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Welcome to eWillys.com, a website for vintage jeep enthusiasts. I update this website nearly every day with jeep deals, jeep history, interesting reader projects, jeep related info, and more.
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There are plenty of interesting, unusual, historic and surprising stories related to Jeeps and their owners. In addition, some of these features have nothing to do with jeeps. This link will display all featured stories starting from the latest.
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The July 14th, 1955, issue of the Auburn Journal, Auburn California, highlighted events from a recent jeep trip in the Sierra Mountains from Wentworth Springs to Lake Tahoe.
William F. Baggerman in 1946 standing in front of his 1946 VEC CJ-2A. Behind the jeep is a trailer (a box on wheels). Standing to the side of the jeep is Charles Mum of the Laredo, Texas, AAA. William is just about to enter Mexico in 1946.
Wiliam F. Baggerman was born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri, area around 1914. He attended Washington University and Edinburgh University. He started Modern Management Co., a real estate management firm, in 1936, and later was employed with Sycamore Investors, Inc., a shopping center development company.
He entered what would become the Air Force right after Pearl Harbor and spent 20 months in the Pacific theatre, stationed for at least part of the time in Guam. While in Guam, for some unknown reason, he decided to travel to Central America after the war.
A year after the war ended, he purchased a jeep and, along with a trailer, headed south to Laredo, Texas, where he began his adventure.
After his trip, he wrote an 60 page book: Driving to Managua, Nicaragua (A Guide to the PanAmerican Highway Through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua).
The book is part guide book and part travelogue, as most of the text describes dryly how to travel through the various countries. Yet, the pics feel far more personal; there are at least 10 photos, almost all of which include the jeep. You can view the entire book online at Hathitrust.org.
The jeep he used appears to have been a VEC with indents and a column shift, but without the rear hubs. So, I’d guess a 15xxx to 30xxx serial number. The trailer is a box on wheels … anyone know what model?
Let’s look at some pics!
This is a map of the Pan American Highway. It’s not clear to me how much he veered off the highway:
This pic shows him just entering Mexico:
Those are some beautiful mountains. But who is looking at the mountains when you can peek inside the cab and see the column shifter:
Apparently, even the jeep couldn’t take William everywhere:
UPDATE: As best as I can tell, it looks like 1963 was when Don Pratt’s Jeep Tours began working with the Kachina Cab company. The article appeared in the August 13, 1963, issue of the Arizona Republic:
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Originally posted June 2019: According to this Pink Jeep Tour site, Pink Jeep Tours is the oldest continuously operating Jeep Tour Company in the United States. It was started in 1958 by a Sedona Realtor named Don Pratt, who would drive clients to see homes at Broken Arrow Estates. The Broken Arrow tour is the original Jeep tour and is still today the most popular tour in Sedona.Why did he make the jeeps pink? Mr. Pratt got the idea while visiting the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach, where everything was pink.
But, that’s only part of the story. In her book Echoes of Sedona Past, Mary Lou Keller explains how her and her husband cleared the first trail and how, when Glenn Keller decided not to open a jeep tour business, their friend Don Pratt asked if he could do it instead. Mrs. Keller covers the story in five pages of her book available to read on Google.The book also includes the image below of Mary Lou Keller with her do Pico in her (probably) 1946 CJ-2A:
Steve discovered this short article on a problem caused by jeeps in the Philippines (though this is a more complicated situation than just the existence of jeeps). The article was published in the October 11, 1945, issue of the Guinea Gold, a newspaper out of Australia. On the same page, there were two additional stories about Australian war brides getting preferential treatment for their trips (one article noted ‘secret’ trips by ship and another by a few women who got to fly to Hawaii) over returning service men.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/250680929?
October 11, 1945, Guinea Gold
“Filipino men are trying to put US jeeps cut of bounds to all their women under 40 years, states Ray Johnston, war correspondent, in Brisbane Sunday Mail.
Almost any hpur of the day and night, American jeeps carrying attractive Filipino girls can be seen in Manila’s grievously war-damaged streets. Timorous mothers and jealous boy friends have been complaining against the attraction the jeep exercises on local girls.
In China, Government officials and citizens became alarmed over the fact that the Chinese took to jeeps, as ducks to water, so they prohibited their girls riding inthem.
“Maybe such a law would be considered rude in Manila, but we should do something about the
situation,” says the Manila Chronicle. “After all, we don’t want it said in future that the jeep won the war and our women, too!”
