PROFILE : Drafting Memories : Charles William Morris is writing about his father’s role in creating the Selective Service. His mother gets her due as well.

He is as predictable as dawn. The first few hours of daylight find Charles William Morris, 85, seated at his word processor, churning out page after page.

His topic is as unwavering as his routine: a historical account of the nation’s Selective Service system, and the integral role played by Morris’ father.

Nearly every day for seven years, Morris has worked on the project. He is about halfway through the second book of a trilogy, which focuses as much upon his mother, Grace Morris, as it does on his father’s achievements.

The first book, titled “The Ways of Grace,” takes the family through 1920. The second, “More Ways of Grace,” will end with the death of Grace in 1954, and the third, “In the Wake of Grace,” will finish in the present.

“She was responsible for everything I achieved and became,” Morris said of his mother. “I owe this to her.”

Eventually getting published is important to Morris, who began writing 15 years ago after a career as an aerospace engineer with a penchant for developing patents pertaining to aircraft engines and automobile pollution control.

But producing the trilogy is foremost an act of love, for his family and for his country.

“I feel a strong need to put this on record,” said Morris, who lives in Agoura Hills with his wife of 57 years, Virginia. “It is a family history, but it centers around an event important to our nation’s history.”

Morris writes that during the Civil War, drafts were conducted in every city by drawing marbles: choosing a black one made a man a soldier; a white one kept him a civilian. The U. S. Army general in charge of conscription during World War I, Enoch H. Crowder, wanted to centralize the procedure. He asked Charles Robert Morris, a 42-year-old captain in the Army Reserve who had spent 20 years as an auditor in the Treasury Department, to devise a lottery system. Morris did so and the first draft lottery was held July 20, 1917.

To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the lottery, excerpts from “The Ways of Grace” will be published in The Register, a Selective Service System publication, said Dan Johnson, historian of the Selective Service System.

“There are some very interesting anecdotes in Morris’ book,” Johnson said. “His writing is some of the best on the topic. He has brought to life historical episodes that might otherwise be forgotten.”

Artifacts from the original lottery, collected by Johnson with the help of Charles William Morris and his son Alvin, will be part of an exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History beginning this fall.

“The Morris family has been an immense help in tracking down artifacts for the display,” Johnson said. “I was overcome with emotion when I finally made contact with Charles Morris. He helped me locate the blindfold, the wooden spoon and the bowl.”

Those seemingly commonplace items offer a glimpse into the way the first draft lottery was conducted.

* The wooden spoon: Cut from an original dilapidated beam at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the ladle was used in 1917 to stir 10,500 gelatin capsules, each containing a draft lottery number scribbled on construction paper.

* The bowl: Purchased by Capt. Morris at a Washington pet store the day before the draft, the $10 goldfish bowl held the capsules.

* The blindfold: Made by Grace Morris, it was tied over the eyes of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Baker dipped his hand into the bowl and selected No. 258, indicating that the man holding that number at each of about 4,000 draft boards nationwide had been drafted.

To save the Army embarrassment, Capt. Morris rigged the war secretary’s initial selection to ensure that a low number would be chosen. Only men from large-city draft boards held numbers higher than 2,000 and Crowder wanted the first number to call up one man from every draft board in the country. Morris made certain that capsules with low numbers were at the top of the bowl.

Visitors to the Smithsonian exhibit will be able to relive this tidbit of Americana. Meanwhile, Charles William Morris will continue writing.

“Charles possesses the most important quality for a writer--tenacity,” said Virginia Bradley, who teaches an emeritus writing class at Santa Monica College that Morris has attended for 15 years.

Bradley questions whether Morris’ trilogy has “enough skulduggery” to be published, but she believes that his writing has greatly improved since he took up the craft. What began as a mechanical style befitting a man developed 25 engineering patents has become lively.

“The first piece he wrote 15 years ago was a science fiction story,” Bradley said. “The idea was very interesting. He has come so far in his writing, I hope he gets back to that.”