Do you remember If This Jeep Could Talk!, August 13, 2024 and If This Jeep Could Talk - Chapters 3, 4 and 5, August 16, 2024?

Well, the final (Click on Chapters 6 and 7) are now available, based on long lost files my brother recently found. Concluding the origin story of the 1948 Willys Jeep in the King/Butt families, Chapters 6 and 7 cover its last third of a century from 1992 to the present 2024. To be continued by some future chronicler, hopefully long into the future.

Some excerpts below:

Figure 1 - Full frontal view in the driveway of my King grandparents’ house, showing the city license plate #27, which reads “Batesville Ark 1950, Home of the White River Water Carnival” – likely the earliest picture the Jeep. Who is behind the steering wheel can’t be determined (almost certainly Granddad King), but the zipped open back panel of the canvas soft top, through which we grandkids climbed into the back seat of the jeep, is obvious. Written on the back of this photo in Cecilia King Butt’s handwriting is “Dad King’s famous jeep – later given to the boys and painted yellow – Jack’s “yellow peril”.

Figure 2 - Two pictures taken on the same day: at the driveway of the Fayetteville home where Tom, Martin and Jack Butt grew up on Davidson Street, my brother Martin and I and my bird dog Perkins are in both, but standing between us in one is my mother, Cecilia, and in the other, my father Tom. These are the only pictures which show the white canvas soft-top installed after we brought the jeep to Fayetteville in 1964 and before I painted it yellow in about 1966 or 1967. I would be around 15-16 years old, Martin around 18-19 before he left college for the Marines.

Figure 3 - Brother Tom and I in the Jeep we’d jointly restored, circa 1995, in Daddy’s driveway
– smiling because despite all of our foolishness, we are still alive and driving the Jeep.

Figure 4 - And now to the catalyst, and also present terminus of this origin-story, when my great niece and nephew, Tom’s grandchildren (and Harry King’s great-great grandchildren), Cecilia (18) and Harlan (15) Butt came for an Arkansas visit this summer of 2024, 76 years after the jeep came into the family, I took them out to a 10 acre vacant parking lot, to learn how to drive the Willys, with its squeaky, clunky, grinding and always fascinating standard transmission. Long live the Willys!