Tractors Were My Fantasy

Tractors Were My Fantasy

Home Copyright 2005 Harris B. McKee

I have three very early memories. One was scary and one was educational; the third was the beginning of am activity that dominated both my real life and my fantasy as a young boy growing up on the farm.

The scary event was a fireworks display conducted by my first cousin Bob in Uncle Wallace’s back yard. He had acquired enough fireworks, probably from a trip to Missouri[1], to put on a family display. As a three or four year old, I thought that the firecrackers were just too LOUD. (There was no lasting impact from this exposure; I was very happy to set off the firecrackers that my father brought back from Missouri a few years later on a return from a trip to Milking Shorthorn headquarters in Springfield, MO.)

My earliest recollection, the educational reference, was watching the brooder house restoration when I was about 3-1/2. In the summer of 1942, a tornado barely missed our home. It was close enough to take off the rafters from the cow barn that was under construction, blow down the silo on the east side of the road, and turn over the brooder house. I got to watch as the brooder house, which would be the site of my earliest chores, was put back in position.

For the first fourteen years of my life, the power source on our farm was mixed. We had a tractor and a team of horses. I learned to drive the team, harness the horses, and carry out the expected care of the horses. I could even appreciate the value of a well trained team being remotely controlled as we husked a small load of corn. They would advance the wagon on command without a driver laying hand on reins. But the fun began when I was four. When my father or the hired man returned from field work to the barnyard in the evening, I would run out to the driveway, climb up into the seat ahead of the driver and steer the 1937 Farmall F-20 tractor through the barn yard to its parking place.

Tractors dominated my thoughts. Of course we had a small plastic Farmall tractor and a little wagon that we used in the house on the rug. But the real world was outside. It was for outdoor use that I conceived a “Magic Tractor”. This tractor was just right for helping me do my chores. This tractor changed at my command from a Farmall to a John Deere or any other brand; best of all, it could be changed from a full sized tractor for doing field work to a miniature version that was just right for pulling a wagon of chicken feed to the brooder house. It fed my fantasy at school as I talked to the other farm boys. It also provided a bridge to the real world.

Roland Marks, the father of Vernon and Jim, had a Ford-Ferguson. Most people felt that the remarkable part of the Ferguson system that Harry Ferguson had provided to Henry Ford’s agriculture venture was the three point hitch.

In fact, the Ford-Ferguson had a design feature that made it particularly usable by smaller persons with limited leg strength. The Farmall F-20 on our farm and the Farmall H on Howard Hargis’ farm required substantial leg strength and length to operate the clutch and brakes .On the Ford-Ferguson, by comparison, the orientation of the clutch and brake pedals allowed operation just by standing on the pedals. Vernon and Jim Marks, fellow students and classmates at Mt. Olive School began to recount their tractor exploits when they were in about the third or fourth grade.

I had only advanced to controlling the team of horses and hadn’t yet soloed. When I was 10 I got to control Uncle Ryle’s John Deere B on the hay rope; it had a hand clutch so leg strength wasn’t important. I really like using the tractor on the rope; I had previously led Dick, the younger member of our team of horses, and always felt in danger during the heavy pull that corresponded to lifting the fork of hay from the hayrack to the horizontal rail in the haymow. He almost ran as he strained in the harness and I hoped that I wouldn’t slip because he couldn’t have missed me. (I probably wasn’t concerned; it’s only now looking back that realize there was danger.)

My first real assignment came when I was in sixth grade and my dad determined that discing would be the best place for me to begin. Other jobs followed; a year later I was plowing and in 1953, the year that I graduated from the eighth grade, I did all of the corn planting on our farm and Uncle Wallace’s using the tractor mounted planter on Uncle Wallace’s Farmall C. This was the first year that our corn hadn’t been planted by my father with a horse drawn planter. It was also the year that he purchased a new Farmall H. Now we had two two-row tractor cultivators and I got to operate the new one. When it was time for evening chores, I often was allowed to stay out cultivating until dark. Although the H had lights, we rarely used them for cultivating because the light wasn’t really good enough to protect the corn.

We experienced a rather unfortunate incident about that time with cultivation. Yugend Hochlan[2], Uncle Wallace’s hired man, had come down to help cultivate the corn on the east side of the road the summer after my dad had his hip replacement. It was Yugend’s first experience with a tractor cultivator and his focus on driving rather than cultivating proved disastrous. At least one row was being covered up with his every crossing of the field. It took manual uncovering by everyone available to restore the field to potential harvesting.

