The news stand price of this 1957 copy of The Saturday Evening Post was 15 cents, and the cover alone was well worth the money. The painting by John Clymer is quite suitable for framing, and half a century later it's a nice reminder of why we think Willys Jeeps are worth keeping and restoring.
Clymer's depection of a trip to the fishing hole with a youngster and a dog, gets to the heart of the American experience, just like some of Norman Rockwell's work for the Post. But he does portray a Jeep that never really existed in real life; the hood and radiator guard combine features of the CJ-3B with earlier flatfender models. It's similar to some illustrations in Willys advertising such as a 1953 ad in the Post, where the artists were perhaps encouraged not to show how high the new CJ-3B's high hood really was, for fear it would scare off people comfortable with the familiar old profile.
The editor, in his paragraph about the cover, mentions that Clymer reduced the number of wagon wheels that were in the real fence around the mill pond, and comments that "maybe he feared that if the thing had more wheels it might get moving in a high wind and roll down the pike lickety-toot. If a fence, while exceeding the speed limit, should hit an auto, who would sue what?" The joke is about as funny as most of the cartoons sprinkled through the magazine .
The editor also speculates about what life will be like in the 21st century. But rather than asking if people will still be driving Willys Jeeps, he expects helicopters will replace automobiles, and wonders if Jeep wheels will then be painted white and used to decorate fences.
John Clymer (1907-1989) is known as a prominent painter of scenes of the American West. But he also did some 80 covers for The Saturday Evening Post in the 1940's and 50's.
I'm apparently not the only person who has done some nit-picking about details in those illustrations; in an interview in Walt Reed's book John Clymer, an Artist's Rendezvous with the Frontier West (Northland, 1976), Clymer commented: "There was only one drawback about doing covers for the Post. They went everywhere in the country, and because I picked and painted actual places, there would be several hundred people who lived nearby who'd scrutinize every detail to try to find something wrong. I had to be sure I knew all about everything included in a picture, and why it was there. There would always be someone like a telephone lineman who'd write in and say, 'I don't think that was the kind of insulator they used in that area.' The Post was good about those things. The only time I had to make a correction on a cover was when I sent in a picture that had an automobile in the foreground. I had completed everything, lights, chrome, trim, spokes, but forgot to paint in the door handle."
You can visit the Clymer Museum in his birthplace of Ellensburg, Washington. -- Derek Redmond
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