An October 18, 1949, article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced Daniel M. Towns decision to drive a jeep from Magallanes, Chile, to Fairbanks, Alaska, then drive to Washington, D.C. He is hoping to be able to cross the Darien Gap rather than boat around it. He plans to use tracks on a jeep to get through the Gap. As of the date of the article, Willys-Overland (or a dealer) had already agreed to supply a jeep.
A few weeks later, Towns received some advice from Frank Buck, as described in a November 07, 1949, article in the Forth Worth Star-Telegram. Frank Buck died a few months later.
Photo Credit: http://umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/tribune/photographs/display_photo.php?id=5001 … This is a 1945 photo from VE Day as the paper prepared for the special “extra” paper announcing the end of the war in Europe. Richard “Dick” Sanburn appears to be the follow standing int he back, slightly bent over without a jacket, fourth from the left. He would go on to become editor of the Calgary Herald.
An April 20, 1953, column by Dick Sanburn out of the Calgary Herald, from Calgary, Canada, shared the news that a new type of jeep, the Mighty Mite, had been introduced. This led Dick to reminisce about the capabilities and rough ride of the jeeps he experienced during WWII. I thought his take on the customization of jeeps by their drivers (or jockeys as he refers to them).
Dick Sanburn’s column “Take it From Here” was launched after the joined the Calgary Herald in 1951. It became a local landmark. According to his obituary, “People either loved it or hated it, but they were never neutral. And that was because Sanburn never pulled his punches.”
During his earlier years as a war correspondent, he was frequently under fire. By the end of the war he had been made a member of the Order of the British Empire. Dick passed away on October 1, 1982 (his obit is at the bottom of this post, along with two of his articles).
Just this one post for Tuesday …
A search of Jeep parades at Newspapers.com revealed endless WWII and post-WWII jeep parades for a myriad of causes. Below is a sample:
This August 08, 1943, photo and article published in the Charlotte Observer highlights a jeep parade held for Army Air Force recruitment.
A June 17, 1942, blurb in the Marysville Journal Tribune noted that Marlene Dietrich and 100 jeeps would be parading in Toledo for a War Bond drive.
Sinbad the dog, a decorated 8-year veteran of the Coast Guard, got his own jeep parade according to a January 09, 1946, article in the Marysville Journal-Tribune out of Ohio.
The March 06, 1946, issue of The Leader-Post out of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, reported that the first 100 jeeps to be imported into Colombia formed a parade in Bogota.
This April 21, 1953, article in the News-Pilot out of San Pedro, California, gives some background on the Annual Jeep Cavalcade trip to Borrego, California. The group totaled 175 jeeps and 600 hundred people.
The article’s author makes a pretty blatant plug for the vehicle one of the reporters was driving, noting that the “powerful new Chrysler Sedan provided by Kroll Motors handled with ease and driving comfort that are characteristic of Chrysler engineer.” (insert eye-rolling emoji here) ….
Andy McIntyre built this model jeep with ingenuity and scavenged parts to help teach his two daughters, Ann and Phyllis, how to drive and use hand signals. He also planned to introduce them to local law enforcement. Eventually, he wanted to teach all the kids how to properly drive, as he noted in the article “Children of today are born into an age of speed … Everyone needs to sharpen his wits to keep step with this age of machines.” It sounds like Andy and his wife raised their girls to be tough and independent!
It sounds like the family had a third daughter, Joy, who passed away in 2008, proceeded by the deaths of her parents Andy and Cora McIntyre. The older sisters, Ann and Phyllis, were still alive as of 2008.
August 16, 1953, article in The Independent Record, out of Helena, Montana.
Anyone seen other pics of this modified jeep?
A January 18, 1953, article in the El Paso Times shared the story of seven young men who formed “the jeep club”. There was no fancy name attached to it. They guys liked to explore the surrounding mountains, hunt jack rabbits, trap coyotes, and play with their jeeps.
On the same page as the jeep article was an article about the first mail route in the United States, one that operated between Roswell and Torrance, New Mexico. The mail (and the occasional passengers) were ferried on the YELLOW DEVIL, an assemblage of discarded auto parts; that kind of sounds like a few jeeps I’ve known.
Obviously, this article was written before the aliens reached Roswell, because, rather than known for “progress of modern development (was it really known for that?)”, it’s pretty much famous for other-worldly visitors.
Make sure to reach the final story, one in the far right lower corner. Need rats for an experiment? One scientist discovered an easy way to get them …
This photo from July 04, 1946, in the Portola Register (out of Portola, California) shows famed clown Emmet Kelly helping Aileen Darnay step out of a CJ-2A, a jeep that was new to the circus. I wonder if the “WILLYS JEEP” painted on the hood was a form of advertising that reduced the cost of the jeep to the circus?
