Text Box:       Cj Blue     Fondly I recall learning to drive, as most lads must. Freedom, growing up, macho matching the few whiskers we could muster.  My first drive was an old Willys jeep, government issue, that my dad had use of for his geology work in Idaho. Now before you turn me in for historic misuse of federal property, dad used this old flop down window jeep to drive to the top of the Southeastern Idaho ridges, the south facing ones home to sagebrush and a few rocks peaking from under thin soil.  He, like others before and following, was charged with understanding and charting valuable phosphate deposits, deposits strategic to a nation at and later recovering from war.     A geologist looks at the rocks, tastes them sometimes, finds the best color in his quiver of pencils, and draws maps of which rocks are where and where they go under the hills.  In southeastern Idaho, the north sides of these hills and ridges are covered with thickets of trees, buck brush, and vegetations hiding the rocks.  A geologic map of just one side of a hill is a half vast map, so to say.  To find these rocks, climbing up hill against the brush that the snows of winter bend down hill is unnecessarily a tough struggle.  Dad wanted, no needed to find the few outcroppings of rocks, and being an educated lad, felt it might be easier and safer to go down the hill covered with dense vegetation.   My job, when I was not fishing for dinner and earning a dollar or two to do so, was to point the jeep down the road that got us to the top, keep it in the gear dad selected, and drive it around to the bottom of the hill dad was to map his way down.  A field assistant and getting paid to do it. Wow at age less than the legal 14 years needed to obtain an Idaho drivers license, I was driving.  Dads are smart, as kids later learn, and it was no surprise to him that soon I could shift too.  Later I was trained to look for the special fossils he needed to prove the age and stuff about these important rocks. True to an incentive given dad, the value of a new collection was five (5!) times more than a mess of cut throat trout (that too had changed).     The pay scale was a dollar a day for driving the jeep, 2 bucks for each meal put on the table and a whopping 5 for special fossils. The money I made from these summers paid for my first Kelsey Junior, but that is yet another story.   Driving led to a learners permit in California, parallel parking, driving the family car, my first truck, a 1942 dodge, and on to newer things. At the time, that made sense and the old jeep was just a forgotten part of a western youth growing up in what later is to be silicon valley, not because the rocks are silica, but rather what some smart folks are doing with SiO2.     Fast forward my life to enjoying a grandson, marriage of our daughters bringing sons into our lives, and still in the west.  Not expensive California where families need to have three jobs to support two people, the west where sage, cactus and hills have little competition from houses and roads.  Arizona this time, and lots of open space.     Enter Cj Blue.     In Pine, I spy a blue 47 Willys CJ2 for sale and after a drive, some tests, and pondering, I am just the second owner of this jeep. Next to my truck, this old Blue colored jeep is simple. No computers to measure gas for the L head four cylinder engine. No special tools as a crescent wrench and screw driver are all that is needed to take it apart.  Later I install seat belts, and work on a simple top (hard to know why for a jeep is not to be much more than a jeep).  Play with this, tune that, replace an old part, and what do you know, we still have an old jeep. Not the comfortable SUV, an old jeep that bounces along at the top speed of 45, steers like the wheel needs to be moved just to stay straight, and open to  the air with bugs on your glasses for the window is down like it was made that way.     Our grandson, son in law, and yup, all of all, just love this old thing. I have visions of driving lessons in old Cj Blue and lots of fun in the hills, remembering the good times, and creating a few in the process.       G.E. McKelvey GEMPress 9485 East Conquistadores Drive Scottsdale, Arizona 85255-4345 Gempress@earthlink.net Http://home.earthlink.net/~gempresss/index/htm               The Ink Zone