JEEPING IN ARIZONA

"If throw leather on mah pony," a whiskery old Arizona rimrock cowboy boasted to me not long ago. "An' we stumble, falter and fall as fur as we can. Then Ah git off and lead. Till the jughead starts shiverin' like seventeen hounds on a slate trail too narrer to holt a shadder, and there Ah tie the horse. And Ah go on afoot and on my belly onteel Ah'm talkin' to mahself like a sheepherder . . . And son, why then Ah git in mah Jeep and go wheres Ah want to go."

The testimonial was the more remarkable, in that this pioneer waddy has never half so much praised his saintly wife, with whom he has lived fifty-five years longer than with his Jeep. In fact, the Jeep speech was his lengthiest oration since the summer of 1954 when he "tore into Phoenix to spill a pot o' paint," in a saloon so ripe a "skonk would be ashamed to meet his mother there," and drank "enough tanglefoot to float a sawlog down the Big Sandy," and ranted on about how some dude picnickers had left open a gate through which "a goosy gether of pecky steers slipped back into the bresh." Anyway, I am encouraged to confess my own affair mechanical. I, too, am owned heart, soul and bruised body by a Jeep. It is, in Jeep jargon, a raunchy willy milly. Raunchy means battered; willy is short for a Willys product; milly stands for military. Mine has hashmarks dating to 1944. "The unpleasantness laughingly called World War II," Jeep lovers are given to say, "probably wasn't worth the Jeep. But almost."

JEEPING In

Other states have more Jeeps (50,000 such vehicles are registered in California) but probably the happiest owners drive in Arizona. Here 10,000 resident jeepophiles may prowl wild, open country from sand dune to timber line: A country rich in game, and ghost towns, and gem stones, and photogenic views, and all the things that Jeep explorers seek, including solitude. No discussion of Jeeps can be both honest and legal. This is because the Willys people, more lately as the Kaiser Jeep Corporation, have registered Jeep as a trademark. They prefer usage as a capitalized adjective, i.e., "My teeth shook loose in my Jeep truck." But to the frustration of the trademark owners, jeepy jeepers, jeepettes and jeepsqueaks jeep jeepingly over nigh unjeepable terrain, by jeepers! In allegiance with the lexicographers, they hang the terminology on any diminutive, open-air, cross-country, four-wheel-drive transport, be it International Scout, British Rover or Japanese Toyota. So be it. The idea for the Jeep may have originated in Charlemagne's rear ranks, and the need for it lingered through World War I. An American officer complained in an official report, that of all the modern professionals: "The infantryman alone carries the supplies and implements of his trade on his back."

By 1921 the army was testing fifteen prototypesmotorcycle rigs, half-tracks, glorified tractors, aluminum scooters, amphibious crawlers. The Belly Flopper, to be operated by a soldier lying prone, had insufficient clearance for rough trails. Closer to the ideal was an all-wheel-drive Model T Ford, which doughboys soon nicknamed, “Our Darling.” The odd experiments did serve to define a series of military characteristics.

By the late 1930s, the army knew it needed a light car for reconnaissance and supply. Capable of a 600pound payload of men and materiél. Powerful. Rugged. Inconspicuous. Reasonably quiet.

So demanding was the challenge, of 135 manufacturers invited to bid, only three responded. They were American Bantam, Willys-Overland and Ford. One

Arizona By Don Dedera

engineering genius is given major credit for winning the contract for Willys.

The late Delmar (Barney) Roos from the beginning disagreed with the army's weight limits for the car. Ford and Bantam sacrificed power and durability to make their models featherlight.

Roos' creation, instead, had a gutty, sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder engine, and a frame and body well-muscled with heavy gauge steel. The Ford and Bantam couldn't keep up or hold up. “By spreading the paint thin,” Roos kept his car to 2,160 pounds. This marvelous compact was but eleven feet long, about five wide, a bit more than three high. It could slog all day at three mph or sprint out to fifty-five. Nobody, not even Roos, imagined a Jeep some day would carry as many as fifteen husky soldiers to battle. Origin of the name, Jeep, is obscure. Segar in 1937 had Eugene, the Jeep, in his Popeye cartoon. The Jeep was a good-luck, fourth-dimensional creature from darkest Africa. The Jeep ate orchids and foretold the future.

But there is evidence soldiers earlier used “jeep” as a slang term for anything eccentric, clumsy or ridiculous. Jeep also may have begun with the contraction GP, for general purpose, a designation for the Ford test car.

Whatever its source, the word was popularized by Irving (Red) Housmann, Willys test driver. One morning Red drove his appealing little quarter-ton 4x4 straight up the steps of the nation's capitol, and then taxied a lady reporter overland through Washington's Rock Creek Park.

"It's a Jeep," he told one and all. And by the next day the word was indelible in American language, and never again quite in control of the Willys people. The Jeep war record is legendary. In all theatres it was the working companion of foot troops. It towed airplanes, carried VIP's, laid communication lines, planted crops, doubled as altars, spread smoke screens, and with a machine gun mounted on a floorpost, charged into the thick of firefights.

