Another member of what I’d call the first generation of MOGSouth stalwarts has left us for more peaceful vistas. David Chiles of Jamestown, NC, age 80, passed away on November 15, 2023 surrounded by his loving family.
David Chiles at MOGSouth Holiday Party 2016
David and Sarah were long standing members of MOGSouth. They were selected as Mother Courage Award recipients in 2003, some twenty years ago. They instrumental in so many MOGSouth club events, holiday parties, rallies and drives throughout the scenic blue ridge and other wonderful places in the Carolinas, it would be impossible to list them all.
David, a professional in the haberdashery business, was always impeccably dressed, that, and his eloquence was always on display. When David talked, one would listen intently for fear of missing something earth shaking. David loved his Morgans, both on the track and on the road. He was successful numerous times vintage racing number 39 and his road cars were things of beauty.
Each of his Morgan road cars were exquisitely restored, wonders to see and for me, real treasures. I don’t know how many times I found myself drooling over his red Plus 8 which I tried to emulate with mine but fell short, way short! David was a true friend and will be sincerely missed. Mark
David Mikell Chiles Obituary as published online, follows.
David Mikell Chiles
in the care of Hanes Lineberry Funeral Home
David Mikell Chiles of Jamestown, NC, age 80, passed away peacefully on November 15, 2023 surrounded by his loving family. He had been in declining health for the past few years. He was a member of Jamestown United Methodist Church.
The son of the late L.C. and Victoria Chiles of High Point, David was born in Knoxville, TN, and lived most of his life in High Point, NC. Summers were spent in Little Switzerland, NC, where he served as president of the neighborhood association.
He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and two daughters, Angela Kemper (David) and Melissa Freeman (Doyle), and one sister, Dixie Burns (Dan). He loved his five grandchildren, Nick Freeman (Brittany), Brynn Freeman, Collin Kemper (Lidia), Paige Kemper, Cara Freeman; his great-grandson, Declan Freeman; and his many cousins, nephews, and nieces.
David was self-employed in the men’s apparel industry for over fifty years. He was active in the Men’s Apparel Club of the Carolinas, Inc. and served as vice president. He was known for his many friendships and loyalty to his customers and fellow colleagues throughout the southeast and beyond.
As an active member in the Triad Sports Car Club and the Morgan Sports Car Club, National and Southern groups, David loved planning weekend get-togethers in the mountains and drives along the Blue Ridge Parkway. He enjoyed racing in the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association for many years and drove his Morgan to many victories.
Funeral services will be 2:00 pm Monday, November 20, 2023 at Jamestown United Methodist Church. The family will receive friends and loved ones in the church fellowship hall immediately following the funeral service. David will be laid to rest in Floral Garden Park Cemetery in High Point prior to the funeral service.
The family would like to thank all the medical and support staff at Hospice of the Piedmont for their loving care and support.
Memorials may be directed to Hospice of the Piedmont, 1801 Westchester Drive, High Point, NC 27262.
It is really difficult for me to report that one of the most loved members of MOGSouth has passed away. Lee Gaskins passed away on 8 November.
Lee Gaskins was a MOGSouth member longer that I can remember and a tremendous friend. Lee had an unmistakable sense of humor and was probably one of the most knowledgeable Morgan car enthusiasts I will ever know.
He loved all those in the Morgan community and only his other passion, Tennis, could drag him away from a heady Morgan discussion at any one of our meets. (The Wimbledon Championships always seemed to coincide with the annual DC MOG events (Morgan Owners Gatherings.))
Lee was my ‘go to’ guy for Morgan history. If I had a question, I knew where to go for the answer. He knew far more about the hot rod Morgan Super Sports, the car that won Le Mans, than I think the factory will ever know.
When I lived in South Carolina, Lee and I were thick as thieves, and to be honest I was more than a willing participant. I have vivid memories of transporting unobtainable Morgan parts for Lee in the back of my SUV. Picking them up from wherever and transporting them back to his home in South Carolina. He asked me to do it, as he didn’t want to let Trisha know he was buying more Morgan stuff! She thought he had enough. I was with Lee on this . . . can you ever have enough??
Their home was dedicated to and organized around Lee’s Morgans, both this road cars and his race cars. Always a Morgan treasure trove to visit. Really hard to describe . . . nothing short of a Morgan Museum.
He will be missed, a MOGSouth member and a friend. Someone we certainly cannot replace.
Lee’s obituary, as posted in the Spartanburg, SC Herald-Journal is below.
Lee Oliver Gaskins Jr.
