb up the ladder to eventually become the Rear Adm. commanding U.S. forces in the South Pacific during the Vietnam War. But that evening he was apparently trying to convince his son of something. As a teenager, Jim Morrison’s interests were literary, artistic. The precocious high schooler was already devouring the French surrealist poets Antonin Artaud, Charles Baudelaire, and the English mystic William Blake, who inspired the name of The Doors. A few years later, the kid graduated in filmmaking from UCLA—my alma mater’s archrival—and perhaps that night the father was saying to his son, See, you can study what and where you want and “He liked all the classics and read everything he could get his hands on. An intelligent, bright young man who liked to write and draw pictures,” the retired Rear Adm. later recalled.

“He went on all the ships that I served in. While he had some admiration for the Navy and the fact that I was in it, it’s clear that he didn’t have any interest in it himself

Not that the senior Morrison did not make special efforts to pique his son’s interest in a military career. On the internet there are photos of a young Morrison with his father on the bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, when the latter was captain of that carrier, and of the adolescent firing what I identify as a Thompson submachine gun from the fantail.

While aboard Midway I had a collateral duty as a Shore Party officer—roughly a platoon of sailors trained to go ashore with our Marine detachment in the event of an emergency. At sea, we trained with small arms—including the Thompson—firing from the fantail at floating targets. But in my two years aboard I don’t remember anyone other than the designated Shore Party and Marines allowed to do this.

Rank has its privileges, but allowing a teenage civilian to fire a submachine gun seems to me a stretch.

And when his son came aboard to visit his father, reportedly one of the first things the senior Morrison did was ordered him below to the ship’s barber to get a regulation haircut.

But it did not influence the young would-be poet. “When he graduated from high school he asked for the complete works of Nietzsche. Most kids want a car.” Rear Adm. Morrison laughed heartily at the memory.

For those interested, there is a long, face-to-face interview with Rear Adm. Morrison and his daughter, Jim’s younger sister Anne Morrison-Chewning, easily accessible on YouTube, which is quoted in this article.

“I didn’t know Jim very well after he left home. We didn’t see him much. I didn’t have a chance to really appraise his mental attitude in his last years.”

After graduating from UCLA young Morrison hung out in Venice Beach in Los Angeles with the budding poets, musicians, and filmmakers he had known in college. “I was looking forward to his… going to Hollywood,” his father noted. “When he ended up in rock music, I was absolutely flabbergasted. His father was in command.

He called me on the phone and said he was going on the road with a rock band. And it took me a little bit to hear what he was really saying... I told him that was ridiculous. You’re not a singer. You can’t sing. And I told him you are on your own track. Get yourself a job. That to me was not a job.” In retrospect, the senior Morrison laughs at the memory of the phone conversation.

Nor did his son Jim have a whit of musical training. Yet for background, let me make a personal detour. While we were stationed in Alameda, on weekend evenings—when things were uninteresting at the O Club—I would jump into my convertible and venture across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and the funky clubs in North Beach. There a generation of poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and Michael McClure were reading their work to improvised jazz arrangement. Kerouac and Ginsburg were acknowledged influences on young Morrison, and McClure became a mentor.

Morrison’s entry into music was accidental, but perhaps fateful. Strolling through the surf at Venice, he ran into a UCLA film school acquaintance Ray Manzarek. Manzarek, older, a grad student, was also a pianist and keyboardist already jamming jazz, rock, blues and folk in a group with his brothers. He encouraged Jim to recite the lyrics to “a fantastic rock ‘n roll concert going on in my (Morrison’s) head.” To quote the line from Blake’s poem, “the doors of perception were cleansed,” and the group was launched.

The Doors’ first album featuring lead vocalist Jim Morrison and the classic “Light My Fire” was released in 1967.

His sister Anne recalls, “It all happened rather quickly. My mom sent me the first album. No note. Just the album in a package. I was just astounded, because that was my brother on the cover.”

Rear Adm. Morrison later commented, “Okay, that was a little rock band there and making some headway. And that’s fine. But when he turned up on the national TV, why I was amazed. I didn’t have any idea the talent he had as an entertainer. I still feel his talent was NOT vocal in the classic term. But he was an entertainer.”

By then the senior Morrison, who had attained flag rank at age 47, had commanded the American naval forces during the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to an escalation of the Vietnam

War from his flagship carrier Bon Homme Richard.

