Morgan Parrish Smith

Morgan’s parents, Gay Parrish and Charlie Smith, didn’t know they were having twins until his sister Holly was born, and the doctor realized Gay’s ‘birthing’ wasn’t over. Four minutes later, on April 27, 1970 in Springfield, Mo., Morgan was born—triggering a lifelong pattern of turning the ordinary grandiose, where the more was always merrier for all.

Morgan spent his formative years in Nixa, MO. and Indianapolis, IN., before moving to Dallas in 1978 where he was raised through most of his adolescence. He and Holly grew up providing mutual entertainment, friendship, and comfort to each other. She remembers their shared experiences fondly:

“Morgan was my buffer to the world. My parents used to say that the difference between Morgan and I in personalities was that he was usually the first to try new things. Like riding a bike. He would just jump on and start riding, fall off, get up again, and fall off, until he finally got it right. I would sit on the sidelines watching him, learning from his mistakes. Then when I tried riding, it was easier, I fell less and was hurt less often. He was my muse and protector, and I was his steadfast, loyal fan who believed he could never do wrong. I never gave up loving him. That’s what our relationship was like.”

Morgan spent his early years at the University of North Texas, Blinn College, and the University of Texas in San Antonio. He taught himself to play guitar, had a great group of friends, and met his first wife in College Station before settling down with her in San Antonio, TX.

Morgan began his career in 1994 at West Telemarketing in San Antonio, where he started as an agent on the phones and left as Vice President of Client Services. At ChaseCom, Morgan refined his sales and presentation skills to earn the Chief Operations Officer and later Chief Marketing Officer role. Using this background in call centers, leadership, and executive management, Morgan moved into the energy sector with NRG as Vice President of Channel Marketing. His experiences culminated at Just Energy. where he served as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. He was an incredible communicator, leader, and salesman, with colleagues often joking that he could “sell snow to an Eskimo.”

Morgan’s professional success took him all over the world to places like Japan, India, Australia, and Europe, and even afforded him the opportunity to ring the NYSE market bell when Just Energy went public. Along the way, his inspirational leadership drove others to follow him from company to company so they could continue to flourish on his teams. He always endeavored to glorify others and create pathways that allowed them to grow.

While Morgan had a successful career and a lifetime of fruitful travel worldwide, the most important aspects of his life were his family and friends. Fatherhood was the highlight of his life. As a parent, Morgan was extremely supportive of his children’s passions. He readily sidelined every sports game (even coached a few!), proudly invested in his young entrepreneurs’ business ventures (there was a “slime” factory in his garage), and patiently taught valuable life skills (swimming, driving, Galaga) to Dakota, Kiran, and Chloe. Morgan is remembered by his three children as a loving and doting father, who gave private guitar concerts at bath time and squeezed a little too hard with all his hugs. Morgan boasted to family, friends, and anyone within earshot of the immense pride he held for his children, showing off hours of videos of volleyball tournaments, dance competitions, and graduations to support his claims. He was a proud father, mentor, and coach, and his children were the center of his life. With them, he was silly, wild, loving, and all things a dad should be.

To Morgan, family wasn’t just about DNA. He had the innate ability to welcome strangers into heart and home, enrich what was special about them, and make them feel part of his ever-growing family. Holidays, “family” dinners, and barbecues were an inclusive affair, where he blended seemingly disparate individuals into one family through laughter, love, and at least four extra servings of ribs and deviled eggs. You felt important when you spent time with Morgan, because he took the time to know and appreciate who you truly were. To some, he was a kind-hearted and gentle man who loved making children laugh and gaining the trust of stray dogs. To others, he was an eccentric superfan of Halloween, the first neighbor on your doorstep in a new city, and the life of the party. But to all, Morgan was a fierce supporter, a guaranteed laugh, and a loving part of their family.

Morgan passed surrounded by his family and closest friends, blending a group of individuals into family one last time. We encourage you to live life as Morgan did, with an abundance of generosity, fellowship, and laughter each day. He will be missed.

