If you missed it, Chapter 1 and 2 is at If This Jeep Could Talk, August 13, 2024. My brother, Jack, continues the Jeep Saga.

Chapter 3

Picking up where I left off in Chapter 2, I took the Jeep in the summer of 1971 back to U.Va. with me for my senior year, ensconced in a U-Haul Truck with castoff furnishings from the parents’ house to furnish my 4th year digs. 

The 1971 summer before my 4th college year was interesting; that was the summer I completed Army Ranger School, and before leaving for that rather interesting experience, I drove the jeep over to Camp Orr, with canoe and dog, for several days to chill out and toughen up for the ensuing training. I took the old jeep road upriver from the Camp which very much required 4-wheel drive  (that road is now overgrown with 50-year old trees) to the next big deep river hole under one of the largest bluffs on the River and set up camp on the gravel bar.   To carry an 18’ canoe on a 13’ foot long jeep without a top,  required that I fold the windshield down and tie the canoe across the passenger seat, with it sticking out several feet over the front and back of the jeep; which left just enough space behind me in the back  seat area for the dog – which was not my dog, but rather my parent’s dog. My bird dog, Perkins,  had been taken by me back to U.Va the year before (a very poor decision) where he lasted about 2 months in the fraternity house before following me to class one day and getting run over.  Not only was I bereft, but it had left my parents for the first time in my life, without a dog in the house.

I couldn’t afford them another bird dog, but fortunately, the father of a fraternity brother from Memphis had a fine kennel of highly pedigreed birddogs, from which a litter had been born shortly after Perkins met his fate.  However, this was an unintended litter which resulted from a highly pedigreed English setter, inaptly getting into the pen of a highly pedigreed English pointer at the wrong time, yielding a litter of mixed breed bird dogs. Such mixes happen often enough, intentionally or mostly not, that the result has a name: it is a “Dropper” with the common knowledge being that they make good bird dogs. However, among the elite of hunting dog enthusiasts, they are an unhappy accident, because they have no market value, and are passed on as gifts to kids or sold for a pittance. Which was perfect for me as I thus became the donee of a Dropper pup from Dr. Dan Fisher of Memphis Tennessee, which I picked up on my way home to my parents at Christmas of my sophomore year,  to replace the house dog I had taken from them. “Missy” was her name.

Missy was sweet, pretty, but dumb as a rock and my parents spent no time training her so she was pretty much a disaster in the woods. But I, for that pre-senior year trip to the Buffalo, needed a companion and at that time harbored the illusion that I could train her a bit on this trip.  We were exploring along a not-high bluff line, when Missy came running out of the woods chasing a butterfly, and like Wily Coyote chasing the Roadrunner cartoons,  following the butterfly ran right past me and off the bluff, somehow not perceiving that the edge was indeed the edge, and her feet kept churning in the air as though there was ground under them until she hit on some rocks some 30 feet below with a sickening thud and yelp.

Terrified that I’d just cost my parents a second dog in two years, I climbed down as quickly as I could. Amazingly, she was bruised and cut, but still ambulatory, and had no permanent effects of the adventure. Missy, the jeep and I made it home from our Buffalo River expedition, I survived Ranger School, the Jeep and I made our way to Virginia, and we survived our senior year at U.Va.  But I digress too much about a dog,  from the Odyssey of the Jeep.

