UPDATE: Additional content has been added about Sandifur Motors.

Originally established in 1937, the Sandifur Motor Company out of Spokane, Washington, was operated by Charles and C. Paul Sandifur. Brothers and business partners, by 1938 the two men were involved in taxi cabs, used cars, life Insurance, and other business pursuits in the Spokane region.

The Sandifurs became a Willys distributor in the autumn of 1945 soon after the launch of the CJ-2A. An ad in the October 21, 1945, issue of the Spokesman Review confirms this.

October 21, 1945, ad published in the Spokesman Review

As best as I understand it, being a distributor meant Sandifur Motors could both sell jeeps and signup other dealers.

The company seems to have followed the standard line of advertising, as this 1947 farming ad shows:

As we’ll see in a moment, Sandifur was successful at selling jeeps, but I can’t imagine CJ-2A was very practical for farming in the Spokane region, in part due to the size of the farms. For example, my maternal grandparents obtained a 160 acre farm 35 miles southeast of Spokane on the small banks of Fighting Creek, Idaho, a place they won in a lottery around 1910, then secured by homesteading. In the 1920s they founded the local Fighting Creek store and operated one of the first phones in the area (we still have some of the books that documented the calls). They also made money logging the local forest and, after WWII, electrifying the area. Had they thought a jeep was practical, I believe they could have afforded to purchase one. Instead, they preferred to use tractors.

My family’s decision to abstain from buying a jeep did little to slow the success of Sandifur Motors. It’s possible the company was doing better selling wagons and trucks versus CJ-2As. I could imagine four wheel drive versions of the trucks and wagons being very handy navigating the endless forests and deserts of the Inland Empire area. This may also explain why both long-wheel base CJ-2As (likely the CJ-2Ls) and CJ-2As with 6ft extended beds were available for sale from both Spokane and Montana dealers (more on this in an upcoming post).

Here’s a 1949 ad promoting the wagon:

October 17, 1949, Spokesman Review

Whatever the company was selling, it was selling enough of them to justify new digs. In early 1951, the Willys dealer moved from its original location at W419 3rd Avenue, to W228 2nd Avenue in downtown Spokane:

February 27, 1951, in The Spokesman Review

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A July 19, 1945, article in the Dayton Herald, out of Dayton, Ohio, covered the jeep demonstration at Charles Sorensen’s farm. Two things about the article stuck out to me. 1) I was surprised to learn that there had been no sales price shared with reports as of the demonstration. 2) The reporter who wrote the article noted that the most interesting piece of equipment was the John Bean Haymaker, which apparently never became a Willys-Overland Special Equipment item, at least not one of which I’m aware. I did find a brochure from a few years later that covered the John Bean Haymaker (see the cover at the bottom of this post).

July 19, 1945, Dayton Herald out of Dayton, Ohio.

What the above article doesn’t mention is that Willys-Overland had hoped to build 20,000 jeeps over the remainder of 1945, at least according to an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer on July 18th:

July 18, 1945, News Messenger out of Fremont, Ohio.

So, why wasn’t the company able to see the 20,000 production figure and instead produced only 1824 CJ-2As? One big factor was that Warner Gear had gone on strike for 12 weeks, stopping production of transmissions that Willys-Overland needed to complete the jeeps. There were probably other reasons as well, but had W-O been able to produce over those 12 weeks what they subsequently manufactured throughout 1946, the company could have come very close to the 20,000 production figure for 1945. In other words, there likely would have been a lot more VECs!

December 22, 1945, Daily Times out of New Philadelphia, Ohio.

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