Morgan Parrish Smith is survived by his twin sister, Holly Parrish Smith; mother, Gay Parrish; father, C.W. Smith; step-mother, Marcia Smith; son, Dakota Smith and wife Melodie LaPlue; daughters, Kiran Smith and Chloe Smith, and a multitude of close supportive friends, family and extended family members that includes Jada O'Neill, Mansi Patel and Brad Bangen, Deena Morgan, best friend Sean and his wife Shawna Collins, Sam and Vinita Mavalwalla, and countless others.

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Read a tribute to Morgan below, written by his father, Charles Smith

Morgan is remembered for having always had the gift of gab. He was a world-class salesman, a consummate communicator, a pesky persuader. At sixteen he hawked season tickets to the Dallas Theatre Center over the phone and shot to the top of their leaderboard. It was a fearsome tool. You might be feeling really tired on a Saturday morning and long to loll in a hammock and read, but he says, "Yo, let's go to the beach!" You dread the next half hour because you know you're in for a constant barrage of wheedling until you give in. (And even then, you know it won't be just you two taking a quiet seaside stroll -- an entourage of 15 has been arm-twisted because - well, you know how they say more is less and less is more? To Morgan more was just not enough. )

Deena Morgan tells this story: "If you were a janitor or the President of the United States, Morgan would take you to Thai Bistro. If you were being fired or hired you were going to Thai Bistro. If you were sad and needed comfort food, you were going to Thai Bistro. If you were celebrating an occasion you were going to Thai Bistro. If you LOVED Thai Food you were going to be shown that Thai Bistro was the best. If you hated Thai Bistro and it was the one cuisine you refused to eat...you were still going to Thai Bistro."

Around age 5 he declared that when he grew up, he wanted to be "a policeman or a bird." It turned out that he was both. The bird in him was the fun-lover and prankster, the kid himself among kids, Peter Pan and the Pied Piper, the playful and creative spirit all knew so well. He coached his daughters' soccer team. He bought himself and his girls electric scooters to zip around on, and when he lived in Cypress, the house was party central. One Dad said, "When Morgan moved in and all of the kids were young and playing on the street, Morgan was always in the mix. It was Morgan and 10 kids." He was told by many that he'd make a great teacher.

He gave Deena's boys and his girls gangster aliases such as "p-diddy" and "Nate-dawg" and even wrote those on name tags they wore at Sunday School. Chloe says he always tried to get the phrase "Yo mama" into every sentence, and he invented a pet catchphrase. Here's Vinita Mavalwalla's story: "He created this word 'BoomHollah' and was adamant it was going to take off as the next big word. He kept saying it in all of our group chats so much so that Sam created a t-shirt with his face and the tagline #boomhollah. We surprised him with all of us wearing it at his house for Thanksgiving. He was flabbergasted but loved it!"

Unless the occasion demanded otherwise, he dressed in cargo shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops. Even in freezing weather he'd wear that, though maybe a long-sleeved t-shirt or a quarter-zip. He loved putting on a Halloween costume, and he was famous for his exuberant Halloween displays. Most people might hire a service to put up ghouls and freaks and witches, but Morgan chose and mounted his own howling, writhing, illuminated witches, zombies, and skeletons with glowing eyes, all motion-started and lit up days before Halloween, so everything sprang up and startled Amazon drivers and DoorDash folks and also you when you were just taking out the trash: Halloween was a season, not a single night. And what house decorated for Halloween doesn't need a Sno-Cone truck? Ditto Easter, Christmas, and the Fourth of July.

He never did anything half-way. You dreaded being his partner in a foursome of Spades because invariably he'd bid blind-nil just for the thrill of it - he was going down in flames or triumphing over everybody. Eight people at his house needed take-out for 16, and his refrigerator was packed with leftovers in clam shells that needed tossing out. If he found a TV show he liked, he'd binge all available seasons ASAP. His enthusiasm was kid-like.

Recently he discovered "Naked & Afraid XL" and zipped through the seasons, urging friends to watch along with him. In the show, small teams of naked contestants are dropped without supplies into, say, a Louisiana swamp or the Amazon, and they try to last 60 days. An update from Morgan: "Here's my 'Naked and Afraid XL' story for the day - a biologist on the 60-day challenge ate tomatoes right before he left because tomato seeds pass through the digestive system whole, and so he saved his poop and made a tomato garden. And it worked! And OMG you've got to watch Season 8."