The week of graduation at U.Va. in May 1972 was a non-stop series of celebrations, events and remembrances, many of which involved the jeep, including one where the five of us riding in it were arrested for disturbing the peace – we called it excessive celebration – I can’t remember the details, other charges were probably warranted, but because we were quite contrite before the Judge, also a U.Va graduate, and had clean records, we paid about $25 in fines and were released.  I can’t recall why, but my parents couldn’t come to graduation, but my best friend growing up, Carie Buckley and his wife, Debbie,  came from Arkansas, and with my U.Va. girlfriend, Amy Wingfield, we all drove in the topless jeep up to and along the Blue Ridge Parkway Drive for a beautiful day-long May picnic.  A few days later, three of my closest fraternity brothers and I packed up our sleeping bags in a duffel bag lashed over the hood of the jeep and headed in the jeep back up into the Blue Ridge of Virginia for graduation-celebratory undirected sojourn.  Come nightfall, we somehow found ourselves driving down the Appalachian Trail for several miles.  That event is pictured, which shows the considerably deteriorated condition of the Jeep since it had been repainted 6 years earlier. I don’t remember what the guns were for, inasmuch as it wasn’t hunting season and we realized that we’d left home without any bullets but brandishing them seem appropriate for this pose.

That fall I entered George Washington U. Law School in downtown Washington D.C.and moved myself and the jeep there from Charlottesville.  I found two other students looking for lodging on the law school bulletin board, and we rented the downstairs of a house in the D.C. suburb of Arlington Virgina...about a 30-minute commute from the law school.  Via the school “ride/carpool” bulletin board, I found another law student who lived a mile or two away in the Virginia suburbs and we split the driving – I would drive us in and back one week, he the next.  Parking was incredibly expensive and hard to find in downtown DC, thus the need to carpool.  He had some kind of conventional car, I had the jeep.  Bruce Deerson was a modest, very Jewish guy, born and raised in New York City, from which he never left until law school.  He was not an adventurous guy, and wasn’t sure what to make of me, but I think thoroughly enjoyed being navigated through the D.C. rush hour traffic in the Jeep.

Settling in Arlington in the summer before entering  law school in 1972, the jeep was beat up and the white canvas top put on in 1964 had worn out, and I undertook to do the sanding and body work to then pay for it to be  professionally repainted, yellow again, and to design and build a new top, that would be more weather proof, easier to put on and take off, and better support the windshield: The canvas tops, secured to the top of the windshield, flapped hard in the wind, constantly tugging on and  breaking (and after fixing, repeatedly breaking) the windshield supports.  The new top was crafted of plywood, on a 2 X 4 frame, with fixed plexiglass windows, and covered with stretched canvas painted white.  It strongly supported the windshield, and two guys could pop it on or off the Jeep in less than a minute, with another couple of minutes to fix or unfix the securing bolts that held it on. I used the white canvas doors that were already on it.

For my 3 years of law school, I commuted daily from the Virginia suburbs in and out of DC through the traffic in the Jeep. By my third year, Dennis Griffith, a college friend of mine by then working as a banker, had become my roommate and we bought a house at 202 MacArthur Road, Alexandria Virginia. The attached picture shows the Jeep, with its new paint job and plywood-based top, in front of our house.

Many of my weekends in law school, I traveled the 120 miles back to Charlottesville to visit my college girlfriend, who was still finishing undergraduate school, or 100 miles west into the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Mountains to hike and camp. Interestingly,  more often than not I couldn’t find rides otherwise and hitchhiked to and from those destinations, rather than subject the jeep, with me in it, to the long highway drives which are hard on both that vehicle and driver.

Finally, I had yearned for years for the Jeep to have a specialized Antique license plate. Such required that the vehicle be at least 25 years old, and in some stage of preservation or restoration. It crossed that magic line in 1973, while I was in law school. I don’t remember exactly when we got the plate, but it was around that time and I was proud to ornament the jeep with such plate.  Having waited so long for that benchmark, in hindsight, the original Antique license plate (along with the rest of the jeep) was so abused over so many following years, that it wrinkled, crinkled and broke, and I had to get a new Antique license plate 10 or 15 years, ago, the jeep now being 76 years old!! The attached picture is the current Antique plate – itself already crinkled and wrinkled a bit.

Chapter 4

I am sorry that this chapter comes with but one, measly picture of the Jeep, though it was certainly in its heyday as a social butterfly during the span of this chapter.

