Brian rightly said:
>The are folks like Jeff at Tactical Truck or Joe Y.
>that can at least do it as a business.
I have to add that the business end of it just a
faction of my Jekyll & Hyde type o.d.disease! Mr.
Jekyll goes looking for mil-vehicles to add to
his inventory of items to sell, then Mr. Hyde steps
in and says "Wow, I gotta have this one for myself!"
Then there's times like when a man stopped in to
my shop while I was restoring an M38A1. He told
me that he also had one and he'd like to sell it.
After he convinced me that it was indeed an M38A1,
I went to his place to check it out. It and a CJ2A
were sitting in the woods behind his house and had
been there for quite sometime. That didn't matter, I
had to have them. Trailered them home and sold the
CJ before I got it off of the trailer! Parked the M38A1
out back. Sometime later another man stopped by to
take a look at my stuff. He spied the M38A1 and
exclaimed: "Hey, I remember that Jeep, I used to
play in it up there in the Marlboro woods (where it
was laying when I got it) when I was a kid." You can
imagine how poor of a condition it was in if a thirty
year old man played in it when he was a youngster.
Then there's the M151A1 I happened to see behind a
house in Delaware. The owner was just stepping out of
his house, so I inquired if the MUTT was for sale and he
said it could be, so we wound up making a deal on it.
Then his wife came out and discovered that he sold
it. Phew, did she rip into me! Accused me of "stealing"
it from him and that I was going to make thousands on
selling it. It was very rough and took almost a year to
restore. Then there's the time about a year ago when
my wife and I traveled to a fellow club member's house to
pay a visit. While visiting the gent, in his early eighties,
his much younger wife informed us that since he could
no longer work and play with his m-v's (Alzheimer's), they
were disposing of them. One son gets the Command Car
and Mity Mite, the other the MB, but they were going to
sell the M718A1. Gotta have it! That lady was sharp on
her pricing, I'll say that. She knew the value and got it
from me. Then there's the M211's I drug out of old farms,
the five rotted out Jeeps laying in the woods behind a
hermit's cabin, and so on. My friend stops over with his
radio equipped M151A2 and wants me to take pics and
post them on my site to sell it for him, now it's parked on
my patio. Mine, all mine! Again... I can't stop, I get a
fever when I find something and the only way to quell it
is to own the new found treasure.
Seventeen of my "treasures," including some classic cars,
have filled my garages, the rest, unfortunately, are out side
for now. I'm planning on building another garage so some
of these will soon be under cover.
Praise the Lord for my understanding wife! When I undertook
to restore our MB, years ago, I was distressed about all of
the original markings having been taken off somewhere down
the line. When Mar's Dad was here to visit, he brought along
their family photo album and showed me pics of the Jeep he
drove while serving during WWII. Jim had a good job and his
duties were to drive the "brass" around, so he was permitted
to put a name on his Jeep. He put his wife's name on the
windshield frame, his son's name, his name and two Eiffel
Towers. I asked for and got Jim's permission for me to copy
all of the markings on his Jeep, except that I'd put Marilyn's
name, my name and my son's name on it. That worked. Mar
loves the MB and it was a good way of introducing her to the
hobby. Jim was like a little kid when he finally got to drive
the finished product. Pics at:
http://hometown.aol.com/joeyounginc/page12.html
Enjoy our hobby, it has to be the best one there is!
Joe Young
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