He discovered Atari's Pong game at age 10. Hooked forever. He was the industry's dream customer, going through Game Boys and such on to Nintendo and the X Box iterations year by year. And when he discovered Clash of Titans -- this was as a grown man -- he was so fiercely competitive that he spent thousands buying tokens that shot him ahead. His house boasted at least three used arcade-sized games, including PacMan and Golden Tee, and there was a full-sized shuffleboard in the study.

He was what could be called a "boutique gardener." Most gardeners till up a plot and plant in rows that might yield a useable harvest, but Morgan's notion was to use pots and boxes for row crops, with the result that his garden might produce a single watermelon, one or two carrots or onions, and he was intent on growing avocado trees in pots with the expectation that sooner or later they'd bear fruit. He did show off a dozen purple sweet potatoes and good-looking tomatoes, though. He planted some things in his front yard, which suggested that producing a bumper crop of something you could rely on for your table or peddle at a local market wasn't the point at all of gardening. His texts about his plants invited you to engage, to compare yours to his, to banter about it all, or complain. He said this about those sweet potatoes: "Factoring labor, redo, time and energy, each potato cost $1,289 to produce, and can be sold at a farmers market for 32 cents." But the front yard garden was there to attract passers-by who might stop and chat. (He never lived anywhere that he didn't almost immediately know all his nearby neighbors.)

You could say the same about cooking: not your day-to-day drudgery of housewives and househusbands, not utility cooking, but sort of small-tournament cooking. He's not going to fix breakfast, lunch, or dinner day after day; he's going to do ribs for twenty people, or try fixing a tub of chicken and dumplings and send out texts and pics of the results as a brag. Or a hundred deviled eggs for a party of 25 people. He believed he was a master chef of deviled eggs. He had special deviled-egg trays. He engaged in a decades-long banter with his dad over who made the better spaghetti sauce, with each accusing the other of using hopped-up store-bought sauce rather than make it from scratch.

Instead of fixing himself a meal, the kid in him would take control and lead him to his junk food of choice, which according to son Dakota and Vinita Mavalwalla were Lemon-heads, Hot Tamales, Beaver Nuggets, and Kettle Corn, all instead of dinner. Daughter Chloe says mac and cheese and Peanut Butter Captain Crunch. And no road trip was complete without a stop at a Buc-ee’s to raid the candy wall and so arrive at a destination bearing bags of kiddy-candy big enough to put a whole Cub Scout pack on a 24-hr sugar high.

But about wanting to be a policeman. At age five, his image of a cop had little to do with a militarized SWAT-team with battering rams and firearms, but instead Officer Krupky on "Sesame Street" or Officer Clemmons on "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." Helpers of humankind, leaders, people who served and looked after the folks they lived among. And Morgan had a deep doobie streak, a need to help and win approval, a need to connect by sharing and giving. Any time he took a costly vacation to a ski or beach resort, he included his twin sister Holly in the party for a free ride. She says, "I know he personally paid for 8 vacation trips for me. Costa Rica, New York City to see musicals with Dakota and Mel, the Amalfi Coast, and the Napa Valley."

When Jada O'Neill's parents’ house was flooded during Hurricane Harvey, they set up a Go Fund Me to help them, and Morgan sent a full third of it to finish out the goal. She says, "It was so amazing. My parents were blown away." Morgan's mother Gay was living on a fixed income as a retiree, and he bought her a house in Cypress so that she could move and live near him and her grandchildren.

There was a homeless man on a corner he passed daily on his way to work. They knew one another by name. Morgan usually chatted with him a bit, then passed him a buck or five. When asked if he gave every day, he said, "Well, no. Not every day." And he asked friends to help design and build or buy a cart for a homeless woman he encountered often. When his dad was gathering up clothing and toiletries to take to a Dallas church that took in busloads of migrants newly arrived at the border, he pitched in and made calls to neighbors and drove up to Dallas with a car completely stuffed with donations.

