Jeep With a Fringe on Top

Many, many years before the spring of 2011 when I am writing this, my wife and I and our two children were stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi. As an airman with three stripes and only about four years in the service, we had to make do on a pretty limited income, so we lived in a rented trailer that measured about 10" in width and 50' in length that was in a trailer park just off Beach Boulevard.

Many of our neighbors were also servicemen and women, but our nearest neighbors were two young women who were students at a nearby college. Their mother was a (or the) manager of of a large hotel just down Beach Boulevard a ways and we became accustomed to seeing her Lincoln Continental with the suicide rear doors parked on the grass behind our place whenever she'd stop and visit her daughters.

The autumn of 1965 was dismal, wet and cold, a period that seemed to begin with the dangerous Hurricane Betsy in September and that would last well through winter. One nasty, cold evening as were were watching our B&W television in the corner of the living room, I heard what sounded like a car spinning tires in a snow bank or on ice. Curious person that I am, I went outside to see what could be making such a noise so uncommon in southern Mississippi.

Behind my trailer, on the grassy patch in front of our neighbors' trailer, sat the mother's elegant sedan, it's rear wheels furiously spinning themselves deeper and deeper into the sandy soil. The two girls and I tried to help by pushing, but that car was too deeply mired. Finally, the mother got out and disdainfully picking her way out of the muddy lawn, announced that she'd have the Jeep sent out from the hotel to pull her car out of the mud.

I went back into my trailer and sat back to watch TV with my wife and children. Perhaps half an hour later, I heard more tires spinning, so I went back outside to watch. There, chained to the rear of that huge Lincoln was a Jeep, not just any Jeep, mind you, but a pretty blue jeep with no sides, but a blue canvas top with fringe around all three exposed sides. A Jeep with a fringe on top. The kind used to take hotel guests to the golf course or down to the gulf.

The driver had backed up up to the Lincoln and hooked some sort of tow chain to the undercarriage of the big car, getting himself muddied in the process. He sat in the Jeep, spinning the rear tires furiously on the pavement, the front end of the jeep bouncing up and down in the futile effort of pulling the Lincoln. I watched, bemused for a while, then offered a suggestion or two.

"Why don't you put the Jeep in four-wheel drive, low range, and turn the it around to pull from the front?"

The driver looked at me as if I'd spoken a foreign language, "How do you put it in four wheel drive?"

Then I realized that this guy was just a hotel driver, not a good-old boy with a fancy Jeep, so I wordlessly unhooked the chain, motioned him out of the Jeep, got in, turned it around, set the transmission, and told him to hook up the chain. He crawled back in the mud, hooked the end of the chain the the frame of the Jeep, then crawled back out. I put the shifter in reverse and slowly let out the clutch until the chain tightened. The tires tried to bite on the wet pavement, then let loose, so I pushed the clutch back in. I told the girls' mother to get back in the car and when she felt the car move, to give it some gas until it stopped moving, then to hit the brake and hold the car in place, until she felt it jerk and move some more.

Slowly, jerking the big car little by little, we got it back up on the pavement. They thought I'd performed a miracle, but all I'd really done was use that Jeep the way it was built to be used, no matter that it was a pretty blue Jeep with a fringe on top.