From wild horse to Route 66: A sailor’s century-long journey

Morris Neighbors’ journey from Oklahoma to the Pacific and back

Morris Neighbors was raised far from the ocean, in an Oklahoma community where oil derricks, farm chores, school, church and baseball shaped daily life. Wild Horse, Oklahoma, sat between Tulsa and Hominy along Highway 20. In the 1930s, it was an oil-field community with company houses, a school, a church, grocery stores and families who knew how to make do.

His father worked for Sinclair Oil and farmed 80 acres. Neighbors attended Wild Horse School through sixth grade. When his father transferred to the Tulsa area around 1937, the family moved to Turley. Neighbors later attended Tulsa Central High School, where he graduated in 1942.

But then the world changed. The United States was at war, and all three of Neighbors’ older brothers had already entered military service. He wanted to serve, too. He also carried a boyhood curiosity that had never left him: he wanted to see the ocean.

From Oklahoma to war in the Pacific

“I had only seen it in movie shorts,” he recalled. “It fascinated me.”

A few days before his 18th birthday, with his parents’ permission, Neighbors enlisted in the Navy in October 1943. After training in San Diego, the Navy assigned him to radar work. Radar was still new, and the Navy looked for young men with strong math skills and the ability to learn quickly.

Neighbors became an operator, watching screens, reading contacts and helping relay information that could shape decisions in combat.

He was assigned to USS Leutze (DD-481), a Fletcher-class destroyer that entered the Pacific war in 1944. Destroyers were fast, heavily armed and dangerous places to serve. They screened larger ships, hunted submarines, supported landings, fought off aircraft and often took the first blows from enemy attack.

Life aboard ship was a cycle of watchstanding, meals grabbed when possible, cramped bunks, sea air and long stretches of waiting interrupted by sudden danger. Neighbors remembered four hours on duty and four hours off, and he remembered the men of his radar crew most of all.

“There were about 12 of us in the radar crew,” he said. “Those were the men I spent the most time with.”

At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Leutze took part in the night action at Surigao Strait. Neighbors helped plot radar information while the ship maneuvered into position for a torpedo attack. He described that moment as one of the proudest of his Navy service.

The destroyer also supported landings and shore bombardment operations. Before troops went ashore, ships like Leutze fired at enemy positions to soften defenses. Neighbors saw the Pacific war as a vast, island-to-island struggle, different from the maps and front lines many people associate with Europe.

“You never know exactly how you are going to react,” he said of first combat. But after Leutze fought off enemy aircraft, he gained confidence in his ship and crew. “From that point on, I said, I am not worried. We are as good as they are.”

The defining moment of his service came during the Battle of Okinawa. On April 6, 1945, Japan launched a massive wave of kamikaze attacks against Allied naval forces. Destroyers on radar picket and screening duty were especially vulnerable because they often detected and met incoming aircraft before the rest of the fleet.

USS Newcomb was hit repeatedly and set ablaze. Leutze moved alongside to help. Hoses were passed across. Repair parties fought the fire. Ammunition could have exploded at any time. Then another aircraft came in, and its bomb exploded against Leutze’s stern.

Neighbors was on deck helping with a fire hose. The blast threw him down. “There is no soft place to land on a ship,” he remembered. He suffered severe sprains to both ankles and was later awarded the Purple Heart.

The damage to Leutze was devastating. Photographs from the family collection show twisted steel and a stern nearly torn away. The ship survived, but the war ended before repairs could restore her to service.

Post service

Neighbors returned to Tulsa, moved in with his grandmother and went back to the church he had attended before the war. There he met the young woman who would become his wife. He used the G.I. Bill to attend Oklahoma State University, walked on to the baseball team and earned a scholarship. He graduated in 1950.

Like many Veterans of his generation, he did not frame his life around what he had endured. He built forward. He worked, married, raised a family, remembered his shipmates and returned to civilian life with the steadiness he had learned in uniform. He built a long career in education, coaching and school administration. He served in his church as a deacon and in the choir. Later, he shared his WWII experience with students and civic groups helping to preserve the history of the Pacific War for younger generations.

Eight decades later, Tulsa placed him at the front of another historic procession. On May 30, 2026, Neighbors rode in a red 1955 Ford Thunderbird as one of six centenarians selected to lead the Route 66 Capital Cruise. The event celebrated the 100th anniversary of Route 66 and set a Guinness World Records title for the largest parade of classic cars.

The scene joined the full arc of his life: the Oklahoma boy who had never seen the ocean, the sailor aboard USS Leutze, the wounded Veteran who came home, the student athlete at Oklahoma State, the husband and family man, and the centenarian honored on the Mother Road.

When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Neighbors did not ask to be remembered as a hero. He wanted his shipmates to know he had done his job.

That may be the clearest measure of his generation. They were ordinary people before the war. They became military men and women when the country needed them. Then they came home, became ordinary again and built the future their service made possible.