Morton Perry MacLeod, 1924-2010

Morton MacLeod was born Feb. 4, 1924, in Houston, Texas, the second of four children of Morton P. and Olive Marshall MacLeod. His father abandoned the family when Morton was four. The Great Depression was on full-force, and the years in Houston were tough, times when there was no money and very little of anything else.

In his youth, Morton and his family would spend each summer in East Palo Alto with his grandparents on their chicken ranch. In the fall of 1937 the family moved to Palo Alto to a house on Louis Rd.

It was in Palo Alto that Morton’s career as a lawyer began. He ran for and was elected a Student Judge. He continued in Palo Alto Schools until half way through his senior year in high school when the family moved to an apple ranch in Sebastopol where he graduated from Analy High. That fall, he started at Santa Rosa Junior College, but left, to his Mother’s horror and dismay, to join the Air Force at age 18 in October, 1942. He served in the Air Force until September, 1946.

After being discharged, he attended and graduated from San Jose State. Later as a Hastings Law School graduate, he was called back for two more service years as a young lawyer in the Judge Advocate Generals Department (JAG).

Morton began his 56-year legal career as a clerk in Judge Hardy’s law firm in Palo Alto. He then hung his own “shingle” in Los Altos, where his firm grew to ultimately specialize in international corporate law, domestic business and real estate ventures.

Morton married Lucretia Shields in 1947 and had four children, Cathay, Jim, Cindy, and Perry. In 1980 he married Lonna Quement and had two sons, Adam and John. Morton was always very proud of his large and expanding family, sons and daughters-in-law, ten grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.

Morton was a born entrepreneur, creative, and a fantastically hard worker with a great sense of humor. He was completely self-supporting from the age of 18, including all of his education. Morton always had a job. As a youth, he sold eggs, bottle caps, and silk hosiery door to door. In law school, he had a full time job with the Palo Alto Times bundling papers on the night-shift. He never, never ran out of ideas for new opportunities, new products, new legal ideas.

At the same time he was supporting his family as a successful lawyer, he started an antiques business and a hamburger restaurant. He pioneered a concept of small boxes of fireplace-stove wood, now commonplace. He and son, Jimmy, developed a line of beautiful, hand-made hardwood mounted clocks. He started a project to use refrigeration to mature lilies to specific dates. The list goes on and on.

Morton was a fantastic and creative gardener with artistic design talent. For his last eight years, he lived at George and Greta MacLeod’s Indian Springs Ranch in Kenwood, in a rustic cabin surrounded by vineyards, oaks, fruit trees, wisteria and roses.

Morton had a continuing interest in all the action and events of the ranch operation, the comings and goings of the workers and the wine customers, and was always ready with a cheerful outlook and suggestion for improvement.

Morton loved his family, children, nature, a new business idea, the rule of law, democracy, and his country. Truly a man for all seasons!