Morgans and Mr. H…

I read the Wall Street Journal pretty much every day. The reporting is far more objective than what passes for journalism in the other papers I take (the LA Times and the NY Times), the stories tend to be better, and there’s A.J. Baime. Mr. Baime is an award-winning historian and a fantastic writer. He does a regular column in the WSJ about interesting people who own interesting automobiles, and the most recent one was about a fellow who fell in love with, and later bought, a Morgan.

A Morgan. Wow, that brought back memories.

When I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade, our science teacher (Peter Herrington) owned a Morgan. It was 1953 Morgan, to be specific, and it was unrestored and magnificently original. I was just getting interested in cars and motorcycles back then, and that Morgan was riveting.   It was one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen.  I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I knew I liked it.  In an age when everything was trying to look like a fighter jet, Mr. Herrington’s Morgan was a combination of an old car, a sports car, and attitude.  It had sweeping fenders (like an old Model A Ford), it was low slung and a two-seater (like a Corvette), and it had huge louvers and a big leather belt to hold the hood down.  Its appearance said I don’t care what I look like, I’m tough, and I’m built to perform.  It was cool. To a 12-year-old kid like me, it was beyond cool.

To dive a bit deeper into this story, I was a bit of a problem, you see, when I was 12 years old.  Actually, I was a pain in the ass, and I got detention a lot. You might say I was a confirmed detention recidivist, and as such, I spent more time in detention than any other class I had in those days.

Normally, detention would be a bad thing, but our principal rotated detention duty and one day Mr. Herrington drew the short straw.  I guess it was inevitable that Peter Herrington would be the detention duty warden one day when I had detention, and this day was that day.  The upshot of all this was that I lived about a mile and a half from school, and after cleaning blackboards and doing the other kinds of things kids in 7th grade had to do in detention, I started to walk home when my detention ended.  Mr. Herrington was in the parking lot, he fired up the Morgan, and he offered me a ride home. In his Morgan. The one I described above.  A ride.  In the Morgan.  This was punishment?

Now, I won’t tell you that I tried to time my recidivism to coincide with Mr. Herrington’s detention duty, but I will tell you that was not the last time I ever got a ride home after detention in the ’53 Morgan.  That car was just so cool. It was a convertible, the door waistline was incredibly low, and it looked and felt like you sat above the pavement at a distance more appropriate for a valve gap than an automobile’s ground clearance. The effect was intoxicating.

Many years later (50 years later, to be specific), I received an email from good buddy Chief Mike (who lives in New Jersey, where I sort of grew up) with an interesting message. Whaddaya know?  Mike had bumped into Mr. Herrington at a local mall. It seems our former 7th grade science teacher (still a gearhead and now long retired) had shoehorned an LS-2 Chevy Corvette engine into his Mazda RX-7.  He had some questions about the care and maintenance of Corvette motors, and everyone in New Jersey knows Mike is the guy to see if you have a Corvette question.

As Mike was telling this story, a lot of memories flooded back. All of us have had great teachers, and Mr. Herrington was mine. Like I said above, I was a first-class pain-in-the-you-know-what in junior high school (and in high school, too, for that matter), but my 7th grade science class held my interest. Science was cool and so was my teacher. It’s probably why I became an engineer.

To make a long story a little less long, I Googled Mr. Herrington’s name.   Yep, there he was.   There’s his address.  A quick 411 call and a few minutes later I had Mr. Herrington on the phone. How about that? Fifty years since I’ve seen this guy, and now I’ve got him on the phone.

You know, a voice is a funny thing. Mr. Herrington, then well into his 80s, sounded exactly as I remembered him. Strong, firm, and focused on gearhead stuff. He told me that the RX-7 was a good car, but the original rotary piston engines were only good for about 75,000 miles (he’d been through several of them, he said). Dropping a Corvette engine into an RX-7 was the way to go, and that’s what he had done. He spoke about it like it was changing tires (a classic Peter Herrington trait).

We had a great conversation. He told me he remembered me, which I kind of doubted until he asked me a question about my father. “Your Dad was the guy who designed and built his own swimming pool, including the filtration system, right? He made the filter tank out of an old wine vat?” That was so long ago I had forgotten about it, but not Mr. Herrington. Wow!

I told Mr. Herrington I felt bad about being such a bad kid and such a royal pain in the ass back in the 7th grade, and he said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re that age…”  Just like that, years of guilt evaporated.  It was a good feeling.

I sent Mr. Herrington a signed copy of 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM and we had a couple of great conversations after that touching on cars, motorcycles, careers, health, life, and other topics. And then one day his wife wrote to tell me he had passed away.  That was a tough email to read, but I felt incredibly fortunate to have reconnected with Mr. Herrington, and I think he enjoyed it, too.  A.J. Baime’s article in the Wall Street Journal made me think about him again.   Thank you, A.J. Baime, and thank you, Peter Herrington.