EL SEGUNDO HERALD February 3, 2022 Page 11
John Morton from front page
is probably the most unappreciated driver in
the United States,” Brock said.
Morton said that his initial intention was
to return to the Waukegan area after the class
concluded, but on a whim, mustered the courage
to approach Shelby for a job. The following
Monday, Morton met with Shelby and was hired
to become a part of the Shelby American team.
Not as a driver, not as a car mechanic or parts
scrounger, but as a janitor. Morton jumped at
the opportunity to become an exceedingly small
cog in the phenomenally successful Shelby
American racing team. He initially dutifully
swept and mopped the floors and kept the
bathrooms as clean as a 20-year-old could.
Morton, who turns eighty on Feb. 17, grew
up in Waukegan, Illinois, with his parents and
brother Lyman. He was introduced to racing at
an early age by his father, who was in the real
estate business. Morton was first introduced
to racing at little dirt tracks in Waukegan and
Milwaukee in 1949.
When he was fifteen, Morton said that his
father took him and his brother to the Elkhart
Lake track to watch a 500-mile sports car race.
That sealed the career deal for Morton, who
remembers that “on that day, I decided that
this is what I am going to do.” It turns out that
Morton, a bit underage, had been driving on
family road trips since he was eleven.
Once Morton started his entry-level job
with Shelby American, he was occasionally
tasked with tackling other duties. He was soon
elevated to “parts chaser” and filled multiple
behind-the-scenes roles on the Shelby racing
team, always aspiring to get behind the wheel
during competition in a Shelby-sponsored car.
Morton summed up his four years with Shelby
American this way: “It was an incredibly lucky
experience for me to be at that little driving
school, at that just the right week,” noting
how the Cobra prototype car that he drove in
1962 sold at a bidding war in Monterey a few
years ago for more than 12-million dollars.
Morton said that 60 years ago, the base price
for a Cobra came in at around $6,000 and that
Shelby was still making a profit.
Here is a quote from Shelby about Morton’s
tenure with the team: “He is very special to
me. He came to work for us as a kid sweeping
the floors. We used to look around the corner
and see him sitting in the cars, imagining that
he was driving.”
In his book, Morton writes about how, 50-60
years ago, racing was “a much more dangerous
sport,” chronicling the on-track deaths of
racers Dave MacDonald, Ken Miles, and Jim
Clark. He noted how, over the years, not only
the tracks that they race on, but the cars that
they encase themselves in, have become “much
safer,” citing the “foot-fire” problems that led
to the death of Shelby American’s MacDonald.
“You are probably less likely to get hurt
(racing) now than you are if you are a professional
football player,” he said. “The cars are
so safe,” he said, that maybe today’s drivers
“tend to take more chances.”
In the ’60s, Morton occasionally drove
for the Dan Blocker Racing team. Yes, Dan
Blocker, the beloved Hoss, one of the stars of
the long-running Bonanza television show, who
passed away way too early in 1972.
Morton did not have much interaction with
“Hoss,” though. “He was hands-off,” Morton
said of Blocker. “He would come to the races
and put-up money for the team,” he said, though
one quick story in the Morton book mentions
that when driver Morton was very fatigued
before a race, Blocker, calling Morton “little
buddy,” offered the driver pick-me-up pills.
Morton relates that Blocker said something
like, “take these, little buddy.” Morton, not
knowing the ingredients of the offered pills,
demurred and decided to just catch a couple
of winks in a nearby pick-up truck to freshen
himself for the upcoming race.
So as Morton, struggling financially, was
working a “poor paying job” in the late 1960s,
Peter Brock re-emerged in his life.
To be Morton as he prepares to embark on his racing career. continued next week!
Travel from page 2
When I (Ben) was 12 years old, my father’s
office sat in the cellar of our house in Bruxelles,
Belgium. When I came home from boarding
school, we’d huddle there and decide which
of his business trips I could join. On the wall,
there was an enormous Michelin road map
of Europe, where Dad’s secretary had traced
in bright red every route he’d driven. After
hours, we’d sit down there, and he would tell
great stories, as we plotted how to fill up the
few remaining empty spaces with Josephine’s
felt marker.
As far back as the dawn of human migration,
maps have served as much more than
simple informational tools. They’ve represented
romance and mystery, danger and exotica, the
limits of human knowledge, and the inspired
reaches of our imagination. The unexplored
spaces on Greek parchments detailed the serpents
and monsters that awaited the intrepid
traveler beyond the last pier in Athens harbor.