Lee Oliver Gaskins, Jr, 86 of Spartanburg, SC, passed away on November 8, 2023 in Johns Creek, GA.
Lee was born in Spartanburg, SC to Sarah Cordelia Cudd Gaskins and Lee Oliver Gaskins Sr on July 6, 1937. He went to school at Spartan High School. He graduated from Clemson University He served in the Army as a Captain. He married Patricia Curry on June 10, 1961 in Columbus, GA. During his career he worked for Liberty Mutual, AMF, Michigan Mutual, Amerisure and Zurich Insurance company. Lee was a member of Morningside Baptist Church in Spartanburg, SC. Lee volunteered with Mobile Meals of Spartanburg and Habitat for Humanity.
Lee had a very dry sense of humor, loved to tell a good joke and was an animated storyteller. Lee could fix just about anything and loved to tinker in the garage with his beloved British cars. Lee was an avid tennis player.
Lee is preceded in death by his father, Lee Gaskins Sr, his mother, Sarah Cudd Gaskins, his sister, Nancy Gaskins Floyd and her husband James Wesley Floyd Jr and his sister-in-law Lark Calhoun Gaskins.
Lee is survived by his devoted wife, Trisha Gaskins, his loving children, Trey & LeAnne Gaskins, Georgia Gaskins Callis, Ken and Carolina Gaskins Ortloff, his dear siblings, Guerry and Sallie Gaskins Burnett, Dean and Judy Gaskins, David and Elizabeth Gaskins Barkley, and his eight wonderful grandchildren, Alexis Callis Willman, Katie Gaskins Smith, Anne Gaskins, Nicholas Callis, Emily Gaskins, Grace Gaskins, Ian Ortloff and Lilly Ortloff.
We will hold a celebration of life for Lee in Spartanburg, SC on Monday, November 20, 2023 from 1pm-3pm at Dean Gaskins’ Home 921 Murph Road, Pauline, SC 29374.
In lieu of flowers, donations can made to:
Mobile Meals of Spartanburg, 419 E. Main Street, Spartanburg, SC 29302
If you would like to send condolences, the address is:
Currently only apparel, branded with the MOGSouth Logo or other related embroidery, is currently available. There are no longer any car badges, pins or patches available. Restocking orders are currently being considered. We will let you know when our stocks have been replenished.
FYI, the on hand stockage levels dwindled with basically no demand in the last year or so. Investments in these items, given the low level of demand was deemed questionable. However, apparel is still available through our supporting business Fourth Gear LTD. http://www.fourth-gear-ltd.com/. Fourth Gear LTD is also available on the MOGSouth web site, http://www.mogsouth.com/ on the SUPPORTERS page.
Fourth Gear LTD has many items, hats, shirts, jackets, etc., all availble for embroidering with the MOGSouth or GatorMOG logos.
Also, any of these apparel items can be embroidered with Morgan related images such as traditional Morgan cars, top up or down, Vintage Morgan Three Wheelers, Stylized Morgan Three Wheelers, etc., and the proprietors at Fourth Gear will even color your images as you desire, just as a note in the field provided on the online order form.
All the Morgan related images and the MOGSouth / GatorMOG logos have been digitized by the club and are now available for you to adorn your chosen apparel item. Simply follow the ordering process at the Fourth Gear LTD online store. (And if you want a specific color, put a comment in the order’s note field!)
My Return to Morganmania By Bob Britton I was 13 or 14 when I first laid my eyes on a Morgan. My older brother who had recently graduated from college bought a stunning Morgan DHC in Ferrari Yellow. It was such a different looking vehicle compared to the popular Mustangs and other American and British cars starting to hit the roads during the early to mid- 60’s. I was completely smitten by the car and fantasied about owning one when I was older. Fast forward to my freshman year at college when I returned home for spring break and saw an ad in the NY Times for a 1965 Morgan +4 for sale in a town close by. Well, with some money saved up from both summer and college jobs I had just enough cash to buy the car for the asking price of $1500, an almost fortune for a 19-year-old college kid at that time. I called a high school buddy to drive me to go see the car, with cash burning a hole in my pocket. Just as we pulled up outside the seller’s house and rang the doorbell another potential buyer showed up in a cab, which he had taken from the local train station after traveling from NYC. Of course, we both wanted this beautiful black with red interior Morgan. Luckily, the owner gave me right of first refusal as I had beaten the other guy by mere minutes to the house. Glad we did not stop for that cup of coffee on the way over or otherwise I would probably never have owned a Morgan. So, with $1500 less in my pocket I drove the car home, with “borrowed” plates
from my mom’s car, no insurance, and I did not know how to drive a stick shift either. That was an interesting ride back home, especially learning to drive a standard with the archaic Moss gearbox. So back to college in the Boston area I went for the spring semester with my Morgan. I sure had some envious classmates back at school when I showed up with this car. Most had no idea what it was as the campus was primarily full of VW’s, small to mid-size American cars, a few muscle cars, or other British sports cars. Some kidded me about it being a “wooden crate” when they learned it had a wood framed body. That sure did not bother me because I had the one of coolest cars on campus. For the next two years I drove the Morgan everywhere, many times back and forth from MA to my home in NY, commuting to summer jobs, a trip once to Watkins Glen to attend the Formula 1 GP race and any chance I got to drive it. Of course, I also learned a few things about car repair and maintenance as well. Once it left me stranded at Jones Beach, NY late one night while on a date when the steel pin that operates the aluminum throw out sleeve broke. A call to one of my buddies with instructions to get a piece of rope to come get us so he could tow the car home led to a rather long night. Now of course I would just call AAA.