By virtue of my law school graduation on May 19, 1975, I became in a single day a Juris Doctor, a lawyer of the Virginia Bar, and a Captain in the U.S. Army…with a really cool yellow jeep and for the first time ever, a pocketful of money on the dating scene in Washington D.C.  Every dog has its day in the sun, and that was mine. At the very graduation party for that event thrown at our Alexandria house, I met Anne, a summer congressional intern who came as the guest of a friend of a friend. The Jeep and its driver (me) had a very active social life in the summer of 1975, marking the time with a do-nothing assignment at the Pentagon, awaiting orders that would send me in the fall first to Charlottesville for the Army lawyer course, thence to South Korea. With many different nice young ladies, we (the open-air Jeep and I) toured the monuments, Great Falls of the Potomac,  open air military band concerts, full dress military parades for retired generals,  Fourth of July fireworks on the National Mall,  the Unknown Soldiers’ Tomb, Arlington Cemetery, Officer’s clubs, night clubs,  several beer and burger cookouts with friends, receptions at senior officers homes, various bars and taverns, and fun Georgetown and Capitol Hill restaurants. Anne, who claimed to be engaged to a boy back home and so feigned no serious interest in me, was emerging overwhelmingly as my strong fav when her parents arrived in August to take her home. Ugh.

Two months later found me graduated from the Army legal course in Charlottesville, on orders to be in Seattle in two weeks for enplanement to South Korea for a year.  But the jeep and I had a date to make first. We headed down Interstate 81 from DC, intending to cover the 900 miles to Memphis, park there, and fly to Shreveport for a last date with my summer romance. Driving the jeep at an engine-maxing whine of 42 MPH on an interstate, being passed by semi’s at 80 MPH is intimidating, if not crazily dangerous.  Well, I was crazy over Anne and on a mission. About 400 miles into the trip, the Jeep fell out on the interstate. Finding a phone booth, calling a wrecker, getting the Jeep towed to a mechanic shop, and myself thence to a motel, occupied the rest of that long day. The next morning, the garage informed me that the camshaft was done for, and it would take several days to get the parts.  I asked for and was informed of the largest used car dealership in the tri-city area of Bristol, Johnson city and Kingsport on the Tennessee/Virginia border and taxied myself there where I told the salesman I needed the cheapest car they had which was both strong enough to tow a jeep, and had a trailer hitch. Of the thousand or more cars on the lot, that turned out to be a 1968 Plymouth Fury III with a 318 cubic inch V-8 engine with close to 300 HP, for $1,200. I combined all but a few dollars of the cash in my pocket, with maxing out  my credit card, and a hot check for the balance, and an hour later was on the road again, Jeep in tow.

For the Jeep, the next ten or so days were fairly boring; it spent about 5 days parked at the Memphis airport hitched to the Fury III,  before being hauled out again by the Fury III onto Interstate 40, being towed  to Fayetteville, this time  Anne riding shotgun in the Fury III. It then spent the next 5 or so days in the driveway at my parents’ house on Rebecca, still hitched to the Fury III.  In those ten down days for the Jeep,  I flew  to Shreveport, met Anne’s parents, drove with Anne back to LSU in Baton Rouge,  during which drive we decided to get married; met all of her sorority sisters at LSU, flew back up to Memphis with Anne, drove to Fayetteville towing the Jeep  to advise my parents of the engagement, picked out and bought an engagement ring, called Anne’s parents to advise them of the engagement, traveled to Batesville to share the news with my grandmother Murt, drove back down to Shreveport with my  parents so they could meet Anne’s parents to persuade them I was not an errant philanderer, and then emplaned for Seattle, to leave the next day for Korea for 7 months, scheduled to return to Shreveport in May, 1976 be married after 7 months absence from each other. I was busy those ten days,  my compadre the Jeep was not.