Summer consisted of four main activities haymaking, cultivating, fixing fence, and pulling weeds out of the beans. I rather liked haymaking and cultivating. Fixing fence was undesirable if it involved repairing a fence, especially if it meant trying to make the fences across the ditches hog and cow proof. It was even fun, however, if it meant building a new fence, particularly after we got the power post hole digger. On one occasion, I set posts as the auger dug a new one and created a cattle runway from the south edge of the garden to the windmill, a distance of about 40 rods in a couple of hours.

I considered pulling weeds in the beans particularly nasty. It was make-work in August. One of the benefits of my joining the Army Reserve was avoiding this task because the two week active duty took me away from weed pulling.

Haying went through a series of innovations as I was growing up. My earliest memories were of putting up loose i.e. not-baled hay. My dad said that it was more palatable for the stock and that we didn’t need bales because we had ample space in our two haymows. We had an old hayloader[3] but I don’t remember ever seeing it in use. Instead, we had a pair of workers on the ground who raised the hay with pitchforks to the rack where another workers controlled the team and positioned the hay. When I was nine or ten, my father located a tractor mounted fork lift[4] that could load up about a third of a hayrack load of hay in a pass down the windrow and then transport it to the barn. This substantially reduced the crew size which permitted greater independence from other farmers and the shared haying work. This method of bucking in the hay had an unexpected consequence. Every load left a slight residue of dust and leaves at the end of the barn. Over the few years that we used this technique, we built up a mound at the east end of the horse barn that was never removed. I was particularly frustrated by the mound because it meant that my opportunity to dribble to the basketball hoop that was mounted on the barn was either uphill or downhill.

In this same era, we were still threshing our oats, but had begun to combine the small wheat acreage. The oat straw accumulated in a large stack and was used through the winter for bedding. To reclaim some of the wheat straw, we began to bale the wheat straw after combining. Beginning in the summer of 1952 we hired Ed Henry to bale our alfalfa. He could place the wire tied bales directly on the hayrack which he pulled behind his 116W John Deere baler at a cost of 13 cents per bale, one cent more than if he dropped it on the ground. The first bales that we dropped from the top of the mow onto the empty floor of the cow barn mow created such an impact that several of the major barn beams were split. My father reasoned that the construction technique of the beams meant that they were effectively half as thick as they appeared to be with their overlapped joining; he bought bolts and installed them through the joints, replaced none of the beams and no further problems were experienced. I was particularly efficient in setting the grappling fork to unload the hayracks and got to perform that duty rather than ride on the rack were I was also proficient. Both tasks were sufficiently dusty but we didn’t consider using any kind of mask or filter. Some neighbors who suffered from hay fever like Richard Hargis did use masks that were much like gas masks; they were undoubtedly hot to wear and thus not considered without severe need.

In 1955, I was finishing my sophomore year of high school; college enrollment was only two years away. I was sufficiently concerned with financing college as well as our impaired financial condition, that I suggested to my father that I needed to earn cash for college expenses. I proposed two alternatives; either get a job with one of Charley Laverty’s spraying crews (the crew chief was the Simpson football coach) or a Central Construction road crew or to buy a hay baler and do custom baling for my uncles and our own farm. Their cost would not change but I would have dollars for college. My father replied that he’d rather have me around home so I proceeded to buy a $2,000 brand new 116W John Deere hay baler just like the one that Ed Henry had been using for the prior three years. I went to the bank and with no money down and payments expected in October 1955 and October 1956 took out a loan. That night was the first time that I was unable to sleep because of a financial decision! In fact, I made the payments and had all of 1957’s baling without a bank payment. But the summer had its own trauma.

