Road Scholar: Original recipe

INSIDE THE GAUDIEST, TACKIEST, MOST ORIGINAL CAR IN SOUTHERN NEVADA

By Newt Briggs

"An American can have a Ford in any color, so long as it's black."

--Henry Ford

John Carpenter can't tell you why there are multicolored pineapples painted on the ceiling of his truck. Nor can he explain the function of the four side-view mirrors clustered in front of his windshield. He's not even quite sure why he felt compelled to bolt the hood ornament from a Ford Mustang onto the front of the truck, but he did it all the same.

"I've seen a few different models with one of these on the front," Carpenter says, pointing to the chrome horse rearing up above the makeshift grille. "I really don't know why they do it, but I always thought it was kind of neat."

The answer involves a Filipino family and its proud legacy in the horse-drawn-cart industry. After the U.S. military wrested the Philippine Islands from the Japanese in the 1940s, the Sarao family--founder of Sarao Motors--began acquiring abandoned American jeeps and converting them into public transportation vehicles. Lacking proper fabrication facilities, Sarao Motors relied on corner shops and cottage industries for design and assembly of the refurbished buggies. Since parts were handmade and no guidelines existed for their manufacture, the jeeps quickly evolved into individual expressions of folk art, each outdoing the others in color, style and flair.

According to a Reuters story from June of this year, "The best Sarao jeepneys feature a small forest of antennae (not connected to any radio), a few ship-sized horns (in good working order) and many, many lights." Most also include at least one shiny horse statue--an homage to the Sarao family's equine-friendly past.

Powered by their original four-cylinder engines, jeepneys (a conflation of jeep and jitney) remain the cornerstone of the transportation industry in the Philippines. Although they're gradually being replaced by more efficient, air-conditioned vans, jeepneys still account for almost a quarter of the country's public utility vehicles. Yet due to stringent American customs regulations, few jeepneys have ever traveled all the way to the United States. Carpenter, who lived in the Philippines as a civilian military contractor for several years, says he's seen only a handful since he began his hunt more than a decade ago. He discovered his in St. George, Utah.

"I first tried to buy it in 1991," he says, dodging a query about how much he paid for the junked beast. "It wasn't until 2002 that they actually decided to sell."

For his vigilance, Carpenter, who now lives in Las Vegas, received the cold shoulder from his wife and a citation from the city of St. George. "It really was an eyesore," he says. So to spruce it up, he covered the roof with a spray-on bed liner and painted it bright orange to simulate the color and texture of an orange peel. For contrast, he painted the body blue and the trim silver. He also replaced the seats, which were originally padded with rock-hard coconut husks.

"There's no pattern," he says, laughing with the glee of a child coloring outside the lines. "I could paint it yellow or green or just glue a bunch of hubcaps to the sides. Who's going to stop me?"

The Air Force, for one. When Carpenter first drove it to Nellis Air Force Base, the guard at the entrance told him, "I'm not letting you on the base until you tell me what that thing is." Generally, though, he gets a more favorable reaction to his Frankensteinian amalgam of sheet metal, paint and plastic. "People always ask me, `Do you have a San Miguel to go with that?'" he says, referencing the popular Filipino lager. "Or sometimes they just want to sit in the back and go for a ride. Kids like it, but so do world travelers and war veterans. It's got a little something for everyone."

And Carpenter isn't done with it yet. The one constant among jeepneys is they are always works in progress, and he's cooking up plans for a wood-grain instrument panel and a professional restoration of the hand-painted ceiling. "I want people to see it in all of its native splendor," he says, estimating the jeepney's value at $30,000-$40,000. "If you can imagine, all of the buses in the Philippines used to look like this. Well, not like this, but something like this. You know what I mean."