The Flemish Gerardus Mercator took years
to bend and form the Seven Seas into the
attractive, intricate, and hopefully navigable
blocks of his famous projection.
Even in modern times, with our preference
for efficiency over splendor, maps have
represented the best of our cultures. In the
explosion of tourism that followed Napoleon’s
exit at Waterloo, German and French maps
radiated a colorful obsession with perfection
in engineering that continues to this day. The
British love of the small-scale life translated
into gorgeous walking maps, with footpaths
and field gates intersecting the elevation lines
of every hill and dale in the British Isles. In
the 20th century, the grand scope of American
generosity and salesmanship found its reflection
in the more than eight billion free road
maps handed out with a windshield scrub
at the filling stations of the road-and carobsessed
country.
Countless battles throughout history have
been won and lost based purely on the accuracy
of the invader’s geographical and topographical
information—their maps. We also imagine that
countless divorces have been hurried along by
missed right turns and a driver’s explosion
of frustration at the navigator in the shotgun
seat. Map-reading has always been a very
serious business.
Early in World War II, when Adolf Hitler
kept promising an invasion of the southern
English coast, he had all the maps he needed.
But the always ingenious British took down
or turned every directional post and street
sign from Kent to Cornwall. Fortunately, the
strategy was never tested, but for postwar
schoolboys, there was the delicious image
of sullen, confused Nazis careening all over
the countryside, while the plucky English
housewives, retirees—and schoolboys, of
course—picked them off one by one.
And yet…
We still recall the drudgery of constantly
switching back and forth between country,
state, and city maps, all of them in a ugly
wad of worn, ripped, and half-opened paper
on the back seat of the rental car—until the
sun set and rendered the entire mess useless.
Nowadays, we just press the plus and minus
icons on our backlit cell phones to zoom in
and out. We might have no idea where we’ve
just passed, but at least we arrive sane and
healthy. And in cities with a reputation for
besieging tourists, we no longer give ourselves
away by bickering and fumbling a mountain
of paper. No, we’re just on the phone, same
as any other busy, respectable local. Or so
we pretend.
The other problem with maps that seems to
have gone away is clutter. Cities and towns
make dense subjects, packed with endless
opportunities and obstacles—streets and
squares, palaces and monuments, restaurants
and hotels, public toilets, one-way lanes and
dead ends, shops by the thousand. There was
always an issue with how much information
you could include in a map without making it
unreadable—and usually the answer was not
nearly enough. These days, any map program
lets you focus on just the pubs or just the
Punjabi restaurants in just the neighborhood
you’re exploring. Maps, guide books, magazine
articles, and all have collapsed into that tiny,
impact-protected toy in the palm of your hand.
Up to a point.
On the very first morning of our first trip
to Mumbai, we awoke for our usual 7AM
coffee stroll and left the hotel with Google
Maps and iPhone in hand. I’d always wanted
to visit the Sassoon Docks, one of the legendary
points in the constellation of the ancient
British East India Tea Company. One of the
walking routes on the cell phone would take
us along the picturesque Colaba Seawall, so
we naturally selected it. What we didn’t know
was that Google Maps, at least in Mumbai,
fails to differentiate between a causeway, a
quiet side street, and an alley through a slum.
We found the error of our way, when we
turned a corner to a sudden, very loud shriek
of surprise. The old lady arranging her sari
in her open tarpaulin home recovered and
returned our “Namaste” with an embarrassed
grin. Four beautiful children playing cricket in
the gutter stopped to let us pass, then followed
along, gleefully demanding “10 rupee!” (we
later decided that the 10-rupee thing was a
game we could play with children all over the
city). A busy mother glanced up from where
she was castigating her baby for defecating
in the street and not over the drain like a
good boy. At another drain, an old man was
studiously clearing the previous day’s deposits
with a bamboo stick. By a hydrant, a man in
his underwear was soaping himself up, while
his friends waited with buckets of cold water
to rinse him off. No one seemed to mind the
invasion—except the invaders, of course, who
couldn’t get through fast enough.
It’s possible that someday someone will
scratch at the annoying microchip in their neck
and look back nostalgically on the good, old,
romantic days of iPhones and Google Maps.
For now, we have to begrudgingly respect the
progress these tools represent in addressing
the bugaboos of traditional navigation. We
might not wax poetic over their beauty and
virtue, but… We haven’t carried a working
map in years.
Next up: Life and Death Valley.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Glencoe, Scotland: Can you hear me now? Apparently not. Greenwich, England: Time has to start and end somewhere. If you’re British, it might as well be here.