The Jeep then entered the dark ages, or perhaps spinning it more kindly, the dormant years.  Martin was gone. Tom was personally settled in California and busy with a young family and a growing architecture practice.  Dad, who had the Jeep at his house would very occasionally drive the jeep for the Heck of it the short mile to the Courthouse and home. I was stationed in Korea for a year and a half, stationed back in Virginia for two years, living in a VW Camper with Anne traveling the U.S. for a year on a wild hair, practiced law in Fairfax Virginia for a year and a half, until our first child, Mary Claire was born, and our good senses brought us back to Fayetteville for good in 1981. That found me taking care of a rapidly growing family and law practice, with no money or time to husband the Jeep. It sat in Dad’s driveway some, and our driveway some, and may have been driven a bit, but was it just sitting there, with a usually dead battery, rusting and rotting out without a garage over its head. A close friend, David Buckley, bought a farmstead in Springdale which had more barns and barn space than he needed, and he let me move the Jeep there, under cover where it just sat. For years, from  about 1983 until 1990.

Before ending this chapter, to justify some nominal pictures, I note that during Anne’s and my one year on the loose in the VW Camper van, we did come through Fayetteville in 1979, and took the Jeep out to what had been in my high school jeeping days one of my rural haunts,  Carson’s Slough on the White River. For the fun of it, she four wheeled around in the abandoned fields for the afternoon, and I got a pic of her at the wheel.

To get a few more jeep pictures into this, also during our VW Camper sabbatical, we ended up in the very rural, rugged Central Cascades of Washington state for several months, living in an unfinished shack on the grounds of a modest rent house sitting at the edge of a gorgeous mountain lake (Lake Wenatchee), the house being rented by a fraternity brother of mine and his gal ( Jeff and Beth Newton), he having migrated to that beautiful place right after college to be a logger.  Anne and I made our way for those months by working with the Mexican migrants picking pears and apples in the abundant orchards, working in the fruit packing plants,  teaching English as a second language to the migrants in the evenings, and I as a logger.

One of those odd jobs which we shared was cleaning the irrigation ditches that ran from dammed, high mountain lakes filled with snow melt, down along the flanks of the mountains through the foothills to water the orchards on the plains. After the growing season ended and the ditches dried up, they had to be cleaned and repaired.  The ditches were about 10 feet wide and 4 feet deep.  Anne and I, dressed in high rubber boots and carrying loppers, rakes, shovels or picks, ambled 2 or 3 miles a day along the ditch, with a crew composed of us and half a dozen non-English speaking Mexicans, cleaning, clearing and repairing them. At points, the ditches were concreted and cracks and washouts had to be repaired.  The only way to get concrete to them, was to drive military surplus jeeps, outfitted with 1 yard dump beds, from where a road crossed the ditches and thus they could be filled by a concrete truck, sometimes miles along the narrow top of the downhill berm of the ditch, to the point of repair to deliver the concrete in small batches.

These were not high-paying jobs, and finding a jeep driver with a drivers’ license was problematic. None of the Mexicans had such, and more problematic, didn’t speak English.  Our second or third day on the job, one of the jeep drivers (a witless derelict, but who had a driver’s license) managed to tip his jeep off the berm and roll it a ways down the hill.  Fortunately, neither he nor the Jeep was seriously injured, but he was summarily fired.  I heard our foreman (a full time county employee) complaining to his boss that work would come to a standstill because there was nowhere to find another qualified driver.  I sidled up to him and in English (1 point), advised him that I had a current driver’s language (2 points), spoke some Spanish so I could direct the crews taking concrete from the dump jeep (3 points) and indeed, had grown up driving jeeps just as these (Jackpot! - hired on the spot!).  I got a raise, the driver’s seat in a dump jeep, and was done hoofing it through the ditches with hand tools all day. Anne, glass-ceilinged, remained with the Mexican crew in the ditch until our week or so tenure ended.  I don’t think she has forgiven me yet. Pictures of the view from our shack- for- the-summer, and the dump jeep operation are attached.

