Robert Green walked back into Willys in 1950 and found himself stuck in the middle of the Farm Sales division. He was “the supervisor of implement procurement and engineering.”  Not in charge, at least not yet, but perhaps feeling alone.

Not literally — the company was still running, still building Jeeps, still employing engineers and salesmen and line workers. But the team that had spent four years turning a surplus military vehicle into a working farm machine was gone. Charles Sorensen had retired. George Newlin had left to breed Guernsey cattle. Barney Roos had returned to core engineering work, far from the farm equipment conversations. Monroe Auto Equipment had cut its losses and walked away. Newgren Equipment, the company Green had co-founded with Newlin to manufacture the hydraulic lift, was finished.

Green was what remained. The last man standing from the original 1946 team — and the only one still willing to fight for what they had built.

The Changing Market

Following WWII, Willys‑Overland had, under Charles Sorensen’s direction, withdrawn from the car market and focused on the Jeep line of utility vehicles. But by 1950, pressure was building for a post-war car. Pressure not from the public, but from stockholders and dealers. They would produce the Aero Willys from 1952 to 1955. It was the only post-war car they would produce. It was also another battle for the Farm Jeep and Robert Green to fight. In 1950, Willys’ leadership was focused on cars, not tractors. But someone else had seen what Sorensen saw in 1946.

Henry Kaiser had been watching the Jeep for years. He’d built Liberty ships and steel mills and Kaiser Permanente hospitals, and he understood the value of a product nobody else could make. When he moved to acquire Willys Overland in 1953, he wasn’t buying a car company — he was buying the Jeep. The passenger car lines, including the Aero Willys that Willys had pinned its post-war hopes on, were gone by 1955. Kaiser didn’t want them. What he wanted was exactly what Sorensen had seen in 1946 — a vehicle with no direct competitor and a loyal market that wasn’t going anywhere. For Robert Green, the acquisition was a double-edged development. Kaiser understood the Jeep’s value. Whether he understood the Farm Jeep’s value was a different question entirely.

The farm Green had designed the Jeep for in 1946 no longer existed. Tractor production in the US reached a record 564,000 units in 1951. The major tractor manufacturers (Deere, Ford, Massey-Ferguson, Case, Allis-Chalmers, Oliver, and Minneapolis-Moline) held 98.8% of the market share during 1950-55.  Willys would need to fight for even that 1.2% share. The farm for which the Farm Jeep had been forged was long gone.

The landscape of agricultural machinery had shifted dramatically. Monroe Auto Equipment, devastated by the Newgren/Bantam disaster, made the strategic decision to abandon Willys. While Monroe continued to manufacture their signature hydraulic lifts independently into the mid-1950s, they effectively withdrew from the integrated development team, leaving Willys to navigate the agricultural sector alone.

One measure of Willys’ involvement in the agricultural market is the number of farm-related items listed in the Jeep Optional Equipment catalogs provided to dealers.  These books, which appear to have been printed yearly, contain add-on equipment that had been “tested and approved” by Jeep engineers.  Individual books are rare, but reproduction copies covering multiple years are readily available.  They make for fun browsing but can also provide some insight into the changes occurring in the tractor and related products industries.

The reproduction book covering 1946-49 contains over 60 products, including about every farm implement available at the time and, of course, the Monroe lift.  The books are divided into agricultural implements and industrial equipment.   The 1957-59 books contain only a dozen or so farm implements in addition to the Monroe lift.  The farm equipment producers had adapted to the market and were now selling equipment for larger tractors, and the wide variety of implements for a 2-bottom plow tractor seen in 1946-49 was no longer available.

Robert Green: The Last Man Standing

When Willys promoted Green to head the Farm Sales department in September 1952, it was an acknowledgment, however quiet, that he was the only one left who knew what the program actually was.

Green was undeterred by the industry’s skepticism. He famously — and perhaps stubbornly — continued to push the Farm Jeep. In his 1997 interview with Todd Paisley, Green discussed the Farm Jeep and the Monroe Lift in colorful terms: It was a “shit piece” of a tractor and a “shit piece of a lift,” according to Green. The Newgren Lift strengthened the frame. The Monroe Lift took up the bed. But it was the machine that he had, and he would do his engineering best to make it work.

His strategy to make it work relied on constant iteration. Finding new ways to make the good attributes of the Farm Jeep shine. To prove the Jeep’s versatility, he oversaw the introduction of specialized implements, including a corn picker, attempting to demonstrate that the Jeep could handle complex PTO-driven tasks just as well as a dedicated tractor. And to do it while providing a warm, dry environment for the driver.

A “Jeep” corn picker has never been seen in the wild. But there are photos of Green testing the machine on a farm near Bowling Green. Although both Willys and Monroe conducted extensive tests, by 1950, any testing was left up to Green. Meanwhile, Willys’ marketing didn’t feature farm implements; it sold farm power.

