Stratford Lee Morton 
in 1899 to work for the Wagner Electrical Organization. Timmerman 
was active in numerous civic and professional organizations. He joined 
the Academy of Science in 1893.3! 
Stratford Lee Morton was elected Chairman of the Academy’s 
recently formed Board of Trustees in the same year that Arthur Tim- 
merman became president. Morton was born in Dixon, Illinois, in 1888. 
He came to St. Louis with his family when he was 14. Five years later 
he began a career as a life insurance agent with the Connecticut Mutual 
Life Insurance Company. He was extremely successful, becoming the 
company’s first million-dollar producer. At the age of 24 the company 
named him General Agent—the youngest in the company’s history. 
Morton, in addition to being a hard-driving salesman, was an avid 
collector of ‘America ana. He also collected minerals, sea shells, and 
fossils. He was an energetic civic leader as well. Other organizations 
with which he was associated during his lifetime included the Municipal 
Opera, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the City Art Museum, and the 
Missouri Historical Society. 
Morton’s involvement with the Academy of Science of St. Louis 
would endure 30 years, until his death in 1970. For many of those years, 
he worked to give St. Louis residents a science museum to be proud 
of—plans for a museum and ways to win support and find funding for 
such an institution were uppermost in Morton’s mind in the 1940s and 
1950s, and he and other members of the Academy toiled diligently to 
reach this goal.>? 
49 