42 years reported, 34 to go.

Chapter 5 – The Resurrection

Ah, let’s see where were we?  Oh, yes, nephew Andrew wanted pictures of the jeep from the old days. Every picture tells a story, or at least all of the pictures produced so far have compelled a story for those forty-two years,  so here we are about 1991 or so, the jeep has been stored, dormant and deteriorating in David Buckley’s dairy barn in Springdale for 8 years or so,  and I have no money or time to deal with it.

Though Andrew Butt, who kicked off this Odyssey of the memory may be interested in this part of the story, apologies are offered in advance for its having the most practical and technical relevance but the very fewest pictures and least drama and romance.

We made many social visits to the Buckley’s farm during those 8 or so years.  Not only were we best friends as couples from BC (before children) with many memories to share, we each had 3 kids by now of generally the same ages, and more memories to make: canoe trips, bird dogs, a horse to ride, chicken flocks, beer to drink, and lots of dreaming and scheming for the future. During these visits, knowing it would depress me, I would nevertheless sometimes wander alone out to the dairy barn to visit and commune with the Willys. It was most melancholy to make these visits to my pal from earliest childhood. The Willys is dinged, dented, side-mounted spare tire busted off, paint chipped and faded, windshield supports broken, seats torn down to their frames, and battery and/or starter both dead so it can’t even be brought to life to hear its 4-cylinder F head purr. It is covered in dust, festooned with cobwebs, littered with mouse and rat nests and poop, and surrounded with piles of other dusty, cobwebby junk relegated by David to that seldom visited venue.  It is a very disheartening experience, when I try to evaluate whether and how it can ever be brought back to its ebullient existence.

The necessary rehab is light years beyond any knowledge, skill or time I have;  there is nowhere nearby that specializes in restoring antique cars much less jeeps; and while I am making a living as a lawyer, there seems to be no large pot of surplus money in our household budget to fund such a project.

Tom periodically asks about the jeep, and I share my dismay and gloom with him.  He’s 2,000 miles away and raising his own family and business.

He suggests that we look for someone, discuss the possibilities, make some forward motion; get the jeep running or towed to a shop.  He wasn’t here to do that; I didn’t know where to start. But somehow I got it started and running, or perhaps even had it towed wherever we took it by wrecker - memory fails after a third of a century. So, an interesting picture attached, taken circa 1991 when surely when Tom was in town for a visit, is of his son, my nephew, Daniel,  then 14-ish, standing next to the very deteriorated jeep, outside the shop of Mason Dixon 4X4 in Fayetteville, a shop that specialized in 4 wheel drive vehicle repair and service.  I can’t tell from the picture, and my memory fails here, too,  but I believe it was on South School Street/Business U.S. 71. Tom had proposed that whatever we needed done to get it fixed, we would split the cost 50/50. Financial impossibility became financial possibility. The net result of that visit to Mason Dixon was that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or would charge too much to undertake a rehabilitation. But importantly, we were moving on the concept!

Daniel Butt with unrestored jeep
I’m not much of a praying guy, but either someone else’s prayers, or just fate itself, led us from a rather far reaching and desperate search in the spring of 1992– I can’t remember how - to Shackelford’s Garage, on South College, in the non-commercial, poor, run-down side of town, a block from the then second oldest (and now closed) elementary school in town, Jefferson. It was a small, two-bay, poorly maintained, grease-covered floor, weeds growing in the front, faded white painted cinder block, with cracked windows partially covered with paint overspray, building.  This was the iconic shade tree mechanic.