My first Morgan, 1965 +4 circa 1969
In the spring of my junior year a college buddy offered me $2500 cash for the
Morgan. He was dropping out of school and heading to the west coast and needed
a “cool” car to get him there. I thought to myself… “I paid $1500, drove it for 2 years and could now make a $1000 profit”. Being a business major, it was a no brainer…. SOLD. And off he and the car went to California, both never to be heard from again. But I had Morgan withdrawal soon after selling the car. A few weeks later I saw an ad in the Boston Globe for a 1967 Morgan 4/4 in Kingfisher Blue, with an asking price much less than I sold my +4 for. Yep, I was a Morgan owner again in short order. That car got me through to the end of my senior year at which time I sold it and bought a Porsche 911 to begin my work career. About a year after graduating from college while working in the NYC area I saw an ad for a Morgan for sale in the same town I was living in. Having already owned two Morgan’s I could not resist going to see the car. As you can expect I bought it even though it was not running and needed quite a bit of work. Later I discovered this was a rare Morgan 4/4 Series V Competition model. Soon after acquiring this Morgan, I accepted a job in Boston. Off to Boston I went, got myself settled into an apartment on chic Newbury St, and then started to look for a place where I could store and work on the Morgan. I found a single car garage in a nearby town for $15/month rent including electricity. So, again I reached out to a buddy who just happened to have a car with a trailer hitch, we borrowed a trailer and proceeded to tow it to Boston.
Over the next several years I would spend weekends and some nights sorting through the Morgan, replacing rotten pieces of wood, having a new interior made and then eventually the body work and fresh paint. As luck would have it my brother offered to rebuild the engine for me since it was basically the same Ford engine as in his Lotus Super 7 race car. So off to CT I went one weekend with that little 1500cc engine in the trunk of my car so my brother could rebuild the engine. He just so happened to have a shelf full of extra performance engine parts which he no longer needed that found their way into my engine, including a mild race cam, forged domed pistons, a dual set of Webber DCOE 40 carbs, a set of tuned headers and a few other performance goodies. Those Webber’s required a unique bump in the bonnet which you can see in the photos of the car. My brother estimated that the engine he built was putting out somewhere between 110-115HP, a bit more than the stock 84HP of the Series V Competition motor. Also, at my brother’s recommendation I sourced a Cortina gearbox from a junkyard which had closer ratio gears and a remote shifter which got rid of the push/pull shifter in the 4/4’s. This was one amazingly fast Morgan with that engine. And, as it was not my daily driver, I had the luxury of keeping it in my rental garage to use primarily on weekends, trips to the Cape, going to car shows or even venturing to a few Morgan meets. In 1978 I drove the 4/4 to MOG 8 in Luray, VA with a girlfriend. At some point during the meet, I heard an
unwelcome noise coming from the engine, which turned out to be a broken valve spring. As luck would have it a Morgan enthusiast attending MOG 8 was a mechanic at the local Ford garage and he thought a Ford Pinto valve spring would work so off to his dealership we drove so he could replace the broken spring. I drove that car for an additional 7 years with the Pinto valve spring in it. And, to my delight my car won 1st place in the 4/4 class. Two years later I returned to MOG 10 with a new girlfriend, who eventually became my wife, and that year my car took 2 nd place in the 4/4 class.
