St. Thomas Realtor Jacqui Morgan had the gift of making friends fast and keeping them for life, and many of those friends grieved openly Monday after learning of her unexpected death Thursday night.
Her son, Brian Morgan, said she died as a result of an asthma attack.
Funeral services are set for 11 a.m. Wednesday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, where Morgan was a regular reader and choir member. Viewing will be the hour before, and interment will follow in the Mafolie Cemetery.
Morgan, 61, worked hard but also made time to enjoy life and to give generously to her community as a volunteer, friends and associates recalled. She was "an extremely professional, well-organized, well-respected Realtor," Re/max associate Marilyn Blackhall said, but "she was also just a good friend."
Jacqueline Lorraine Anderson Morgan was born in New York City, where she grew up. She attended Hunter College and the American Institute of Banking and worked for seven years as a bookkeeper at Chemical Bank of New York. She first set foot on St. Thomas on vacation in 1963. A year later, she came back to stay. "She became a Virgin Islander in all ways meaningful," attorney Susan Bruch Moorehead wrote in eulogy. "Shortly after her move here, her beloved son, Brian, was born, and together with him her new family circle expanded so that many of us here today can include ourselves on her list of hundreds of special friends who became her family."
Morgan held office positions at the Attorney General's Office, the Commerce Department, West Indies Corp. and the law firm that today is Grunert Stout & Bruch. She was a member of the first graduating class in the legal assistants program at the then-College of the Virgin Islands. She was introduced to the real estate business by Vernon Ball. After working for a decade with Ball at Omni Real Estate, she bought the company from him. In 1992, she made the decision to team up with the St. Thomas Re/Max franchise.
She was a past director of the Virgin Islands Territorial Association of Realtors, past president of the St. Thomas Board of Realtors and past president of the St. Thomas-St. John chapter of the American Red Cross. She played pan in the St. Thomas All Stars Steel Orchestra and was active in numerous other professional, civic and social services organizations.
Moorehead described Morgan as "adventurous and extremely accomplished. She was always learning and wasn't afraid to take chances."
Dane Perry, St. Thomas This Week editor, recalled how the two of them and another friend from real estate circles, Karen Steers, took a vacation to Venice a couple of years ago — Morgan's first visit to Europe. It turned into an impromptu buying trip, Perry said, when she and Morgan, smitten with the abundant, inexpensive Venetian glass, decided to bring back as much as they could to sell it at art fairs "and enjoy it until then."
Morgan had appeared in good health and good spirits at the Re/Max office on Thursday, Blackhall said. "She was at work until 6 o'clock, then she left to go shopping before she went home." Later that evening, she was taken by ambulance from her home to Roy L. Schneider Hospital, where she died around 8 p.m., her son said.
In addition to her son, she is survived by a sister, Patricia Anderson; her adoptive daughter Marlene V. Francis, adoptive brother Jens-Peter Kemmler, other relatives and many friends.
