Hello again everyone! This-Old-Jeep.com is back. I’m really thrilled to be posting updates to the site once again. For everyone who may not have known, I had to spend the last six months or so rebuilding the site. Back in October the hard drive on my laptop failed. I didn’t have a complete backup (but luckily had a partial back up...). It was a hard lesson to learn, but an important one. I lost alot of info, some of it I was able to retrieve and find once more, but some is irreplaceably gone. But like I said, it was a lesson and onwards and upwards!
Alot happened in the last six months and I wanted to fill readers in on what I have planned. I may have a big announcement to make soon. Back when this mess began I had something in the works that was put on a back burner. I still don’t want to say too much about it, but its an exciting idea that I haven’t seen before. I think that everyone would be pretty jazzed by it too. Now that I’m a bit more free and clear I’m going to go back and try to rework this idea. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
I had a few interesting emails as well. One from the son of the incredibly talented LIFE magazine staff photographer Myron Davis, whose work I’ve profiled in the LIFE photo archive. Glenn Davis wrote:
“Dear Brendan T. Burke,
I am Glenn Davis, the oldest son of Myron Davis, whose LIFE photos you have in the LIFE archive section. I was surprised how much biographical information you had on him and that it had been updated through his death four years ago. Thank you for preserving this history.
The email below was sent to family and friends and has corrections/explanations of the information you have listed for him. You may want to make corrections. Your time and effort is greatly appreciated.”
I’ve also been working on reworking the site to look more homogenous from page to page. The site is so large that over the years that I’ve been creating it, it has gone through several evolutions and as a result, some details here and there were different as I had forgotten a particular font or font size that I had previously used on another page. Its just some basic cleaning up, but I’m still working and will be for awhile yet, though most of the major stuff is finished. I still need to upload and tinker here so you may see a few broken links or oddball things. If you do or if you have a suggestion to make, please feel free to email me @thisoldjeepdotcom@gmail.com. I love to hear from you guys and anything that you may spot that I haven’t really helps me greatly!
I still have many ideas for future articles that I’m working on and you should see over the course of the year. I’ve accrued enough additional photos and info for a sequel to the hardtop article that I wrote last year. The various forms that people had ‘civilianized’ and modernized the jeep is still something that fascinates me. I also had an idea for a ‘where are they now?’ sort of article detailing what’s left of Willys, Kaiser and AMC and their legacies. It surprised me how much still exists even if in a ‘fossilized’ legacy.
There are alot of miscellaneous things that I have in the works. I have a ton of stuff to share with you guys that I’ve found online in more Website Finds. Most of it is stuff that I have never before seen on the web. I want to hold another drawing and giveaway for you too. There are plenty of designs that I’m working on for new tees and a new calendar for next year in the This-Old-Jeep.com Zazzle marketplace. One of the biggest disappointments that I had with the hard drive failure was that I wasn’t able to put together a calendar for this year after three years running. But 2015 will see a new calendar.
There are two sections of the site that are long term projects. One is a jeep manual section where you will be able to browse through and download free and publicly available government produced jeep manuals mainly for the military models. Its a big section and so its takes up alot of memory on the site and has always been one of the things that was put off until later just because of the sheer volume of time involved in putting it together. The second part of the site is something that you may have noticed in the navigation menu at the top. Its a ghost of a page that I accidentally uploaded before it was even begun. I’m going to put together a new section of the site that details info on the jeep from the beginning, a sort of a jeep spotter guide plus much more. Photos for IDing models, history, details, variants, international models, etc. Its another big idea and it’ll take me some time to get it together.
Lastly, I want to say thanks for everyone’s patience. Its taken me a long time to get back to here. I had some minor family health stuff to deal with as well as just plain tapping away here on the laptop. But now I’m back and hope to get to fairly regular weekly updates. Its great to be back and thanks again! Brendan