Its proprietor was the aging, short, round, stooped, grey and balding, bespectacled and very modest Lloyd Shackelford.  He channeled a very senior Santa’s elf, long sleeves rolled up, suspenders and all, shuffling about his shop, crinkle-surrounded eyes peering over his spectacles, which would crinkle further if he was amused or interested. We’d been told that he was the mechanic in town to work on old jeeps.  Lloyd was shy and demurring, but his shop had several old CJ’s in it in various stages of disassembly and repair, and when we showed him our jeep, and suggested we needed some work, his face lit up and eyes sparkled like a kid on Christmas morning.  He walked around it, put his hands on it, grinned,  started describing parts, features, prospects, functions that we’d never known or thought about. He described several jeeps, including Willys, he’d rebuilt from scratch and showed us his own, which he drove to work every day. His hourly rate, which he embarrassedly quoted as perhaps too high, was rock bottom.  He didn’t have much help, he said, so it would take time. We had time.  There would be a lot of decisions to be made about what to spend, where. We were ready to make decisions.  He would have to be paid for parts as we went along – we’d pay him upon presentation of each invoice and in advance if necessary.  He said he could start right away, and we told him he had the jeep to work on from that moment until it was finished.  Lloyd was our guy. -!-

Basically, we told Lloyd that we wanted every part: engine, transmission, drive train, electrical - and fuel system, brakes, body, and frame taken down to its component parts, with each part evaluated for soundness and viability and if reliable, cleaned, polished, refurbished and put back to use.  And any part that wasn’t solidly functional, replaced with as close to possible with original parts.  And we wanted a paint job true to the original blue, and a new rag (cloth/canvas) top. Lloyd thought he’d died and gone to heaven to be gifted with this project.

My office was ½ mile away, I visited his shop every week, if not several times each week, for the next 6 months, to check on progress, make decisions, and keep him paid currently.  I was totally engrossed in the project, and probably lost many thousands of dollars of billable hours standing in my lawyer’s coat and tie on his dusty, grease-covered floor garage, just watching.

Ah, my children, in those days, there was no internet.  I spent many hours on the phone and by (snail)mail to develop maybe a dozen sources of second hand or after-market parts throughout the U.S. for Willys jeep parts – there weren’t many, and none of them carried comprehensive lines of the parts.  You could order a catalogue, but they were inevitably not current, or didn’t provide clear specifications, so if a certain gasket turned up deteriorated, Lloyd would look first to see if it was of standard size or make carried by the local auto shops, but the chances were excellent that it was not, and had to be found by a catalogue search, then supplemented and confirmed by telephone calls.  Lloyd put as much of that as he could off on me, because, my children, in those olden days if you telephoned beyond the limits of Fayetteville, it cost by the minute, and the further the call went, the more it cost, and Lloyd did not have in his simple and  modest budget, money for the many and protracted long distance  calls it took to find, discuss and order parts from far places in the U.S.  A few parts even had to be machined by a local machine shop because they could not be found.

Also in this process, I discovered that Lloyd was illiterate.  He would tell me on Monday that he needed a left-handed gizmo, which he was calling the local auto shops for. On Wednesday he would advise that the part wasn’t carried locally, but a diligent search through all of the parts catalogues had turned up what he thought was right, and he would show me the catalogue picture of it, announcing, “I think this looks like the right part, but I can’t quite make out what this description under it says” – and putting his glasses on and off and squinting, he would say, “can you see that clearly enough to read it to me?”  Whereupon I would read the very large and clear print to him, and he would say “I was hoping that was what it said, that’s the part we need!” or, “no, that won’t work here.”  That ritual was repeated dozens of times, and it took several repetitions for me to realize he simply couldn’t read.  My hypothesis was confirmed through several contrived situations, designed to confirm he couldn’t read, without embarrassing him. I needed to know that to effectively assist him when dealing with any kind of writing: invoices, specifications, directions. But he spoke Willys Mechanics fluently, without reading a word.

Over the next 6 months, the jeep went to tiny parts all over the floor of the garage; the whole body went to a paint shop for repair and painting; the seats went to an upholstery shop to be reupholstered; the frame went somewhere to get straightened, and there were several other outsourced efforts I can’t now clearly remember.  But I discussed with Lloyd, every part and action every step of the way. I have the foot-thick file of every part order and service rendered, if anyone ever wants unbury the detailed record.

