Mr. Morris was among the most colorful characters on the local restaurant scene for decades. An 11-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and Army who received a Purple Heart after being wounded in Korea in 1952, Mr. Morris went on to become a boxer, winning 70 of 80 amateur fights and four of five professional bouts as a heavyweight. Turner once watched him bend a dime between his teeth — and he did it twice, giving one each to her twin sons.
In 1979, Mr. Morris became America’s oldest “Tough Man” participant at age 45, and 11 years after that, entered the fighting competition again at 56, only to be turned away by a ringside physician who said his blood pressure was too high.
And those were the sanctioned fights. Mr. Morris once told a Dayton Daily News columnist that he’d been shot nine times, mostly in bar fights, and was cut by knives 14 times.
And there was the other side of Duke: The walls of his restaurant across from the Montgomery County Fairgrounds were lined with framed poems that Duke had penned himself. He was a prolific poet, writing more than 600 poems “on napkins, match book covers, placemats, anything in front of me when the idea hits,” he said in a 1991 Dayton Daily News interview.
Mr. Morris, who learned to cook at the age of 9 while working for his parents at the Victory Cafeteria on East Third Street, kept Duke’s Golden Ox going through boom and bust times before closing the restaurant eight years ago.
Mr. Morris is survived by a sister who lives in Michigan, and by several nieces and nephews in the Dayton area and in Michigan, according to Turner. Funeral arrangements are pending.
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