Odds ‘n’ sods: Remembering Harry Morgan

For several years, I’ve written articles about the great and unusual people I’ve met in the mineral exploration and promotion business, but none impressed me more than the late Dr. J.H. (Harry) Morgan, whom I knew for more than 30 years.

Morgan had a great outlook, and I always admired his tolerance for other people. He was a brilliant geologist and businessman known for his equal treatment of others. What I remember most was his tremendous optimism under adverse conditions. He was a rock.

In the spring of 1976, Morgan, Mort Stewart (the now-prominent prospector) and I sat in a bar at a hotel in Yarmouth, N.S., drinking beer. I was in the midst of a bad spell. The firm underwriting our tin prospecting in Yarmouth Cty. was almost broke and on the verge of closing its doors, leaving myself, Stewart, and our crew without work. Morgan, the president of the firm, had come from Montreal to visit us and get a feel for what was happening with the tin project. He would soon have to decide either to keep things going or pull the plug. Meanwhile, Stewart had found boulders of high-grade tin in the overburden on our property, but we had not traced them to their bedrock source. I had lost hope and Morgan knew it.

He was a frail man, and few who knew him realized he was afflicted with several serious illnesses that would incapacitate most people his age. (I felt guilty lamenting about our troubles that night when I knew he was suffering tremendous pain as a result of a kidney ailment.)

We left the bar and went to a restaurant where a pleasant waitress asked us what we were doing in Yarmouth. Morgan told her we were looking for tin deposits, and she asked if we’d found any. He told her no and she responded by asking him why he still seemed so happy. He grinned and told her the following anecdote:

A psychology professor gave a seminar on the sexual habits of the average male. When he finished his lecture, he asked the class to remain there for a bit while he conducted an informal poll for his research. He asked members of the class if they’d had sex seven times in the past seven days. No one put up his hand. Six days? Same response. Five days, and so on, until he reached one week, and dismissed the class. On his way out, the professor noticed one student grinning from ear to ear. The professor asked: “What are you so happy about? You didn’t put your hand up.” The pupil responded: “I have a date, and tonight’s the night.”

I didn’t fully understand the story’s significance until the following day, when Morgan told me to keep the crew prospecting for another two months and that the firm would somehow scrape up the money. The story was about having patience, and through that, opportunities would arise.

Not long afterwards, the price of tin skyrocketed. We optioned our property to Shell Canada Resources, which grubstaked Morgan’s firm for several years to explore for tin in the granite terrain of the Maritimes. Shell eventually located a large tin deposit at East Kemptville, which Rio Algom later put into production as North America’s only such mine — the second-largest tin producer in the world, in fact.

A year or so later, I found out from an accountant who worked for Morgan’s firm that he had personally paid for our tin explorations in Yarmouth from the beginning because the firm had been broke for some time.

The memory of that night in the restaurant has stayed with me because he was a very sick man, and not an affluent one by any means. He took it upon himself to keep things going for Stewart and I because he believed in us and our work. I could not have asked for a better friend.

People in the mining industry in Nova Scotia owe Morgan a lot. I know I do. That quiet, optimistic and cheerful person was the driving force behind several junior firms that made important mineral discoveries which resulted in four producing mines in that province.

— The author is the owner of Truro, N.S.-based Ecum Secum Enterprises.