Junkyard Find: 1979 Jeep Cherokee
I spent a lot of time crawling around this ’69 Dodge A108 van during the last couple of weeks, picking up much-needed parts for my ’66 Dodge A100 Hell Project, and so I became quite familiar with the A108’s junkyard neighbor: this ’79 Jeep Cherokee.
This yard, being a typical Colorado self-service operation, has many Malaise Era Cherokees in stock. We saw this ’79 Cherokee Golden Eagle not long ago, and several more await my camera.
While this Jeep doesn’t have quite the style of the Golden Eagle, but it does have some timeless— i.e., extremely dated even when new— touches.
AMC didn’t have much in the art budget by the late 1970s, so they stuck with the “indian beads” tape stripes for a long, long time.
The giant “Quadra-Trac” selector knob adds a certain industrial charm to the cabin. You didn’t want to lock that center differential until things got serious!
The good news is that plenty of these trucks still roam the streets in these parts.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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The temp/fuel gauge cover has come unglued and fallen down on the dash in the pic. Ha! EXACTLY the same as my dad's '82 Grand Wagoneer and my '85 GW did, as well as my neighbor's '84 and a friend's '86. I used to know every single defect in these things, but the 20 years since I've driven mine has erased my memory. Best feature: completely separate heater and A/C units. You could run them both simultaneously (talk about mega dehumidification abilities!) and the A/C could cool a small apartment.
Man, vehicles used to be so damn roomy inside without all the over-sized center consoles and dashboards that leave little room for the front occupants for the sake of looking stylish.