Mary Byrne
When Ron Sacca, a lifelong resident, travels by airplane, he shares the same anecdote with his seatmates: his high school English teacher was the sister of the famed Amelia Earhart.
He doesn’t expect everyone to believe him, he said. But it’s true.
Grace Muriel Earhart Morrissey, who died in 1998 at 98, earned several awards for teaching English in Medford and later in Belmont, according to a Belmont Historical Society newsletter published in June 2022. The Kansas native taught at Belmont High School from roughly 1959 to 1969.
“She always had a smile on her face,” recalled Sacca. “It was a gift having her as a teacher.”
Years before Morrissey started at Belmont High School, her sister Amelia Earhart set out on a flight in 1937 that would have made her the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on the most challenging leg of the journey, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
The disappearance of arguably the most famous woman of her time became one of history’s enduring mysteries. Little real evidence has been found about the disappearance of the plane or the location of the bodies of Earhart and Noonan.
Recent Discovery
A few weeks ago, however, a South Carolina-based exploration company announced it had captured sonar images that appear to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. According to Deep Sea Vision’s social media, they scanned 5,200 square miles of ocean floor with a 16-person crew and an unmanned underwater drone.
“I hope it’s true,” Sacca said.
Despite her connection to Earhart, Morrissey kept her professional and personal life separate, never speaking of her sister making headlines worldwide.
“She never said a word about it, not one word,” recalled Evagrio Mosca, a senior in Morrissey’s last class before she retired in 1969. “I had heard through rumors that she still held out hope that her sister would get found. … People respected her privacy about it.”
That isn’t to say that Morrisey wasn’t proud of her elder sister. According to her obituary, she wrote two biographies of Earhart. The first, “Courage is the Price,” came out in 1963. Then in 1987, on the 50th anniversary of her sister’s disappearance, she published “Amelia, My Courageous Sister: Biography of Amelia Earhart: True Facts About Her Disappearance.”
“We know that [Morrissey] went to her grave not knowing whether her sister was ever still alive,” Mosca said. “It must have been very sad for her not to know.”
‘Best of the Best’
According to Mosca, Morrissey was “real old school,” commanding a certain respect, “but she didn’t do it with a heavy hand.”
“When you went into her classroom, she expected a certain decorum,” he said. “She expected it, and she modeled it.”
Morrissey made a point of really getting to know her students, Mosca said.
“For me, she somehow knew I was on the track team,” he said. “So every once in a while, it would be a Monday and she’d say, ‘Wow you really did well at the Saturday meet.’”
Teaching seniors, Morrissey placed an emphasis on preparing her students for the English SAT, and ensuring they understood the fundamentals. She also helped students like Mosca appreciate reading and writing in a way they hadn’t before.
“On the final week when we had graduation, she came to our banquet,” Mosca said. “It was announced that week she was going to retire. … She got a massive standing ovation. She was so moved by this outpouring of love that she cried. It was wonderful to experience.”
Mosca said Morrissey was among a handful of teachers who inspired him to consider a career in teaching. Now retired, Mosca worked for 30 years as a teacher in Lexington. In 2005, he returned to Belmont to serve as the K-12 director of mathematics, retiring in 2007.
“It was nice coming back to where it all started for me,” he said.
Reading through a thread of Facebook comments from other students who had Morrisey as a teacher, Sacca said she was “the best of the best.”
“She was loved by all,” Sacca said. “I never heard a bad word about her.”