Muriel Morse; Ex-City Personnel Manager

Muriel M. Morse, former general manager of personnel for the city of Los Angeles and an internationally prominent community volunteer, has died. She was 80.

Mrs. Morse, who was named a Times Woman of the Year in 1961 for her outstanding public and community service, died Tuesday at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

She served as Los Angeles personnel manager from 1965 until her retirement in 1978. Mrs. Morse joined the city department in 1939 under Mayor Fletcher Bowron, and for many years was one of the highest-ranking women in local government in the country.

After she retired from city government, Gov. George Deukmejian appointed Mrs. Morse as the public member of the five-member state Industrial Welfare Commission, which regulates the minimum wage in California.

Mrs. Morse served for 20 years on the personnel commission for Los Angeles County schools.

She also had a distinguished record as a volunteer, serving as president of the Soroptimist Federation of the Americas in 1971, Soroptimist International in 1976, and the International Personnel Management Assn. in 1976.

Locally, she was president of the Women’s Division of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where she organized a community service training program for young women. She was also president of the Visiting Nurses Assn. of Los Angeles, the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni in Southern California and the Soroptimist Club of Los Angeles, and had been active in Business and Professional Women. She worked for United Way of Greater Los Angeles for more than 40 years and last year received its Special Volunteer Award for her service to the community.

“Service is not just the task of finding human needs and giving our time, talent and money in improving conditions of our fellow men,” Mrs. Morse said in 1969, addressing a group of volunteers. “We must recognize their individual dignity, their special talents, their own responsibility and our mutual goals.

“Helping others demands a sharp self-awareness, which permits us to acknowledge an individual and to receive as well as to give. Individuals, regardless of circumstances, have as great a need to help as they have for help.

“Service work,” she said, “must be in meaningful projects worthy of a woman’s interest, abilities and imagination.”

Muriel Moreton was born in Stony Point, N.Y. She moved to Santa Monica with her family as a teen-ager and graduated from Santa Monica High School. She went on to Stanford University where she earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in 1934 and was a member of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. She received a master’s degree from Stanford in 1935.

At Stanford, she also met her husband, former Southern California Edison executive Barnard A. Morse, whom she married in 1935. The couple lived on his family’s Altadena estate, built in 1910.

In addition to her work for the city and volunteer organizations, Mrs. Morse taught such subjects as collective bargaining, labor relations and personnel management at Stanford, Caltech and USC. She was also president of Scapa Praetor, the support group for the USC School of Public Administration.

Mrs. Morse avidly pursued her hobbies of trout fishing and growing cymbidium orchids. “Anyone interested in intellectual pursuits,” she said in 1984, “also ought to get their hands in the soil.”

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Morse is survived by two sons, Robert of Monarch Beach, Calif., and Barnard Jr. of Edmonds, Wash.; a brother, Douglas Moreton of Wickenberg, Ariz., and nine grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Altadena.

The family has asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Muriel Morse Endowed Fellowship at the USC School of Public Administration or to the Visiting Nurses Foundation of Los Angeles.