By By MARCIA STEFFENS / Niles Daily Star
NILES - The Niles Daily Star has learned of the death of the only child of Thomas Willard (T.W.) Ready, the original builder of the Four Flags Hotel and Ready Theater.
Virginia Ready Morris died on April 21, 2006, in Agoura Hills, Calif. She was 94. She is survived by three children: Patricia Morris Newman, William Ready Morris and Thomas Mihills Morris; three grandsons and three great-grandchildren.
Her friend, Patricia Bachman of Niles, remembers her “very close friend.” The two both lived in Niles, graduated from Niles High School and the families were acquainted, she said.
She remembers Virginia as a “skilled horsewoman,” whose wealthy father raised horses for harness racing at the family home, Galehaven, near Hunziker's nursery on Yankee Street.
Bachman also knew Charlie Morris, even before he married her friend Virginia.
She also remembers when Virginia's father, Thomas (T.W.) Willard Ready, opened his Ready Theater.
Though she couldn't remember the exact date, Bachman believed it was near to 1933, the year she graduated from Niles High School, or a little earlier.
Virginia would later name her daughter Patricia, after her friend in Niles.
Patricia Morris Newman, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., outside Los Angeles, remembers going to the pharmacy and soda shop in Niles, though she didn't grow up here.
Her grandfather T.W. Ready would eventually move in with his daughter Virginia and her two sons and daughter. With him came a collection of beautiful furniture, Newman said.
Some of the lovely pieces her grandfather had purchased from the Pillsbury estate, she said and the 1892-93 Columbian Exhibition.
One walnut table her mother had said came from the Old Coast Inn, but that was all Newman knew.
Her grandfather originated the draft and the fishbowl used by him for the first drawing in 1916 and again for the second World War, was given to a museum in Philadelphia by the family.
They even have a ring which that was, according to the family history, given by Buffalo Bill Cody.
Virginia had quite a history and life.
What a great epitaph.