Karl and Ida: Tractors that I (Jim) remember

As a child there are many things that I have fond memories of such as the smell of freshly baked bread, the sound of the frogs in the slough near the house, walking in the woods looking for the cows to bring home for milking. Then there were many Saturdays in the winter when Horace, dad and I worked all day cleaning calf pens, or hauling hay. Afterwards it would be wonderful to go to the warm house where mother would have nice meal for us. Paul Thyren threshed for Dad until dad bought his own machine sometime in the late 1930’s. I think I was about 10 years old when dad got his own threshing machine. When I was about 9 or 10 I helped with the harvest by driving the MM Z (Minneapolis Moline) tractor pulling the grain binder. Horace rode the binder. I could drive the MM because it had a hand clutch. All of the bundles we made had to be put into shocks to dry. Dad would usually do this but he couldn’t keep up so Horace and I would help put up shocks. Dad had bought a Farmall F 12 tractor earlier but it just was not powerful enough. Also, the MM model Z tractor was powerful enough to run a 22-inch threshing machine.

The summers on the farm involved a lot of work but I have good feelings about them. The work was hard but the memories are meaningful. One of my first jobs was to drive the horses when hay was loaded on a hayrack and hauled to the barn. I would drive the horses as Horace would spread the hay over the hayrack as the mechanical loader, which was pulled behind the hayrack, lifted the hay into the rack. Horses pulled the rack and loader down the windrow of hay. I would move around the front of the rack trying not to get too much chaff down my neck and also packing the hay down. When we hayed up on the north quarter, the hay was stacked. My job here was usually raking the hay into windrows. To do this we use a dump rake pulled by two horses. When I was in ninth grade I started hauling bundles for threshing. This was when we had our own threshing machine.

Our first combine was a used McCormick Deering. Sometime in the late 1940’s dad bought a new Case A6 combine. This was a good combine which he used the rest of his life.

Before the F 12 Farmall tractor, Dad had two other tractors, a Case and a Fordson. There is an interesting story about mother, Vincent and the Fordson. It seems that Vincent was seated on the Fordson and he dropped something on the ground. The tractor was in gear and running but he had his foot on the clutch as he tried to reach down to pick up what he had dropped. In the process, he lost his balance and fell off the tractor. The tractor was now in gear and the tractor backed up. The back wheels missed him but the transmission rubbed his back. However, the front wheels had turned and one of the front wheels was on top of his arm when the tractor stopped. He was near the house and mother heard him hollering. She came running over to where he was and saw the wheel on his arm. She took hold of the wheel and lifted it so that he could get his arm free. She was not a large women but God provided the strength when she needed it. Medically we could say that she had an adrenaline surge of strength. All that Vincent had was a bad bruise on his arm and back.

Karl liked to visit and mother would say that you couldn’t make a quick trip to town because Dad liked to talk so much. When the Frank Bothmans lived on the Brevik place, where Robert Peterson lived and now his son Neil lives, dad liked to visit with Frank. Many evenings Dad and Frank would sit in the barn talking for hours. During WW11, when Vincent was in the army and over seas, dad would try to keep up on the war by listening to the radio news broadcast by H. V. Keltenborn, and reading the Pathfinder magazine. During the war years, Pastor Skibsrud was our pastor. As a closing hymn for Sunday Service he would usually have us sing a special song asking God to bless our men in the service. This was very emotional for Dad.

Mother drove a car until she drove her model T into the big county ditch near the Swenson farm on the way to St. Hilaire. After her accident mother drove only when dad or the boys couldn’t drive. This would have been before I started school. After her accident mother only drove when dad or one of the boys couldn’t drive. I remember her taking me to school when I was in first or second grade, driving a Plymouth. This would have been in ’35 or ’36. On the way home that morning she turned the corner just north of the school too sharply and tipped the car over in the ditch. She wasn’t hurt and it didn’t hurt the car either. However, there was a square hole in the roof liner where battery acid dripped and destroyed the material.