This is a story about a quest that has carried a New Orleans engineer more than a half-million miles to 58 countries so far. It began in 1997, when Internet communication was relatively new. Gregg Morton was working in Bangkok. When he listed his location in the biographical notes of the America Online (AOL) social media site, he received an e-mail from a stranger in the United States. The young woman from Tennessee had a question and a request. She asked Morton if he was anywhere near the Bangkok Hard Rock Café. And if so, would it be too much trouble for him to buy her some of the restaurant’s souvenir Halloween pins so she could add them to her Hard Rock Café pin collection.
In fact, Morton said, “It turned out I lived right around the corner; a two-minute walk.”
So Morton bought his new Internet acquaintance several pins and mailed them to her. She promptly reimbursed him, and that would have been the end of the story, except that somehow during the long-distance transaction, Morton had been bitten by the Hard Rock Café souvenir pin-collecting bug. And bitten hard.
Hard Rock Cafés, Morton explained, mint the small, colorful promotional pins for various reasons.
“They make pins just to commemorate people’s visits to the cafes and to commemorate holidays and special events,” Morton said. “And, you know, they’ll do series of, like, flags of the world, or they do the Hard Rock waitresses of the world, various different series which a lot of people like, because in order to complete the series you have to trade or visit many, many places in the world.”
New Orleans engineer visits 219 Hard Rock Cafes
Gregg Morton, a New Orleans engineer has traveled 500,000 miles to visit 219 Hard Rock Cafes on his quest to collect 4,838 souvenir pins.
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Morton took completing Hard Rock series seriously. At this writing, he has visited 219 cafes around the globe, from Paris to Berlin to Moscow to Tokyo to Buenos Aires and back. His meticulously kept spreadsheets indicate that he’s collected 4,838 pins in all. With an engineer’s exactitude, Morton says he’s logged 507,392 miles, jetting across the earth for the sole purpose of adding Hard Rock Cafés to his tally – he doesn’t count business travel. He has put in 38,671 miles driving to domestic Hard Rock destinations.
Morton grew up in Detroit, but in his 20s he regularly traveled to New Orleans for Carnival to escape the Michigan cold. In 1981, he made the Crescent City his home. He shares a spacious West Bank home with his wife, who accompanies him on Hard Rock adventures. Two rooms have become de facto museums of the restaurant chain’s memorabilia. The walls are gridded with the sort of glazed wooden cases one might use to display a butterfly collection. But instead of insects, the cases are aglitter with colorful pins in the shape of jukeboxes, champagne bottles, tropical birds, pin-up girls, rock stars and guitars, guitars, guitars.
Most pins sell for $10 or thereabouts, Morton said. But some are much more precious. His most coveted collection within the collection is a set of scarce pins earned by senior employees of the Bangkok Hard Rock. Morton said that the hundreds of dollars he paid for some of the pins represented a bonanza to the restaurant employees.
And pins aren’t the only Hard Rock souvenirs Morton seeks. The shelves in Morton’s collection rooms are lined with baseball caps emblazoned with international Hard Rock logos. Hard Rock teddy bears sit in plushy rows. At charity auctions, Morton said, he’s known to overbid wildly to acquire the rarest items. Morton said that at Hard Rock Café special events, the biggest fans are allowed to smash guitars Pete Townshend style. Two such demolished guitars hang on the walls.
Counting the cost of pins, travel and other expenses, how much has his world-spanning hobby cost? Morton said he hasn’t kept track.
“I wish I had, because a lot of people have asked me about it,” he said.
Morton, 62, said the globetrotting quest dovetails nicely with the travel required by his engineering specialty. He is an expert at snaking telecommunication or electrical or sewer conduit under obstacles, he said. He does it on the large scale, like tunneling 60-inch diameter pipe under a riverbed. He says that his drive to collect pins drinks up excess time and energy.
“It’s just something to do,” said Morton, who speaks with a far northern, almost Canadian inflection. “I’m not obsessed with it. I’ve got to be busy. I’ve got to have something to do. It’s time-consuming.”
But there may be a bit more to it than that.
Camaraderie is part of the draw. There’s a whole network of Hard Rock pin collectors out there, eager to share their enthusiasm. In his kitchen, a row of padded manila envelopes containing Hard Rock collectibles stood ready for shipment to other aficionados.
“I’ll tell somebody that, say, I’m getting ready to go to Beijing … and the e-mails start flooding in,” Morton said. “They say ‘Hey, pick me up this, pick me up that.’ And consequently they do the same thing when they let me know where they’re going. ‘Hey do you need anything from Rio de Janeiro?’”
Morton noted that the Beijing Hard Rock has closed since his last visit.
Competition is also part of the attraction. Morton explained that in 2001 the Hard Rock Café began issuing special reward pins to their customers who had visited the most restaurants. Arrayed on Morton’s kitchen counter were display boxes of Hard Rock honors. The small guitar with the ruby was a bonus for visiting 75 restaurant locations. The guitar with the emerald memorialized Morton’s 125th Hard Rock. Beyond the 150 mark, the badges began being personalized with Morton’s name engraved in the surface. The 200th visit award was personally presented by the Hard Rock C.E.O., Morton said.
“I like those pins,” Morton said of the personalized prizes, “and then it becomes a competition with other people. You know, who’s going to get the most cafes and how quick are they going to do it. That’s what I really find interesting and it drove me into visiting.”