I’d learned in early spring that Tom Wilson(Ethyl’s brother) had 40 Acres of alfalfa hay that he wanted someone to put up for him on the shares. I signed up and set about finding a buyer for my share of the hay since we expected to have enough hay or our own. A firm in Des Moines agreed to buy all my bales at a price of around one dollar per bale. It seemed like a fair price and they would pick up and haul the bales from the field. There was a problem; probably more than one if you counted each rain that fell after the hay was cut a separate problem. Ordinarily we expected to let the hay cure for about two days and then rake it in windrows and bale it. On the first cutting, the rain fell on the mown hay and the rain fell on the windrows necessitating some turning of the rows to permit additional drying. In the process, the beautiful green alfalfa color turned to brown. More significantly, some leaves fell off with each activity. The hay buyer came down when the hay was ready to bale and to my consternation rejected the entire lot. Too many leaves had been lost; the color was unacceptable; they would take none of it at any price! We finished the baling and stacked the bales on the edge of the field. My father later used the hay for bedding. Subsequent cuttings did prove acceptable and I made a little money on the field but the amount was not burned into my memory in the way that having a whole cutting rejected was memorialized. It was during one of the subsequent cuttings that I logged 42 hours in our tractor seat in a three day period most associated with putting up the hay on that field. It’s a good thing that I still thought that driving the tractor was about the most fun one could have.

Not all of my tractor adventures were that much fun. I finished planting the corn in the field south of the house at about 7:00 a.m. the morning after I’d gone to VEISHA at Iowa State in Ames with Uncle Everett’s family. The last step in finishing a field was winding up the wire used to check the corn into hills 40 inches apart. The tractor planter had a powered device for doing this that used a sprocket on one of the brake drum shafts and an ordinary chain drive. For some reason, the two sprockets didn’t line up. I tried to guide the chain with my gloved hand and keep it on the sprockets. Suddenly, the little finger on my left hand was pulled through the sprocket under the chain. It was cut severely and should have had stitches although I only realized that much later. At the time, we just put on a bandage and I went back to work.

The fingertip wasn’t completely removed so it wasn’t quite the same thing as when my father cut the tip off his finger in a V-belt pulley in a similar entrapment. He put the finger tip in a saucer in the house and continued to unload corn until mother got home. She took him, without the fingertip, to the doctor who did sew up the stump. She was not amused to see the tip in the saucer upon their return. His shortened finger like those of most of my uncles led our daughters to believe that all farmers had missing fingers, an observation that was all to true.

Farm accidents were all too common and we knew of farmers killed by overturning tractors or enraged animals. But there were also plenty of near misses. The time my father undressed in the alfalfa was one of the near misses. We were mowing hay, I on the tractor and he standing on the frame of the mower and holding the seat for stability. He was there to quickly pick up thistles so they didn’t stay in the hay. There were also occasional bunches of loose hay left over from a prior cutting; these bunches sometimes plugged the cutter bar. For one plug, I jumped down and cleared the blockage and climbed back on the tractor. Neither my father nor I realized that he had moved his feet slightly to let me move past him. His move had placed his pant-leg just close enough to the power take-off for one of the bolts to catch in his cuff. The turning shaft proceeded to wind up his pant leg. Of course, this could not occur without several other happenings. First, the suspender button on his shoulder popped out of the fabric. Next the pant leg ripped up the seam. By the time that I stopped the tractor, he was standing on the mower in his underwear. We were both relieved that he had only a few bruises and we both had a much better appreciation for the shielding of power take off drives that were not in place that morning.

My bumper car ride on the F-20 was another near miss. We took our tractors to the Farmall dealer in Indianola for mechanical work driving them on Highway 69 sometimes on the shoulder and sometimes, when the shoulder was too rough, on the highway. On the occasion of my bumper car ride, I was northbound coming down Middle River Hill on the highway. The F-20’s highest speed was about five miles per hour in fourth gear; with the clutch disengaged it could coast faster. I was coasting when a car in a hurry to get on up the road tried to pass me but didn’t clear my left rear tire. Fortunately, the bump pushed the tractor onto the shoulder, knocked my foot off the clutch and did little damage to either car or tractor. Such coasting was generally discouraged, but in this case, it undoubtedly minimized the damage.

[1] The closest point where one could bootleg fireworks back into Iowa

[2] The Hochlans were Latvians who had been displaced after WWII and come to this country by way of Canada under the auspices of a church group. Yugend had no experience with either automobiles or tractors before arriving on Uncle Wallace’s farm. Because he was such a willing worker, we helped his difficult learning process with the machinery. His son Eugene, was wounded in combat in Viet Nam.

[3] The hayloader was a machine designed to raise hay from a windrow up and over the rear of the hayrack where the man or men on the rack would move it forward and build a load.

[4] The machine he found had been made to mount on a Farmall H; he got the black smith to modify it for the F-20 just as he had converted the F-20 from its original spade-lug steel wheels to 10-38 rubber tires. He also had the tractor repainted and took great delight in my excitement to see this shiny and modernized machine.

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