9/17/2008 – 9/18/08
Daddy, as Patricia Marko tells it, bought her a yellow 1949 Jeepster convertible in 1968 and kept an eye on it from his office window in the only high-rise building in town to make sure she didn’t waste the afternoons cruising up and down Main Street.
Daddy was an FBI agent.
“The town was so little that he could see all the way down Main Street, and he could see if you were cruising after school,” Patty said. “I could do it once, but then I had to go home.”
Maybe in part to try to replicate the experiences of those high-school years, Patty now has a 1950 black-over-yellow Willys-Overland Jeepster convertible that she bought four years ago and can cruise whenever she wants. But she wheels it out of her garage only during the summer — and then only on weekends, to keep the mileage down.
“I’m not going to put too many miles on it because I want to keep it,” she said. The black-faced odometer with the white numerals has recorded 85,988 miles.
And Patty doesn’t go more than 55 mph in the Jeepster, which has a three-speed manual that shifts the 72-horsepower 134-cubic-inch four-cylinder, and she’s never used the overdrive. The speedometer reads up to a maximum of “8,” short for 80.
Patty’s dad paid $350 for the 1949 model, which he found with chickens roosting in it in a barn near El Centro, Calif., the tiny town 50 feet below sea level and right up against the Mexican border where Patty grew up. He had it repainted and re-upholstered at a shop across the border in Mexicali.
In contrast, Patty paid $15,000 for her ‘50 Jeepster, which she bought online from a dealer in Whidbey Island, Wash., who had it for two years. He bought it from a California family that had stored it for many years, she said. It’s worth up to $25,000 today.
The black manual convertible top and the black vinyl upholstery with the white piping look as good as new. Chrome spotlights adorn each side of the two-piece windshield. A spare tire wrapped in black is propped on the rear bumper.
The light yellow paint, which Willys-Overland dubbed “Nassau cream,” was redone years ago and shows signs of wear, with chips on the fenders. There is minor rust on the chrome grille, and the whitewall tires have faded to match the yellow of the car.
The starter is a big, fat button on the floor, above and to the right of the gas pedal. Most of the chrome — and there’s lots of it — gleams.
Willys-Overland produced 19,132 Jeepsters between 1948 and 1950, including those sold during the 1951 model year. The company figured it would try to take advantage of the popularity of the World War II Jeep by trying to appeal to civilians with a passenger car, but the vehicle just didn’t catch on.
Willys revived the Jeepster name in 1966 with the Jeepster Commando. But the moniker died in 1971 even though American Motors, the successor to Willys-Overland, rebadged the vehicle as the Jeep Commando for the 1972-73 model years.
Patty’s original Jeepster, the one Daddy bought, “was hard to drive, and it was slow; you couldn’t go fast or race.” But it was a convertible, and she loved convertibles. It was handed down to her younger sisters when Patty went off to college.
From her dad’s view from his office, the car must have stood out on El Centro’s Main Street like a yellow banana on black velvet. It was the only one in town. Did Patty feel spied on during her after-school cruises?
“Well, my father was an FBI agent, so we figured it was his job to keep a close eye on his own kids,” Patty explained. “We never really felt spied upon. We did get to drag Main a couple of times after school, but then we’d head home. [It was a] small-town kind of thing, too. You couldn’t get away with anything even if you wanted to.”
Santa Fe’s high-schoolers probably can relate to that.
As for the “new” Jeepster, Patty bought it because she always was into collectible cars and convertibles and “ran across ads for Jeepsters and thought, ‘Why not?’ I wanted one that was in good condition and working order, and it had to be yellow/black.”
Seek and ye shall find.