We know little about how Green spent his time. Yet his marks are there in Willys’ documents. In the mid-1950s, Willys Motors, Inc. produced a “Product Merchandising Manual” containing forty instruction sections. The book was the dealer’s bible. It contained detailed instructions on everything from prepping new and used cars to setting up a showroom display. One section, “Demonstrations,” gives detailed instructions on preparing for and conducting farm demonstrations.

We know from Green’s promotion article that he authored a book on farm demonstrations while at Newgren. The Product Merchandising Manual’s demonstration section ran for about 40 pages. Details on the plowing demonstrations ranged from tire pressure to using a 10-year-old boy to demonstrate how simple it was to plow with a Jeep. Green regularly used young boys to demonstrate ease of use while at Newgren. There is no doubt that this section was his creation.

The Shift in Scale and Strategy

The agricultural world of the 1950s looked very different from that of 1948. The industry was rapidly moving toward industrialization: acreage was expanding, requiring higher horsepower and increasingly specialized machines. The “all-purpose” small tractor was giving way to heavy-duty machinery — even icons like the Ford 8N and Ferguson TO-30 were disappearing from front-line farm work. Willys’ marketing began to pivot accordingly. Advertisements from this era placed less emphasis on heavy plowing and instead returned to earlier conclusions — that the Jeep was best used as a utility vehicle supporting larger tractors rather than replacing them.

Willys introduced three new versions of the civilian Jeep, following the CJ2a. The CJ-3a in 1949 had only a few improvements. The CJ-3b, introduced in 1953, was in production until 1968 and had a larger engine. The CJ-5 was produced from 1955 through 1983, and was the last Farm Jeep. The farm had changed, but the Farm Jeep had not.

Yet Jeep’s sales remained strong enough to keep the company profitable. Green, as head of the Farm Division, continued to add implements that farmers wanted.

In 1954, to promote the new CJ5, Willy produced the last of the films intended for moviegoers. In a tradition that goes back to “Jeep Day,” some of the Jeeps shown are no longer in production. You will see, for example, the CJ-3a, which was replaced by the CJ-3b. The movie is the most complete record of the Jeep line in the mid-1950s. The movie opens with the Farm Jeep, but swiftly shifts from farm work to general utility work.

The movie featured the “famous hydraulic lift.” That feature was about to change.

The Transition to the Stratton Lift

When Monroe walked away, someone had to find a replacement hydraulic lift. That job fell to Green.

The trail he left — if he left one — is frustratingly thin. With the aid of a Cleveland Library patent specialist, we combed the records looking for a direct connection between Green and the Stratton lift patent. We found none. The registered inventor, Alford Foote, left no obvious trail connecting him to Farm Jeeps either. Stratton itself was primarily known for building garbage trucks and hydraulic material handlers — not exactly a natural home for agricultural engineering. The patent wasn’t granted until 1960, five years after Green left Willys.

And yet the lift that appears in a June 1955 newspaper article — right at the end of Green’s time at Willys — closely matches the Stratton design. Stratton had no obvious reason to be developing a hydraulic lift for a farm vehicle. Green had every reason to be looking for one.

It is speculation, and we want to be clear that it is speculation — but it is hard to look at that 1955 article and not wonder whether Green wrote an unusually detailed request for proposal, one specific enough that whoever built it was effectively working from his design. Whether Foote knew what he was building it for is another question we can’t answer.

The lift Green designed when he left Willys also leaves us with an unanswered question. Why did Green not manufacture the lift and offer it as a replacement to Willys? One explanation is that although the Stratton patent was awarded in 1960, it might have been available when Green left in 1955. We do know that Green’s own company would supply Willys with plows after he left. More on that in the next chapter.

A closely related mystery is what Willys was doing for lifts during the four-year period from 1956, when we believe Monroe quit the lift business, to 1960, when the Stratton patent was approved. It is highly probable that a stockpile of Monroe lifts was available and that, as suggested above, the Stratton was available long before the patent was granted.

What is the real story behind the Stratton Lift? Was it the lift Green would have chosen for the Farm Jeep? The part of the Stratton story we do know was given to us in late 2020.  Ernie Klimek sent an email saying he knew part of the Stratton story. As a boy, in his family’s machine shop, he had helped build the lifts. That story is in the “Dig Deeper” section. There will be more to say about this in the next chapter.

Finally, why did Green leave Willys in 1955? Did Kaiser, in their efforts to consolidate, eliminate the Farm Sales unit? Or did Green leave on his own? In our research, we have built two timelines for Green in the period 1951 to 1955. In addition to his time at Willys, Green was building up his Bowling Green Company. That story is in the “Dig Deeper” section too.

The End of an Era

Robert Green’s departure from Willys in 1955 marked a definitive turning point. With his exit, the institutional memory of the Farm Jeep program effectively vanished. No clear successor stepped into his role. The program, once driven by innovation and ambition, began to drift — sustained by momentum rather than intent, and increasingly overshadowed by the recreational uses that would eventually redefine the Jeep’s identity entirely.

⛏ Dig Deeper: Sources & Further Reading →