Fatherhood was a very big item in Morgan's portfolio, and you could tell some of his greatest moments were witnessing with tremendous pride Dakota's success graduating with honors from Texas A & M in three years and in landing his first big job at Exxon. Morgan shot videos of Chloe's and Kiran's volleyball games and dance competitions and proudly posted them to friends and family. Recently he'd been teaching Kiran to drive, and when asked if it made him nervous, he said very. "I told her - see that round thing in the steering wheel? That's the horn. Don't ever ever use it!" And Morgan taught Dakota to swim and ride a bike, bought him a car, and sent him to and through college.

From the time he was ten until he was 18, he spent summers at Camp Rio Vista, even though each season he seemed to break his nose. Aging out as a camper, he became a counselor. And so he eagerly urged his kids to follow his very well-worn path there. Jada credits him for making sure Dakota went every summer for ten years "so that he'd have that experience that shapes him still to this day." Mansi reports that that passion was passed along to Kiran and Chloe, who attended sister camp Sierra Vista, and they "count down the days to the next camp every time we pick them up from there."

His step-mother Marcia also remembers this: "When I was a brand-new stepmom-to-be, Morgan and Holly would stay weekends with us. They were naturally suspicious of me and, at only nine, jealous of having to share their Dad. I was unsure of my new role and, mostly, tried to ingratiate myself by baking Saturday-morning blueberry muffins and being Morgan's audience as he played Pong. One day, he came up the backstairs into the kitchen clutching a sweaty little cluster of dandelions that he gathered and handed them to me. I've never appreciated a gift more."

Sean Collins has been Morgan's best friend since 1994 and says, "During Harvey and the Louisiana hurricanes, he knew I would go out and help people rebuild, so he sent me money multiple times to help. I recall during the Louisiana hurricanes he checked on me and I was telling him about a couple of families that I was trying to get generators for and he sent me the full amount for two generators." He also says that "in the two toughest periods in my life Morgan was right there for me." After a divorce, "I couldn’t have felt more a failure. He was the only adult I had, and when I moved to Houston and our old company sued me for non-compete, he was the only guy that was on my side. He was overly generous in his belief in me. That’s all I needed from him and I got it in volume."

Sister Holly can recall a recent incident that occurred in Dallas when she witnessed a staff member on the video monitor mistreating her mother, an Alzheimer's sufferer. Morgan drove to Dallas and asked to speak to all of the staff together. Then he told them the story of who Gay was, what she had been. Holly says, "His approach was perfect. Instead of being upset or angry with the staff, he just talked to them about our mother and who she was as a person. It was so effective. And he always sent money for Christmas to her caregiver."

Echoing that, Sam Mavalwalla says, "He connected with people" and "built friendships that would last a lifetime." For Morgan, "It was about how you treat people and how you make them feel. He just had a way of connecting with people and made them feel good."

Another associate and friend, Deepa Beck, says that Morgan "meant so much to me, not only for his dear, genuine friendship, but also for the amazing opportunities he afforded me during my time working for him. His faith in me led me down a career path that, frankly, fundamentally changed my family's financial outlook for the better. For this, I am forever grateful to him."

His last act was a great gift to a stranger. At some point in the past, he encountered a question we all face when getting a driver's license or making out a will. Do you want to be an organ donor? Some shy away from it and say "no" on impulse. Morgan saw it and said yes. A person who says yes must be thinking of helping somebody else, because there's no way it's in their self-interest.

At the hospital, friends and family learned that he was registered with the state of Texas as an organ donor. When a representative of the donor organization met the group of friends and family to explain the process and take information about Morgan's history, she asked if anyone knew if someone needed an organ.

"For the first time, I instantly remembered my cousin Wendy who'd been on dialysis for a kidney for over a year," says Jada. Jada's older sister had offered to help, but their blood types were not a match.

"I immediately put her name on the list and called her late that night," says Jada.

Several hours later, Morgan's gift of love - that kidney -- was dispatched to San Antonio. It turned out to be a match, the transplant surgery was successful, and cousin Wendy was the very grateful recipient. Jada says, "Her husband shared with me that she had given up on dialysis and couldn't go on any longer when I called to tell her, and it gave her hope again. Thank you, Morgan, for that blessing!"

And all say Amen.

Charles Smith