Has Your Mom Ever Looked This Good? My mother told me my grandfather always bragged he had the only military Jeep with an automatic transmission. After buying the Jeep in 1955, he taught my 11-year-old mother how to shift gears from the passenger seat when he was driving and engaged the clutch with his left foot. The youngest of his three daughters, she was his side-kick everywhere they went. He was a member of a rock hound club in Imperial Valley, California and made numerous trips to the desert. This is a photo of my mother “pretending” to drive on such a trip to the desert in southeast California. It was May 1956 and she was 12 years old. She remembers fondly the trips in this Jeep to the A&W Rootbeer stand in her hometown of Brawley, California. Her father always put the windshield down on the hood and the family would drive several blocks to savor rootbeer floats in “Jeepie.” Her dad kept this Jeep until he purchased his 1960 CJ-5 pink Willy’s Jeep, which I am currently restoring. And that begins the story of me when I was 5 years old, riding in the Pink CJ-5 with Grandpa, in “Baby Jeepie”.