bmattock
Veteran
For friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Grandfather Mountain, a loss of an icon and friend to all photographers.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
http://www.fayettevillenc.com/local/article_ap?id=86236
Published on Thursday, June 01, 2006
Hugh Morton, photographer, environmentalist and N.C. icon, dies
CHARLOTTE, N.C.
The Associated Press
Hugh Morton, whose camera lens captured some of North Carolina's enduring images and whose passion for environmental causes preserved Grandfather Mountain, died Thursday. He was 85.
Morton died at around 6 p.m. from esophageal cancer, said his daughter, Catherine. He was at his home in Linville, at the base of Grandfather Mountain.
From courtside at the Dean Smith Center in Chapel Hill to the heights of the Blue Ridge Mountains he adored, Morton took his camera everywhere. He photographed University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham pitching a horseshoe, Michael Jordan in a Tar Heel uniform and the Charlotte skyline as seen from atop Grandfather Mountain _ 100 miles away _ on an exceptionally clear day.
He had a flair for promotion, dreaming up the "Mile-High Swinging Bridge" that became the symbol of Grandfather Mountain and running publicity for Luther Hodges' successful 1956 gubernatorial campaign.
And in his most famous campaign, he stopped the National Park Service from building the last 7.7 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway over Grandfather Mountain, saving the mountain he owned and loved.
"That was the most important thing as far he's concerned, his most important calling," Catherine Morton said Thursday night.
Dean Smith, the former basketball coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recalled meeting Morton when Smith was an assistant to then Tar Heel coach Frank McGuire. They remained friends until the end, with Smith calling Morton every couple of weeks, including last week.
"He sounded strong," Smith said. "I thought, maybe a miracle is happening. But of course, it would have been very difficult."
Morton, he said, "really was a giant in my eyes. And a close, close friend, and a great citizen of the state."
Morton was born in Wilmington in 1921, the son of Agnes MacRae Morton and Julian Morton.
His maternal grandfather, Hugh MacRae, was an industrialist whose development companies built at Wrightsville Beach, outside Wilmington, and Grandfather Mountain, near Linville in the state's western mountains. Julian Morton was president of both companies.
In 1934, at a summer camp near Linville, Hugh Morton took his first photography class. That same year, a photograph he took of a counselor tutoring two campers in golf appeared in a state tourism ad in Time magazine, launching Morton on a lifelong vocation.
"They used it, and it made me very proud to be in the big time, you know?" Morton recalled in a 2003 interview with UNC-TV.
A member of the Army Signal Corps, Morton filmed the exploits of the 25th Infantry Division during its World War II invasion of the Philippine island of Luzon and photographed Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He was wounded attempting to flush a Japanese sniper out of a cave.
While recovering, Morton learned of the early death of his father; when he returned to Wilmington after the war, he took over the family business. That same year, 1945, he married Julia Hathaway Taylor, who was with Morton when he died.
The couple would have four children _ Hugh Jr., who died in 1996; daughter Julia; daughter Catherine; and son Jim.
Over the years, Morton crossed paths with almost everyone who was anyone in North Carolina. Shortly after photographing a young actor performing in the annual outdoor production of "The Lost Colony," Morton paid the man $25 to entertain at a North Carolina Press Photographers Association banquet.
Andy Griffith's performance of "What it Was, Was Football" _ a piece about a country boy encountering his first college football game _ led to a best-selling record and launched a career that made Griffith one of the state's most famous natives.
Morton inherited Grandfather Mountain after the 1951 death of Hugh MacRae.
"The other members of the family knew that I loved Grandfather Mountain and Grandfather Mountain was not making any money," he said.
Under Morton's leadership, the highest peak in the Blue Ridge range became a top tourist attraction. Morton built a bridge from a parking lot across a ravine to one of the mountain's peaks, dubbing it the "Mile-High Swinging Bridge" because the structure was 5,305 feet above sea level.
His friend Charles Kuralt later joked that the bridge, which had to be tied down so it wouldn't swing wildly in wind, ought to have been called the "80-foot-high tethered bridge."
At his mother's behest, he hosted an annual Highland Games that became one of the world's largest celebrations of Scottish heritage, and he expanded the annual "Singing in the Mountain" gospel celebration. When Morton enticed Charlotte native Billy Graham to the event in 1963, traffic clogged U.S. Highway 221 for more than 50 miles between Marion and Blowing Rock.
In a life of many triumphs, Morton's best-known victory was over the National Park Service and its plan to route the Blue Ridge Parkway over Grandfather Mountain.
"It would have put deep cuts in fields high up on the side of a rugged mountain that just shouldn't be conquered," Morton said. "It was the difference between right and wrong, as far as I was concerned, and I was not going to budge."
With state leaders backing Morton, the park service was stymied in its efforts to condemn the right-of-way it needed. In 1962, Morton won a key public relations battle when he debated park service director Conrad Wirth on statewide television.
As Morton recalled, Wirth and his chief engineer droned on and on. When it was Morton's turn, he introduced his musician friend Arthur Smith, host of the popular morning television program "Carolina Calling."
"He says, 'You know, it just doesn't seem right when somebody loves Grandfather Mountain the way Hugh Morton does and he's looking after it _ it just doesn't seem right for a big bureaucrat to come down here from Washington and try to take it away from him,'" Morton said.
"Well, the switchboard at WRAL lit up like a Christmas tree, and that was all she wrote."
Four years later, the federal government agreed to a compromise that took the parkway around the side of the mountain. The bridge built to accomplish the feat _ the Linn Cove Viaduct _ won design awards and became the state's most famous stretch of road.
Over the decades, Morton's promotional skill and passion for Democratic causes saw him spearhead campaigns _ all of them ultimately successful _ to allow the sale of liquor by the drink, use a 3-cent gas tax for highway improvements and allow governors to serve successive terms.
His tourism development efforts made him a leader in bringing the battleship USS North Carolina to Wilmington and preserving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse _ though he opposed a later effort to move the structure inland, arguing its greatest asset was its proximity to the water.
He blamed friends in the travel industry for talking him into a short-lived run for governor in 1972; running third in a five-man race, he dropped out before the Democratic primary.
Concerned about the damage pollution was doing to western North Carolina landscapes, Morton spent much of the 1980s and 1990s lobbying for clean air.
The late 1990s saw residents of a country club community Morton developed near Grandfather Mountain criticize him for allowing construction of a nearby shopping center; Morton said the development financed the donation of 800 adjoining acres to the N.C. Nature Conservancy.
Morton often said he preferred to be known as Grandfather Mountain's "legal guardian," rather than its owner, and spent much of his later years arranging to protect thousands of acres from development. His grandson, Hugh MacRae "Crae" Morton III, took over Grandfather Mountain Inc. in June 2005. He is the fifth generation of the family to tend to the mountain since 1885.
"I don't know if I'm going to get to heaven or not," Morton told UNC-TV, "but I certainly won't get there if I in any way detract from the beauty of Grandfather Mountain."
