Category: History

Here’s a recently unearthed shot of Chewbacca on the beach in Nag’s Head in about 1999 or so. My friend James is flying my kite over on the right side. In retrospect I’m amazed at how naive and trusting I was to drive 300+ miles in a truck I’d only recently bought, but I’d already taken her across the Eastern Shore to Assateague (150 miles) with no problems. She ran like a top, and it was loads of fun to shift into 4-Lo and get her out on the beach. I think we probably drove 3-4 miles over the sand until we found a section we liked.

I’ve embarked on a project to digitize all of of my old paper files after I found out that the big multifunction copiers at work are back online and are able to email again. They have batch scanners that will take a giant stack of papers and smash them into one PDF that I can then email myself. Going through my overstuffed file cabinet I found a long-lost folder of Scout documents. It’s all Chewbacca era stuff, including the original lineset ticket, most of the receipts for the registration, an April 1972 copy of Mechanix Illustrated with a review of the new Scout II, and a bunch of other assorted papers. I was happy to find pictures that I thought I’d lost as well as correspondence from the original owner I bought it from in 1997. I’ll start posting them here as I process all the files.

This is the original listing for Chewbacca from a nice man up in Lancaster, PA. I bought this truck the day before my birthday in 1998.

Brian sent me this picture with the caption “13 years ago today”.

This nice-looking Traveler showed up on Craigslist and FB Marketplace for around $17K, which is a pretty good price for what they’re offering. What caught my eye, beyond the obvious good looks and desirable extra 18″ of wheelbase (and thus cargo space) was the location of the first staging shot:

That’s the former location of East Coast Scouts, my local IH mechanic in the early days when I had Chewbacca. He closed up shop in the early 2000’s when it got to be too much to stay on top of; he’s back in the area after moving to PA for a while and I traded emails with him last year.

Digging through the family archives this weekend, I found a couple of shots of Chewbacca and I in her prime. This was from about 2001 or so, out in front of my parents’ place in New York State. I guess I’m used to looking at a taller suspension these days, but she’s riding awful low on the springs.