Bob and future wife at car show, MOG 10
My 4/4 on Skyline Drive, VA 1980
In the fall of 1980, my future wife and I took a trip to the UK to visit some of her English relatives. We took a few extra days to tour Wales and when I noticed that we were going to be traveling near Malvern Links I said to her…. “We have to stop at the Morgan factory”. So, a quick detour took us to the hills of Malvern to tour MMC. Visiting MMC is like no other factory tour one can imagine. After being cheerfully greeted by the receptionist we were just instructed to wander around the factory and ask any questions we might have of any of the men or women working in the shop. We freely walked around everywhere. We even got to see Mrs. Peter Morgan’s personal +8 Automatic, supposedly the only one ever made by MMC. After our tour I ask if we could say to hi to Peter Morgan and without hesitation, we were escorted into his office for a brief chat. He was a very charming fellow and was keenly interested to learn that my girlfriend’s mother was English and had moved to the US just after WWII to marry her father, after they meet while he was stationed in the UK during the war.
Frame Shop at MMC where it all begins
Panel Beating at MMC I owned the 4/4 for about 10 years before I decided, as a new Dad, that I should sell it since there was no room for three in the car. So, I placed an ad in the Boston Globe and a young Doctor from Puerto Rico doing his residency in one of the Boston area hospitals bought the car and had it shipped back to Puerto Rico. I often wonder if the Morgan is still running around the island and being enjoyed by him. Of course, after owning 3 Morgan’s over a period of sixteen or so years I was having British car withdrawal so I convinced my wife that if I could find a sports car that had four seats, as we now had a second daughter, we should buy it. My initial quest was to find a Morgan 4-seater. Unfortunately, four seat Morgan’s were not that plentiful, especially in NH, where we were now living. However, I knew that Austin Healey’s had little jump seats in the back, so I ended up buying an Austin Healey 3000 in 1991 and immediately installed two sets of seat belts in the jump seats for my daughters. They were 4 and 7 at the time. The Healey became
our new “family” sports car for many years. I have attended every British Invasion in Stowe, VT since 1992 and my older daughter, now 37, who now lives in VT, often comes to spend the day with me at the show. But even after all the years owning the Healey, a truly magnificent British roadster in its own rights, I still had the desire to own a Morgan again. I thought initially I wanted a DHC, just like the first one I saw so many years ago, so I began to look for one of these rare Morgan’s. I started to watch BaT auctions, checked out ads in Hemmings, spoke to Morgan owners at British Invasion and other car shows to find a DHC for sale. I eventually test drove a beautifully restored 1967 +4 DHC but the price was more than my budget. While visiting my brother who is now retired in FL, we test drove the rarest of all DHC’s, a 4-seater “Snobmog”. But being an early 50’s model it just did not have the performance I was hoping for. My brother, who now owns a Morgan 4/4 himself, mentioned that he knew of a fellow Morgan club member in GA who had several Morgan’s including a DHC so I reached out to him to see if he might be interested in selling it. As it turned out he was, and he also mentioned he had an early +8 that he wanted to sell as well as a rare Super Sport. Of course, the SS was way out of my price range but the early Moss gearbox +8, the holy grail of +8’s, perked my interest. That was it. I was going to buy that car instead of his DHC. So, after a many months of back-
and-forth phone calls and viewing numerous photos as I could not fly down to see the car in person due to the pandemic, I purchased the car sight unseen and had it shipped to me in the fall of 2020. This +8 is a low mileage 1971 model, 1 of 49 legally imported that year before Morgan Motor Company withdraw from the US market due to being unable to meet DOT regulations. And as you already know Morgan’s had a hiatus from the US market for a few years until Bill Fink figured out how to get them legally back into the country again using propane instead of gasoline to meet emission regulations. What appealed to me most about this Morgan is it was one of the 484 +8’s produced that was based on the low and narrow body +4 Morgan’s with the Moss gearbox.
My 1971 Plus 8 upon arrival in NH While an excellent original example of this rare and desirable Morgan model I decided to give it a “re-freshening” over the winter including a new leather interior and two-tone paint job of Royal Ivory with Connaught green fenders.
[I posted this once before however with the number of new members we have, I am sure there are folks out there that want MOGSouth Name Badges. If you are new to the club, or simply can’t find yours, we’re here for you!! In case you are wondering, they look like the picture below. They are available for $8.00 plus shipping. I can’t remember what the shipping is, so let’s say $2.00 each. If you want one, simply send an email to sbschepens@gmail.com and provide us with what you want the badge to say (Name, nickname, Alter Ego, etc.), put a check in the mail to Stacy Schepens (address on the membership roster) and we’ll get the process started! And, be patient. They will take a bit of time to get created and mailed. FYI, they either come with the little magnetic device that magically attaches to your garment but leaves no holes or the old ‘pin it to your shirt’ style! Let me know if you have a preference. Cheers, Mark]
