My first old car was a 1941 Willis Jeep, Army version. We owned several hundred acres in East Texas, about an hour’s drive from Dallas, and Leo, my Pop, owned a plumbing business in town at the time. He worked hard at his business and then loved to play cowboy at our country place on weekends, it was his way to get away from the stresses of a business in the city. I was 12 or 13 then and learned to love our weekends and summers there. I first learned to drive on old cattle tracks and dirt roads on and near our place.
My first motorized vehicle was a Red Comet motor scooter Pop bought for me to get around the place on when I got tired of riding my horse. It was so low to the ground the engine soon got clogged with the red, iron-rich dirt and dust from those old country roads. We would clean out the dust and grime, oil it up again and off I’d go. As our cleaning and maintenance sessions came closer and closer together, Pop realized the scooter was not designed for the kind of abuse I could inflict on a vehicle.
This was in the early fifties, a short time after the war, and there was a glut of surplus items of all kinds, so Pop soon located what he thought was the perfect vehicle for a son with a bit of a wild side – a surplus Army jeep with 4-wheel drive. My friends, Jerry Don and Domard, and I would pile in that old Jeep and spend some of the best days our lives whizzing up and down the East Texas countryside.
A man who worked for Pop on our place part time, doctoring cows and cutting cord wood, spotted a hornet’s nest in a clump of mesquite trees in the middle of one of the pastures one day. It was a huge nest and he was concerned they would swarm and attack some of our newborn calves. After hearing him and Pop talk about it, my friends and I decided we could take care of the problem for them and have a little fun at the same time.
We went off down to the barn and found several old mops with broken handles. Back then we kept a 55-gallon barrel of kerosene for lamps and cook stoves, and also used it for other things around the place, like cleaning up broken motor scooters. Anyway, we got some kerosene in a bucket and soaked those mops good with it. Off we went in the jeep (open cockpit and all). The plan was to drive straight through the mesquite trees (mostly big bushes) and swat the hornet’s nest with those kerosene soaked mops, knocking it down and killing the hornets with the kerosene.
Well, best laid plans don’t always work out just as you picture them. Many years before, our land had been farm land, and a farmer had plowed his deep furrows for planting just on the other side of those mesquite trees. Of course, we didn’t know they were there when we went flying through the trees, whacking and swatting at that hornet’s nest.
Everything was going just as planned, we had successfully knocked down the nest, and then we exited the other side and hit those furrows running across the field. First thing I knew, that jeep became a wild bucking horse, and it bucked all of us out and continued by itself across the field. All those hornets we had just evicted were mad as blazes and looking for vengeance and we boys were running all directions, swatting and yelling and trying to get away from them.
It took a while to get over those stings, but I’ll never forget that day with my friends and that Jeep, my very first car.
