Before the Jeep, there was Dad’s Chevy Luv pickup. That’s where I learned to drive stick. Dad’s teaching method was simple and terrifying: he handed me the keys on the beach in San Felipe and said “See if you can figure it out.”

I learned to drive in sand, which made it much harder than pavement. Air down the tires. Release the clutch just quickly enough to get moving, not so fast you stall. I didn’t burn out the clutch (much).

I found the Jeep in the El Centro newspaper. I wasn’t even looking — I was driving Dad’s Luv at the time. I think my parents knew the guy selling it. Pettigrew, maybe? I went over, took it for a test drive, and bought it for around $4,500. My dad helped with the money but made me negotiate myself. First lesson in vehicle ownership.

It was one of the later CJ5s — tailgate, curved door openings designed for vinyl soft doors that took about a minute to remove. Lap belts only. No back seat (I added one). Simple stock straight-6. Ragged top, otherwise decent shape.

Driving with no doors was fun but kind of terrifying. First time I changed spark plugs — in the street in front of the dorm — I got the firing order wrong. Educational. Campus had a street they liked to open and close at random; I got around it by driving up on the curb. One ticket for that. I did a lot of drives up to the dirt roads behind Upland, and down to San Felipe several times.

The windshield wipers didn’t always work, so I used a Vice-Grip to turn them by hand. The Jeep had no back window, which gave me something to argue with campus security about — they wanted their parking sticker somewhere and I had no obvious surface to put it.

In Baja I got stuck below the tideline once and managed to get 4WD locked and crawl out before the tide came in. A few days later I was one of two vehicles stuck to the diffs in a tidal mud flat. We extracted with 1x8 boards. Stories of getting stuck and having the tide cover the vehicle are “pretty common” in those circles, which says something about those circles.

I replaced it with an Isuzu Trooper and swapped the big BFG all-terrains over. Then, driving down to south Pomona to get parts, a guy on a side street started to pull out at a T-intersection, stopped — and I ran into the pickup truck that had stopped in front of me. Totalled the Jeep. I blamed the smaller slick tires (from the Trooper) and the guy on the side street. Sold it to a Jeep parts place; they repaired it and resold it.

Great starter car. Vice-Grip windshield wipers.