Tom and I changed many of the basics, deciding that safety and functionality trumped originality:

1. A roll bar was installed;
2. Seat belts were installed;
3. The electrical charging system, a 6 volt battery and system that recharged from a generator (and which could not be jumped from a 12 volt system then standard in every car), was converted to a 12 volt system which recharged from an alternator;
4. The backseat (bent and broken beyond repair) was newly crafted to have a lockable box under the seat, theretofore being no secure place in the jeep for important papers or thievable tools;
5. The split-pane, opening , windshield, which based upon our experience and conferring with several jeep experts and articles, was a design deficiency in the CJ2A from the beginning because the flapping of the soft top attached to it, stressed and broke the windshield supports, was replaced with the much stouter windshield used in the CJ3A.
6. We went from the oversize snow tires back to the narrow, heavily lugged tires originally used in the military jeeps and CJ2A – they had to be special ordered from China.
7. An overdrive gear box and stick shift was installed, increasing the top possible speed by about 10 miles per hour (to around 50), and providing in effect 6 forward gears, in each of high and low range, to make the gear range adaptable to every range of engine loading.
8. The windshield wiper motors were replaced: the passenger side was actually a manual handle on the inside, that the passenger would swipe back and forth by hand, to effect a like swipe with the outside blade; the driver’s side was driven through a small rubber hose by vacuum using engine compression – but when the engine was not turning fast enough, the vacuum became insufficient to drive the motor and the wiper stopped until a higher rpm was obtained.  Both were replaced by small electric motors, wired to the engine electrical system.
9. The brake shoes, at 9 inches, resulted in the jeep having a very weak foot braking system – we had all learned to downshift, and even pull on the hand emergency brake, to slow or stop the jeep in extreme braking situations.  We followed Lloyds’ recommendation to put 13 inch brake shoes on.
10. We beefed up the front bumper to have installed on it a winch.

1. Otherwise, there were a hundred or more replacements, fixes, finishes and adjustments to put the jeep, after daily work for 6 months and an $8,000 shared investment from Tom and me,  back into beautiful, showroom-ready, top running condition (that’s about $18,000 in today’s dollars).  Mr. Shackelford proudly announced with a wide grin and very crinkly eyes, “she’s a beauty! Runs as smooth as a little sewing machine and you can stand her on her nose with those new brakes!”
2. In all of this, I had joined the nationwide Willys club, which published a periodical, mimeographed newsletter with jeep adventure and rehabilitation pictures and stories from all over the U.S.,repair hacks and updates on Jeep shows and 4 wheel drive expeditions, and jeeps and parts for sale or wanted.  I determined from that, that our 1948 CJ2A would have shown and performed very well at such national events.  I toyed with the idea of so showing it, but practically I had no time for that. However, its market value didn’t seem to be much above what we had invested in it; it was an investment of love, not financial return.
3. By that time, I had built a garage onto our house with 3 bays:  one for Anne’s car, one for mine, and one specifically for the jeep.  In later years, as my kids turned 16 and got cars,  there was bitter complaining on rainy, cold, and icy days that they had to go through rain, scrape icy windshields, start cold engines and sit in their driveway-outdoor-parked cold cars while the jeep reposed in dry warmth in the garage.  Ah, Grasshopper, the jeep is your elder to be respected and preserved. In short, there was not a sympathetic ear to their plight.
4. Attached is a picture of the jeep, with my family gathered about it, in its refurbished glory in late 1992 or early 1993.  We had driven it out Highway 45 in a snowstorm to attend a social event at the house of Jane Hunt Tinnen – she being the daughter of trucking magnate JB Hunt.
5. Thus endeth the chapter on the resurrection of the Willys. 44 years reported, 32 to go.
6.