Dr. Warren G. Morris lived in the Ohio State Buckeye scholarship dormitory while he was a student in mechanical engineering. During his senior year, he met Ruth Penrod, who was one of very few women in optometry at that time and whom he married six months later, just prior to entering the armed forces as an Army sergeant. He saw battle in Germany during World War II as a machine gunner. While he was fighting in the European theater of WWII, his wife opened her optometry practice in Toledo. She wrote to him daily, and in those letters, she shared with him her thrill of providing vision care to patients in northwest Ohio. Upon his return to the states, Dr. Morris told his wife that he also wanted to become an optometrist so they could practice together. After he graduated from Ohio State Optometry in 1949, he joined his wife in her Toledo practice, where he specialized in pediatric optometry. He told his colleagues that his wife examined adult patients so he could play with children. He not only helped his little patients see better, he also stressed the importance of a good education to them and to their parents. Dr. Morris was so dedicated to children and education that he also worked with special education teachers in the Toledo area to help them understand the role of vision in reading performance.
Dr. Morris served as President of both the Ohio Optometric Association and the Ohio State Board of Optometry. In his honor, a memorial fund for children’s vision research was established at The Ohio State University College of Optometry in 1990.