Obituary

The brilliance of Quin Morton’s soul exploded into the universe on June 8, 2025, and shall shine forever more. His incandescent light brightened the lives of all that knew him.

Quin was born on July 6, 1948, in Charleston, West Virginia. He was preceded in death by his mother, Julia Beach Morton; father, Quin Morton III, and his wife who passed while they were married, Jennifer Jones Morton.

He leaves behind his daughter, Julia Morton Spradling (Patrick Spradling) and their children, TI’s grandchildren, Caleb Wiley, Ireland Wiley and Mary Spradling; his step-daughter, Natasha Rollins, and her children, TI’s step-grandchildren, James Blankenship, Bobbie Lee Crane and Evan Robinson, and Evan’s daughter, TI’s step-great-granddaughter, Skylar Robinson; his step-son, Joshua James; sisters, Julia Morton Neenan and Mary Lou Gallagher; nieces, Meredith Gallagher, Amy Pauley and Mary Jo Neenan; mother of his child, Carmen Sclavi Crisco, and many friends, too numerous to mention.

He attended Holz Elementary School, John Adams Junior High School and graduated from Charleston High School after transferring from George Washington High School.

Although many referred to Quin as “T.I.,” some of his closest friends called him “Tiki,” acquired from and short for one of Quin’ s favorite bars, the Mantiki.

Being around Quin, one always felt he knew something you didn’t and most every time proved to be true and that something never failed to be surprising!

Quin Morton can best be described as a rugged individualist. He flirted with danger all his life, exemplified by his fascination with motorcycles, which he rode from the time while he was in high school and well into his sixties. In his early years, he often rode with an informal group of bikers- ‘Jake the Snake’ Phyle, Ned ‘Rope’ Wright, ‘Skipper’ Burdette, Travis Ellison and Joe Burdette, to name a few. It was the good old days when helmet laws did not exist and every serious biker could ride with a true sense of freedom. In his mid-teens, Quin was involved ma motorcycle accident with a few of his aforementioned friends; specifically, ‘Skipper’ Burdette, Travis Ellison and Joe Burdette, all of which suffered serious injuries, T.I. taking the brunt of it as two motorcycles and four teenaged-bikers were strewn along the highway after a high-speed collision with an automobile.

Quin suffered a traumatic head injury so severe doctors had to drill three holes in his head to relieve the pressure from his swelling brain. His arm was mangled which required him to wear a metal brace. Quin never complained and it never seemed to bother him being the stoic that he was.

T.I., although compromised for a while by his injury, still liked to scuffle sometimes. To level the playing field in such pugilistic moments, Tiki would swivel his metal brace in front of his face for protection, peering out over it like a buzzard. His opponents would bust up and bloody their fists trying to land a blow to his head. Tiki would counter with a powerful punch from his active arm.

On one memorable occasion, Quin was engaged in a fist fight outside of the Malibu one night. He was fighting a tough guy from the west side they called Apples. Apples too had only the use of one good arm. That fight will be forever known as ‘the battle of the one-armed bandits.’ T.I. emerged victorious after a tough fight with a worthy opponent.

Quin eventually made a full recovery from his devastating motorcycle accident and continued to ride for many years. Tiki once rode his Harley-Davidson 735.3 miles to Daytona Bike Week, with nothing but the clothes on his back, his two saddlebags filled only with ice and beer. Quin Morton truly was a free spirit.

After high school, Quin went to work in the coal mines. He worked long, hard hours for a couple of years. His time in the mines made tougher an already tough Quin Morton.

Becoming restless and with the good money he made in the mines, T.I. purchased a brand new, blue-gray Mach I Mustang and went in search of adventure in south Florida. He eventually ended up with two like-minded friends, David Carter and Buck Pelzel, in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They established a commune of sorts in a small, ground-floor apartment not far from the beach on Broward Blvd.

A short time later, three other long-haired hippy freaks, Bobby Crabtree, Stevie Blankenship and Bruce Legg, also considered founding members, gravitated toward this action-packed venue, notoriously known as ‘the Pitt’ and took up permanent residence with Cart, Buck and Tiki.

True to the zeitgeist of the times, the Pitt became widely known as a wellspring of action and a destination for many WVU and Marshall University students on spring break who wanted to learn to party like the pros. Hundreds of enthusiastic young hedonist passed through the enchanting doors of the infamous Pitt, well versed in the art of the party upon their reluctant retreat.

As all good things come to an end, Quin in search of purpose and opportunity returned to the beautiful mountains of West Virginia.

Having sowed enough wild oats to fill a silo, T.I. met his beautiful wife to be, Carmen, fell in love and got married. A few short years later, they would be blessed with their only child, daughter, Julia, who brought a new and more powerful kind of joy into their lives.

With his knowledge of the mining industry, he learned from his backbreaking work as a teen, Quin with his boundless energy would establish his own coal company.

He was in his late twenties when the J.B.H. Coal Company began to flourish, providing T.I. and wife Carmen wealth beyond their wildest dreams. They settled in a big house in Lewisburg, West Virginia, with two Harley-Davison Motorcycles and a big yellow Cadillac parked in the double garage.

The view from the enormous master bedroom was spectacular, overlooking a verdant, perfectly trimmed backyard. If one were to gaze out of the broad span of the Morton’s picture window on Quin’s 30th birthday they would behold a grand festival, a Mardi Gras on grass with a giant pig roasting on a spit and a band playing to dozens of revelers, well-dressed aristocrats and half-dressed hillbillies alike. Quin was comfortable with the sophisticated and irreverent and always was himself in the company of either.