Everywhere it went it was admired. Chinese officers posted their most trusted guards over their Jeeps. The foam green. (I hasten to boast that with a broom I painted my willy milly in concert ivory and forest green. By itself it has acquired layers of coffee brown, trout scale silver, campfire black, sardine mustard and Mercurochrome pink.) A fair reflection of jeeping interest is in Jeep clubs. At last count there were seventy-three in the nation, from Pennsylvania to California, from Texas to Michigan.

Several hundred jeepers attended the last Jeep Jamboree of the Phoenix Jeep Club. Delegates came from all over the Southwest. After exploring some desert and Russians coined a term which translates, “The Passes Anywhere.” Many a young GI, drafted before he was old enough to drive his old man's Chevvy, learned how in a Jeep. Correspondents filled their dispatches with Jeep anecdotes. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin sketched a 5th. Cavalry topkick mournfully pressing a pistol to the hood of his broken-wheeled Jeep. It was the Pulitzer-prizewinning artist's favorite cartoon of the war. An invention so perfectly suited to battle would seem an unlikely prospect for peacetime.

But Jeeps came home and without modification went to work on delivery routes, in farm fields, on ranches. Jeeps were perfect for rock hunting, border and beach patroling, surveying. They pulled parade floats and delivered the mail. Attachments enabled Jeeps to dig 800 feet of trench per hour, drive smoke ejectors and paint and insect sprayers, shunt freight cars, and run milkers and generators and compressors.

The previous owner of my Jeep carried a half-ton of flagstone on its hood, over fifteen miles of the worst roads of the Mogollon Rim. I have used it to pull oak stumps, and snake green pine logs. With a loop of gin belt off a jacked rear wheel, it drives a buzz saw.

Two decades of civilian service have brought refinements and superficialities. Jeeps now can be had in shades called president red, plantation white, peacock blue, and Setting up camp near Morristown, northwest of Phoenix, they ringed a bonfire to hear Harry Buschert's bad news. Buschert, of Hemet, is president of the California Association of Four Wheel Drive Clubs. He represents twenty-eight clubs with 750 members. California," he said, “is literally stomped to death by human feet. There is a rising movement of recreational users of the outdoors, as well as cattlemen and miners and so-called desert protective associations, against jeeping.

"Because so much of California is privately-owned, large areas have been closed, and I mean land that couldn't possibly be hurt by a tire track, land that can't support one cow per square mile.

"We have to drive as much as 200-square miles before we are permitted to turn off a paved road."

It was another world to wilderness-rich Arizonans, accustomed, within the limitations of common sense and courtesy, to wheeling off the highway where they dang well please. It also was a warning that Arizona jeeping has its own problem in public relations, aggravated by a minority of thoughtless and malicious vandals.

A few generalities can be drawn from Jamboree-like sociables. There are about four categories of Jeeps: 1. Stockers. These are unmodified millys or civvies, either pretty or pretty raunchy.

2. Goers. In standard bodies the owners have made extensive changes in powerplant and chassis. Harry Buschert's otherwise stock Jeep does gymnastics with independent suspension. Jeepers will stuff almost any-thing under a Jeep hood. Robert Dennis and C. Á. Scott, of Eagle Mountain, Calif., and Harold Huffman, Twenty-nine Palms, have fitted their station wagons with 1951 Oldsmobile, 1955 Pontiac and 1956 Plymouth engines. A V-8 tied to four-wheel-drive is perseverance, uncorked.

3. Non-Jeep jeeps. Norman Pederson swears by his International Scout for work and play. He insists it is as much a bronco in the boondocks, and much more comfortable on the highway. But equally enthusiastic are Del Rogers of Mesa, and Dr. Martin Ahlene of Kingman, toward their Japanese Toyotas. They say the Toyota is only nine inches longer than a standard Jeep, and with 135 horsepower can tow a housetrailer. Yet Glenn Taylor of Phoenix is inseparable from his Land Rover, which has room for a whole Boy Scout patrol, and burns diesel fuel.

Racers. Into a Jeep shell Phoenix daredevils John Cornelius, Dick Claxton, Kenneth and C. J. Blankenbaker and John Griffith will insert a full house an engine designed and tuned for the track. For handsome purses they compete in steeplechase races against similar machines at Denver, Colo., El Paso, Tex., and Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences, N. Mex.

Four photographs shom sequences in race at last year's Jeep Jamboree

But another generality is also obvious. Most Jeepers desire neither companionship nor thrills. To many, inher ent in owning a Jeep is the act of getting away from it all, preferably at minimam speeds. If they wanted racing performance, they'd have bought a sports car; if they wanted togetherness, they'd have bought a bus.

The Hardscrabble News of Sodona sensed this spirit in à recent article: "Jeep owners are numerous around Sedona and mostly they are just for fun. Last Saturday Don Pratt . . . up Jordan road . . . turned off to the right before reaching Sedona Gun Range. From here there is a path good enough for a Jeep and many choices of side trips. For an hour the Jeep climbed to steadily higher altitudes in the genersi direction of Steambeat Rock to emerge on a high platesu overlooking the Sedona settlement. Here a vast panorama of red rocks, can be seen in any direction and familiar rocks appear new and unfamiliar. You can stop, turn off the Jeep engine, and listen to the silence.