The fires of rebellion were lit. It was the Sixties—Make Love, Not War. “We were the undeclared

Vietnam War,” The Door’s drummer John Densmore explains. But “Rebellion met blank incomprehension,” as the New York Times noted in its obituary of Rear Adm. Morrison’s death at 89 on Nov. 17, 2008, in Coronado, California.

Even a novelist cannot create a father and son as dramatically in conflict.

The father had graduated from Annapolis with the encouragement and help of a relative—who had been an admiral—just in time to be aboard the minelayer Pruitt in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The

Pruitt fought in operations in the Aleutians and the central Pacific, then Morrison volunteered for flight training in Pensacola, Fla. He won his wings in time to fly Hellcat fighters in combat missions over Wake Island in the Marianas and Honshu, Japan, in the last year of World War II.

During the Korean War, at the joint operations center in Seoul, he earned a Bronze Star with V for

Valor for combat operations against North Korean and Chinese forces. He then served aboard USS

Midway as its Operations Officer as she was being rebuilt, recommissioned, launched, and shook down as the then most advanced carrier in the fleet.

In the San Diego Union-Tribune, staff writer Steve Liewer reported, “After earning flag rank…Rear

Adm. Morrison weathered his son's very public rebellion, stardom and death while serving in high-profile

Navy posts in the Pentagon and the Pacific. He never mentioned Jim publicly, but he found it strange to visit friends' homes and see posters of his son on the bedroom walls of their teenage children. ‘He never told people (in the Navy),’ his younger son Andy Morrison said. ‘But the young guys all knew.’”

His sister Anne comments, “My dad was in the Navy. He was still an admiral, and he had his own life. And I think Jim knew this would be an issue with my parents, and I think he just separated himself completely.”

On occasion Jim even told friends that he was an orphan. Rear Adm. Morrison is later quoted, “I had the feeling that he felt we’d just as soon not be associated with his career. He knew I didn’t think rock music was the best goal for him. Maybe he was trying to protect us.”

At the height of his success, Jim Morrison declared, “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”

Epic on-stage drunks made national headlines, as alcohol now augmented the LSD and hallucinogens that had supposedly cleansed the doors of perception. Even The Doors drummer Densmore declared, “I’d never take acid with that guy. He’s crazy. And I never did.”

In March 1971, The Doors recorded their last album “L.A. Woman.” Then Morrison took a leave of absence from The Doors to move to Paris with his girlfriend Pamela Courson.

“I think Jim went to Paris to escape what he had in the United States,” his sister Anne reasons. “To gain his own freedom. To do his own writing. Experience something new.”

Pamela found Morrison dead in his bathtub on July 3, 1971, at age 27.

“We were notified by the naval attache at the embassy in Paris,” the Admiral recalls. “He sent me a message that Jim had died of a heart attack in a Paris hospital.”

The medical examiner found no evidence of foul play. Morrison was buried in the “Poet’s Corner” of Pere Lachaise Cemetery. His father felt it was "quite an honor . . . for the family" to have his son buried near cultural giants like Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and Frederic Chopin. “I was impressed with the fact that here was my son being interred really quite honorably in the great cemetery in Paris and realized how well liked he was.

“I haven’t really heard the lyrics. I’ve heard the titles like ‘Light My Fire.’ I’ve got to buy it. But what goes on after that, I could not tell you. I’m afraid I’m a very poor interpreter of his talents …We never had the occasion to see him.”

After his retirement the rear admiral took classes in ancient Greek, so that he could read the Bible as it was originally translated. In 1990 he and his wife finally traveled to Paris to visit their son’s grave.

There Morrison installed a plaque he had personally crafted and ambiguously worded in Greek, a phrase usually interpreted as "True to his own spirit."

In the interview on YouTube, he explains the epitaph, “He went his own way. And he was true to his own ambitions, his own aspirations. And that was his goal in life. And he made it. . . . Well, basically, he was a good man. He was a good solid citizen. He had moral and ethical standards that were very high. He was just somebody you’d like to know.”

The interview with Morrison concludes with a silent close-up on the admiral’s face, an old man’s face, blue eyes tearful, regretting the son whom he did not really know.

Copyrighted by Rick Setlowe 2020