Tim Surdyke

This Willy’s has been around the family for over 40 years. It was owned by Louie, a man in our hunting club, and every fall it came out to the family farm for deer season, or trips out west to hunt antelope. When Louie’s health was failing, he sold the Jeep to my brother-in-law, and he continued using it for the next 10 years. I bought it from him 5 years ago, and began the restoration. My goal was to make it a project I could work on with my son Tom, who was then 16 years old.

We soon discovered that the body had rusted through too many times, with too many repairs, to be salvageable, which considerably increased the restoration time. Meanwhile, Tom applied for and received admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point. This reinforced our early decision to restore the Jeep in a military style, even though it was a civilian model.

Tom entered USMA on June 28, 2015. In the mean time, the restoration moved forward near completion.

On June 24, Tom was on a short break following Air Assault School and went to the beach on Long Island NY with another cadet. On that day, he saved a young man who could not swim from drowning in a rip tide, but he himself was overcome by the sea, and on June 28, 2016, he died of drowning.

On July 4, 2016, his 19th birthday, Tom was laid to rest at the USMA Cemetery. For his heroic actions, he was awarded the Soldier’s Medal, the Army’s highest non-combat award.

This project, already wrapped up in my son Tom, who had grown up around it, became a tribute to him. The numbers I chose to put on it, while not in a historically correct format, hold much meaning for me. 0704 is Tom’s birthday, as well as the day on which he was buried. TS are his initials. 60 is the number he wore through 4 years of high school football, and XIX, Roman numeral 19, is representative of his class graduation year at USMA.

From West Point’s Alma Mater:
And when our work is done
Our course on earth is run,
May it be said, “Well Done”
“Be thou at peace”