By Dr. Robert E. Plucker
About the
time I was in third grade, we had a terrible rain and hail storm in the early
spring. Two of my Dad’s best horses were
killed in that awful storm, and it was hard for him and the remaining horses to
do the farm work for the rest of the summer.
So Dad tried to make it easier on the horses by getting a tractor to do
the heavy work. He had so little money
in those days that all he could afford was an old worn-out Parrott
tractor. It was a gigantic thing with
steel wheels that were higher than a man’s head. Of course it had no rubber tires. It took terrific power just to move the heavy
tractor by itself, and so when it came to pulling a plow, there was hardly any
power left, and the tractor was mostly a very large failure. He used this monster machine for about two
trouble-filled years before he gave up on it.
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| Rock Island Tractor |
My Dad had
saved up a little money by this time and was able to buy a very good used Rock
Island tractor. This was also a
steel-wheeled affair that was a fine tractor for plowing and other very heavy
work, but could not be used in the cornfields because the wheels were so wide
and badly spaced that they would tear out or bury most of the rows of little
corn plants if you tried to use it in the cornfield. But it was a fine tractor, and my Dad hated
to have to sell it several years later when he decided that his horses needed
to be retired to the pasture, and that the cornfield work would have to be done
by a new “row-crop” tractor.
He sold the
Rock Island in the winter, and so he had some time to shop around for the new
tractor before the spring field work had to be done. He and I went to Chancellor, only four miles
away, to look at a new Case Model VC tractor, small and bright orangey-red. I liked this tractor a lot; it was small
enough so I thought I would be able to drive it, and of course it had the wide
rear wheels and narrow front wheels that you must have for corn-field
work. It also had rubber tires, which
made it ride much easier than the old steel-wheeled machines that my Dad used
to let me ride on while he drove.
I thought surely he would let me drive this new one. After all, I was in seventh grade by this
time.
I was
terribly disappointed when he decided that the Case was too small and would not
be able to finish the work fast enough.
Then I thought maybe I could get him to buy a nice green and yellow John
Deere, but he said he would not be able to get used to the sound of the
two-cylinder John Deere engine (“pud-up, pud-up, pud-up”). How about a nice bright red Farmall? Nope, operated clutch was much safer for a
tractor, and all you had to do was put it in gear, and when you wanted to go
ahead, you pushed the clutch lever ahead, and when you wanted to stop, you pulled
it back. And besides, his beloved old
Rock Island tractor had a hand clutch.
It was
getting close to spring planting time, and Dad had to do something, so
one day he and I went to Lennox to look at a Minneapolis-Moline Model R. This had to be the right tractor, as it had a
hand clutch, a good sounding engine, was small, but powerful enough to do the
work, had rubber tires and was very pretty.
It was a sunny yellow color with cherry-red wheels and I thought surely
my Dad would let me drive this one.
My Dad was
able to agree on a price with the tractor dealer and they arranged that in
order to save even more money, my Dad would be able to get the tractor in Sioux
Falls and so would not have to pay someone to haul it out to the farm on a
truck. So Mom and Dad drove to Sioux
Falls, about twenty miles, and up the big Main Street hill to the
Minneapolis-Moline place where the dealers got their tractors. There must have been eighteen or twenty Model
R tractors, maybe twenty more Model Z and Model U, but only one huge Model GT
on the floor. The GT would have been
much more expensive and much more powerful, but I was glad my Dad was not going
to buy it as I was sure he would never let me drive this monster. I had wanted to go along to get the new
tractor, but I had to be in school. So
my Dad got the fun of driving his new tractor home from Sioux Falls all by
himself, twenty miles. This would take
him nearly two hours at the tractor’s top speed.
My school
was an old-fashioned country one-room, one-teacher-for-all-grades school that
had seventeen kids. We had at least one
person in each grade except the sixth.
We had no kindergarten, and the highest grade was eighth. We had two outhouses, one for girls and one
for boys, and we had a big pail of water with a dipper that we all drank out
of. I was in school and excited and
jumping around all morning. The teacher,
Mr. Ebbesen, was really very kind to me, because he knew that it was hard for
me to keep my mind on schoolwork when my Dad would be coming home on the new
tractor right past the schoolhouse. I
thought if I were lucky, I would hear him go by. I knew I would not see him, as there were no
windows on that side of the room.
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| Minneapolis Moline |
“Jump on,”
said Dad. You can imagine how I must
have hung back, ready to cry at how frightened I was at the thought of riding
on the new tractor. You can imagine
this, maybe, but my thoughts were only about how quickly I could jump on to the
platform of the tractor behind my Dad.
We had a terrific slow spin around the schoolyard, and then my Dad said,
“You want to take over?” I thought I
probably had died and gone to Heaven.
But dead or not, I was going to drive that tractor around the schoolyard
a couple of times, and I did, in all four forward gears and reverse, Dad
helping me, maybe just a tiny bit.
Soon Dad
said I had to go back and finish out the day at school, but that I could drive
some more when I got home. Of course I
did, and as I got older and bigger and able to help more with the field work, I
found myself behind the wheel of that tractor more and more. By the time I was finishing high school, I
spent much more time on that tractor than did my Dad. I never got over the thrill of driving that
new tractor, no matter how many hours of work I did with it, and that is the
reason I tell this story today.
ROCK ISLAND
http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&sa=X&biw=1600&bih=718&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=jG5WQ6vFxli2sM:&imgrefurl=http://www.farmcollector.com/multimedia/image-gallery.aspx%3Fid%3D2147488226%26seq%3D1&docid=smihfETgdfMjBM&imgurl=http://www.farmcollector.com/uploadedImages/FCM/articles/issues/2010-10-01/bv-rockisland-02600-1.jpg&w=600&h=450&ei=H31XUK75I4jY2AWwi4Eg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=443&vpy=328&dur=53&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=165&ty=102&sig=116226233814777316939&page=1&tbnh=161&tbnw=228&start=0&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:0,i:98
MINNEAPOLIS MOLINE MODEL R
http://compare.ebay.com/like/251136790708?var=lv<yp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar
That’s one interesting story. Good thing they were able to get the tractor out of the mudhole. Is the tractor still in good shape, by the way? :)
ReplyDelete- Bernadine Koster -