Morton is one of the world’s top three Hard Rock patrons. He and his friendly rivals – Bob Buchanan from Kentucky and Rickie Sorzi from Switzerland – stay in touch with one another as they vie to add franchises to their lists. Morton was happy to hear that Sorzi plans a visit to New Orleans in mid-March. Coincidentally, Morton already had scheduled a trip to Guatemala to – of course – visit a newly opened Hard Rock.
The rock memorabilia that adorns the restaurants and the burgers also have a place in the collector’s heart.
Morton, whose silver hair drapes his shoulders, is a long-time rock fan. As a teenager in Detroit, he said he saw classic acts including Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Once, he said, he ran into the Rolling Stones at a restaurant in Detroit’s Greek section in the wee hours. The band invited Morton and his friends to pull up chairs for a visit. An autographed Keith Richards poster hangs in Morton’s living room.
Though Hard Rocks across the globe offer some local specialties, they tend to stick to an American-style menu that doesn’t vary much from location to location, Morton said. When he works abroad for long periods of time, a trip to a Hard Rock is a little like touching home base. He said he recalls racing through cities to reach Hard Rocks for a taste of home before closing time.
Morton said that his Hard Rock Café quest has led him to places on the map he might never have seen. For instance, he said, while visiting the Cairo Hard Rock, he made a side trip to the Great Pyramids. His experiences have been mostly good, though occasionally he’s been forced to confront some of the world’s woes. The poverty in India, he said, was hard to behold. Just days after he’d left Beirut, the city was torn by war. And once he witnessed the chilling aftermath of a car bombing in Bali, not far from a Hard Rock Café.
“I don’t let those things bother me,” he said.
Next week, Morton’s off to Guatemala. After that?
“I also need to get to the new one that opened in Chile,” he said, “and the new one that opened in Peru; so I may do that in April.”
Here’s a list of the 219 Hard Rock Cafes Morton has visited on his collecting trek. The first 200 are in chronological order.
Boston Copley Square, Niagara Falls — Canada, Niagara Falls — NY, Cleveland, New Orleans – Original, Cancun, Memphis, Indianapolis, Nashville, Honolulu – Original, Kona, Maui, Gatlinburg, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York — 57th Street, Myrtle Beach, Atlanta, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas – Original, Orlando Hotel Rock Shop, Orlando Café, Atlantic City, Montreal, Ottawa, Corel Centre – Kanata, Toronto – Skydome, Toronto, Chicago Café, St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Key West, Phoenix, San Diego, Tijuana, La Jolla, Newport Beach, Los Angeles – Original, Hollywood, San Francisco – Original, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas — HR Hotel, Las Vegas — Hotel, Denver, Pittsburgh, San Juan, St. Thomas, Minneapolis, Bangkok, Pattaya Café, Pattaya Hotel, Bali Hotel, Bali Café, Jakarta – Original, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tokyo Uyeno – Eki, Yokohama, Tokyo – Roppongi, Osaka UCW, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, Cayman Islands, Cozumel, Orlando Vault, Nassau, Choctaw Beach Club, Acapulco, Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, Bogota, Makati, Seoul – Original, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney – Original, Surfers Paradise, Melbourne – Original, Guam, Saipan, Fukuoka, Hong Kong — The Peak – Original, Hong Kong – Original, Detroit, Paris, Munich, Berlin – Original, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Cologne, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Birmingham, London, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Belfast, Chicago — Hotel Rock Shop, Cabo San Lucas, Tampa Hotel, Louisville, Destin, Hollywood Hotel and Casino Rock Shop, Hollywood Café, Foxwoods, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janiero – Original, Bahrain, Dubai – Original, Panama City, Athens, Dublin, Catania, Malta, Kuwait, Gothenburg, Oslo, Gran Canaria, Moscow, Cairo, Sharm El Shiekh, Hurghada, Beirut, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Ocho Rios, Belo Horizonte, Narita, Mumbai, New York — Times Square, Malta Bar, Margarita, Punta Cana, Warsaw, Biloxi — Hotel Rock Shop, Biloxi – Café, Boston –Faneuil Hall, Fiji, Cartagena, San Diego — Hotel, Myrtle Beach Park, Singapore — Airport, Seoul, Bengaluru, Hyderabad — Airport Bar, Prague, Krakow, Bucharest, Aruba, Venice, Mallorca, New York — Yankee Stadium, Las Vegas – Strip, Penang – Café, Penang – Hotel, Macau – Hotel, New Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad City, Tulsa — Hotel and Casino, Dallas, Costa Maya, Hollywood — Hollywood Blvd., Seattle, Singapore — Hotel, Sentosa Café, Ho Chi Minh City, Phuket, Albuquerque — Hotel and Casino, Medellin, Punta Cana — Hotel and Casino, St. Maarten, Honolulu, Tampa Café, Sydney, Melaka, Hong Kong – LKF, Marbella, Hamburg, Florence, Berlin, Mykonos, Glyfada, Panama — Hotel, Four Winds, Hard Rock — Direct, Hong Kong — The Peak, Macau — Café, Bali — Hotel Rockshop, Biloxi — Hotel and Casino, Macau — Hotel and Casino Rock Shop, Malta — Airport, Panama — Megapolis Hotel Rock Shop, Pattaya — Hotel Rockshop, Penang — Hotel Rock Shop, Penang – Retail, Punta Cana — Hotel and Casino Rockshop, Punta Langosta – Cozumel, San Diego – Hotel, Singapore — Hotel Rockshop, Tampa — Hotel and Casino Rockshop, Chicago – Hotel, Hollywood –Hotel and Casino, Orlando – Hotel, New Orleans — Bourbon Street
Engineer travels 500000 miles for Hard Rock Cafe souvenirs
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