He was in his late twenties when Tiki took up Scuba diving. He received his P.A.D.I. certification and soon became enamored with the sport. He dove throughout the Florida Keys and many diving destinations in the Caribbean. Cozumel, Mexico, was one of his favorite places to dive. Two of the dive sites he liked best were 100 ft. Wall dives, Santa Rosa Wall and Columbia Reef.

Quin once joked to one of his dive buddies he introduced to the sport, ‘Only two things you need to know about Scuba diving’ Tiki quipped, ‘hold your breath and come up quick’ one of which can cause an air embolism and in certain circumstances immediate death, the other decompression sickness and a myriad of severe physical consequences.

On one dive trip in the Florida Keys after several dives, he and a dive companion drove down to Key West in search of adventure and more exhilarating dives.

Tiki on a whim and flush with cash wondered if he might find a Captain and sailboat for hire. As fate would have it on a balmy starlit evening, sitting in Ernest Hemmingway’s favorite bar Sloppy Joe’s, Tiki sipping on a beer would meet Captain Jeff. Captain Jeff and Katie were a young couple from Boston who owned the 36 ft. sailboat the Tamarind. They agreed to take T.I. and fellow diver on a four-day diving excursion to the Dry Tortugas, a small group of islands 70 Miles south of Key West.

Setting sail the next day, unknown to Tiki at the time, the Tamarind and crew would sail directly over the wreckage site of the 1622 shipwreck the Atocha that Mel Fisher and his salvage crew would discover seven years later with a bounty of over a half a billion dollars of gold and silver.

Well into the second day of the sail, the Tamarind approached a partially submerged freighter with its bow jutting out against the azure tropical sky. At Tiki’s insistence, Captain Jeff dropped sail and set anchor. Surrounding the partially sunken ship a wide area of choppy blue sea was enclosed in a perimeter of buoys posted, DANGER! and RESTRICTED AREA!

This was a temptation the bold and brazen Quin Morton could not resist. Over the strong objection of Captain Jeff, Tiki and his dive buddy put on their Scuba tanks and descended into the murky waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Descending down to 50 feet they made a jaw-dropping discovery, a vast graveyard of cylindrical bombs littering the sea floor as far as the eye could see. They finned belly to bomb for a considerable distance, an experience his friend would later say was a dive too eerie to properly be described. To add to the excitement, Tiki was brandishing a speargun. After missing a small grouper, his wayward spear struck and made a significant nick in one of the thousands of bombs, while his terrified dive-buddy looked on waiting for both to be blown out of the water in pieces.

Surviving the dive and safely back aboard the Tamarind, Captain Jeff and crew would hear Quin say aloud something he had said before and would say many times after in similar dangerous circumstance, ‘well, we cheated death one more time.

Weeks later, curious about such a strange dive on a half sunken ship in the middle of the ocean, Quin did some research and found they had been diving on the World War II destroyer escort, The Patricia, used by navy bombers for practice.

It can only be surmised, but it is likely this sail trip was the catalyst for Quin’ s future enthusiasm for sailing.

Back at home in Lewisburg with Carmen and attending to his duties as executive of his coal company, Quin would soon realize that his lust for adventure and sailing had not abated. He had often wondered what it would be like to be captain of his own sailboat. He discussed buying a sailboat with Carmen and she agreed it would be exciting.

T.I. soon after would enlist the help of his good friend David Carter, who had some limited sailing experience and was living in Tallahassee Florida. They developed a plan. Quin would purchase a sailboat that would be permanently docked in Shell Point, a small harbor south of Tallahassee. David would look after the sailboat and learn to sail it while Quin would attend to business in West Virginia. On the weekends, T.I. and Carmen would fly down to Florida and Cart would impart his newly gained knowledge about sailing to Tiki.

A few weeks later Tiki would purchase the 27 ft. Irwin sailboat they would christen the Cartiki- Car for Carmen and Tiki for Quin’s nickname.

The pIan worked beautifully and several months later both Cart and Tiki became proficient sailors.

Not long after the Cartiki set out on her maiden voyage with Cart and Tiki alternating at the helm. They honed their skills for days sailing down the west coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico and across the peninsula through the intercoastal waterway and the 154-mile crossing of Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic Ocean and the arduous sail back to Shell Point.

Buoyed by this experience and gaining confidence in his sailing skills about a year later Tiki would take two of his inexperienced friends on the sailing adventure of their lives.

Leaving the small port of Shell Point on a cold December night, they launched into lashing seas and what would become a dire struggle for survival. They sailed 160 miles 40 miles out to sea in howling winds through an enduring storm with 30-foot swells. They arrived at their destination at a port south of Tampa Bay some 32 hours later, tattered, torn, exhausted and drained of their last drop of I I adrenaline, but alive with one hell of a story to tell.

One of his shipmates upon recalling the terrifying sail, said of Captain Tiki, ‘He stood there on the dock like the son of Neptune himself, with brown tousled hair, his blue eyes beaming out over windburned cheeks and after flashing a wry grin said, ‘Well boys we did it again, we cheated death one more time.’

This was the essence of the man Quin Morton, a resilient risk taker living and loving life to the fullest. He inspired his friends to live big just like he always did.

On this solemn day of June 8, 2025, much to the sorrow of his family and friends, but to the overwhelming joy of the welcoming universe, death finally cheated the Mighty Quin.

Tiki Morton loved by many, respected by all.

R.I.P. OLD FRIEND

A memorial service will beheld at a later date.

Condolences may be sent to his family at www.barlowbonsall.com.

Barlow Bonsall Funeral; Homehas been entrusted with the arrangements.