"Overhead more than likely ons or more jet trails will span the deep blue of the sky. If you are alert you will likely see a herd of deer, occasionally squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks, and for sure White Face cattle grazing on the government forest land.

"The road winds across the plateau around Steamboat Rock to a viewpoint far above Midgley Bridge. The road down and across the canyon, steep in places but Jeepable (attention, Kaiser Jeep Corporation!), leads. East along the opposite side of the canyon to join Highway 89A north of Midgley Bridge."

Not a shriek, crash or injury in the whole adventure: The greater satisfaction is in accepting the dare of a faint trail. That is jeeping, by the disorganized.Furthermore, a Jeep usually will limp through its owa misfortune. Any man of modest mechanical apti tude can keep a Jeep running. A wrap of wire has replaced my crystalized oil filter bracket. A length of garden hose has quieted a hood rattle. The battery is effectively anchored by a block of pine through which a bolt hole was burned with a branding iron. When a reat axle snapped twenty miles from a garage, I came hoine on front-wheel-drive only.

My first gratifying reward in owning á Jeep, and It lias come to all jeepers, was in rescuing a lesser machine from the mud. City hunters drove into Kaibab North forest in a frozen dawn, and at lunchtime returned to their camp to find their pickup truck settled into the thawing gumbo.

"The oil pan is sitting on a flat rock," said the hapless truck owner, "and, well, we see you've got a Jeep."

One Spring a warm drizzle fell on the Mogollon snowpack, and washed an angry, yellow flood down Tonto Creek. I was at Bear Flat watching the water roar seventy feet wide across the ford when a cabin resident tightroped across the cables and boards that served as an emergency foot bridge. He said he had been trying to dig out his station wagon for two days.

"And," he said, with irresistible hope, "I saw your Jeep."

It's something of a priesthood. My willy milly plunged into the torrent, bucking upstream against the tide, blowing smoky bubbles through the submerged exhaust. Then suddenly it fell into a hole scoured out of the ford. Water sloshed over my ankles. The engine gurgled, hissed and died. The Jeep began to inch toward the edge of the ford, to disaster in the white rapids below.

That would be a bad spot for most automobiles. But for the Jeep, the tools of salvation were a wrench and a rag. Working under water I removed the fan belt so that no more spray would be thrown across the top of the engine. I dried the spark plugs, climbed around the windshield, tried the starter. Va-room! We went on across and in a few minutes returned with the station wagon in tow.

Where that Jeep hasn't gonel It has dipped a tire into Sonoite Creek, and it has crunched through a field of 400 acres of wild iris at Hannagan. It has waited for a hatch of quail to dart across Swift Trail, and it has startled a yearling doe at Potato Patch on Saddleback Mountain. It has been to Maverick and Horse Thief, Rustler Park and Wikieup, Bagdad and Peppersauce Wash. It has visited nearly all the graves of victims of the Pleasant Valley War. It has brought back firewood and granite gravel, elk horns and camp meat, and a thousand vivid memories.

For several years Join Theobald and I hunted ghost towns, a year 'round sport with no bag limit in Arizona. We jeeped to Gillette, to Palace Station, to Fort Bowie, to Minnehaha, to Maricopa Wells, to Dragoon, to Charleston. We called our pastime "Jeep Journeys to Places You Can Hardly Get To, Anymore," but we never exhausted all the melting adobe and decaying frame remaining of Arizona's robust past, Among the first to use their Jeeps in search and rescue in Arizona were members of the Prescott Jeep Club. Now there are a half dozen other such groups in the state, and twenty-seven in the nation.

Typical is the function of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Jeep Posse: "To assist the sheriff's office in the maintenance of peace, order and law, and to promote safety, welfare and good fellowship."

The reference to hospitality is sincere. When in Phoenix to direct a mass polio immunization, Dr. Albert Sabin expressed a desire to explore the desert. Next day a fleet of posse Jeeps loaded with sausages, soft drinks and smiling drivers whisked the famous scientist and his family to a back-country cook-out.

Every posse and club has its log of lifesaving and public service. They search for lost people and overdue airplanes; clear storm damage and reinforce roadblocks. Law chiefs across the land echo the sentiment of Mari cops County Sheriff Cal Boies: "I don't know how we'd get along without 'em."

Someone who has not owned a Jeep a long time may not be enchanted by the lorelei cry of a compound low gear. One has to sleep in a Jeep and under a Jeep, kick it and cuss it, stand in its seats and pick apples, pack a deer in it, set meals on its hood, know it as a mistress and a buddy who will tolerate a family, repair it, defend it against critics, and acquire the peculiar but pure faith that the most desirable way from Points A and B is the slowest and crookedest. One has to fight a brush fire and free a bogged cow and find a lost baby, with his Jeep, to know what jeeping is all about.

Those are all the requirements. The intensive pride and insensitive backside will be acquired automatically.