Leslie was also born in March (and their wedding, quite appropriately, occurred in March the day after Leslie’s birthday some years later, of course). Leslie is originally from Utica, New York and is the 2nd of 3 girls. Leslie’s father was an interior decorator and her Mom, though primarily a stay at home mother, did the bookkeeping for her father’s business and made part of the draperies he sold. At two, Leslie’s family moved to Colorado where Leslie stayed until she was 20, spending her whole K- 12 career in one school. After spending one year at Colorado State University, where she majored in Sociology, Leslie decided she was tired of sitting at a desk and quit when Eastern Airlines offered her a job and she moved to Miami.
Mike and Leslie married March 4, 1967 and Mike started teaching school at Homestead Jr. High in Homestead, Florida while selling insurance at night. After two years of teaching and selling insurance, Mike was hired by Southern Bell in 1969 to sell yellow page advertising. He then moved on to working in the Business office in 1971 and after working in several districts, took over the group in Key West, Florida.
At 27, Leslie went back to school and got her A.A. in Criminal Justice and was planning on continuing before they moved and were 140 miles from the nearest college. So she decided to stay home and raise their children, Richard and Jason. Mike and Leslie tell of meeting some very interesting people during their time in Key West. They lived a block away from Peter Fonda. And one night, in a local bar, ran into Truman Capote and had a drink with him. As a flight attendant, Leslie met a lot of celebrities and tells of playing gin rummy with Raymond Burr on one of the last prop planes flying commercially with Eastern.
Mike met some other people under less favorable conditions. In his job as Telephone business manager, he once cut off service for nonpayment to a missile site in Key West, and rapidly made the acquaintance of their key personnel. In another instance, he cut off service to a hotel owned by the Mafia. Service was restored promptly (and Mike is fortunately still around to tell the story).
After leaving Key West, they moved to Atlanta where Mike became a District Manager for Requirements for Southern Bell before moving on to New Jersey on AT&T’s Headquarters Staff. Mike spent a year in Australia with AT&T in 1984 helping install a billing system for Telecom Australia while Leslie kept the home fires burning with their two sons, Richard and Jason. While Mike was in Australia, Leslie went back to work as a supervisor in a software duplication warehouse, a high stress job she hated but did for 3 years. She then got her favorite job of all working for Nagle’s Candy Barn in New Jersey. She describes the job as much like the famed episode of Lucy and Ethel working in the chocolate factory. Leslie ate so much chocolate on the job that the owner threatened to weigh her coming in and out and deduct the difference from her paycheck. She became so fast at her job that what once was a five person job, she was able to handle by herself (maybe all the caffeine in that chocolate). She said she would sing all the way to work and back and when she got home, the dog would stick to her face.
Following a few more years in New Jersey, the Morgans moved out to the West Coast and Mike continued his career with AT&T in Pleasanton, California where he managed installation for Fortune 500 Companies on a national basis before finally retiring in 1998. While in Pleasanton, Leslie worked for a bakery (now we better understand Leslie’s love of desserts!) After retirement, Mike went back to teaching, as a substitute teacher and played golf when not working. They decided it was time to find a permanent place for retirement and had been looking all over California, when they made an offer on a house in Solvang.
On the way back to the bay area, they saw the sign and decided to stop at Blacklake. Before they finally bought their home here in 2000, Mike says Leslie kept changing her mind about which lot to buy and they moved their deposit around on 5 different lots before deciding on the one they bought.
Because they did so much traveling before retirement (Mike was on the road a lot for his job with AT&T and Leslie flew a lot with her job with Eastern Airlines), they do more traveling by car now than by plane. They have cruised to Bermuda a couple of times, once with friends and once with the boys and have also cruised to Alaska. In their travels around the country while working, they also spent a lot of time visiting family and still travel frequently to Colorado to visit Leslie’s Mom.
Their son Richard lives in San Diego where he works at Macy’s in their visual department. Son Jason and his wife, both CHP officers, live in Aptos and are the parents of Mike and Leslie’s grandchildren, Ryan who is 3 and Mackenzie, who is 20 months old. Mike and Leslie are also parents to two cats, Precious and Mikey, and a Miniature Schnauzer named Molly.
