Christmas Joy

     “Merry Christmas and I wish I could help you,” the passerby lady said.  There was real sympathy in her voice.

     “Thank you.  You aren’t the only one who wishes you could help me,” I replied as I straightened up and turned to face her.

        The lady just came from the post office building and walked past my car to get to her car, both parked at the curb in front of the building.  She got into her car and drove away.  I turned to my car with the engine hood raised, tool kit lying on top of the motor along with various pieces of plastic moldings, a few screws, and various screw drivers and wrenches.

     It was December 23, the day we had chosen to celebrate Christmas with the girls and families.  I had gone Christmas shopping early (8:30) that morning.  I left the gifts covered with jacket, gloves, scraper, other paraphernalia that collects on the seat of the pickup while I helped with preparations for the anticipated evening. That included vacuuming and cleaning a bathroom or two. 

      About one p.m., the Goodwife left for the post office with a couple of items to send to her mother for Christmas.  I finished my brief repast, retrieved the items from the pickup and just about finished wrapping the first one when the call came. 

     “I’m at the post office and the car won’t start.”

     I did what you should never do, assumed.  The day before, I had trouble getting the switch to turn.  I urged her to wiggle the steering wheel right and left as she turned the key.  Nothing.  Try shoving the shift lever up as you turn the key.  Still nothing.

    I left unwrapped gifts lying on the couch loosely covered with wrapping paper and other stuff.  I grabbed an extra set of car keys and took off for the post office. 

     The Goodwife got out and I slid behind the wheel.  Bells dinged and lights flashed as I inserted the key into the ignition.  The switch turned without difficulty.  The dinging stopped, the lights went out, and there was a barely-audible click, click, click. 

     Instantly it dawned on me that I had made a wrong assumption and should have fished for a few more symptoms.  I had brought not tool one.  Well, not one I needed, anyway, to clean corroded battery cable ends and battery terminals, or to replace a battery.

     I popped the hood to see how bad it would be.  In the good old days, this would be a ten or fifteen minute fix.  The battery would be easily accessible in one of the four corners of the engine compartment.  Remove and clean cables.  Clean battery terminals and replace cables, and you are on your way.

     In newer vehicles, 2001 in this case, so many plastic covers and cases have to be stowed in the engine compartment that the battery has had to find other places to hide.  In the dearly departed Aurora, for instance, cleaning cable ends would have meant removing the back seat to find the battery lurking in its covered box.  That almost sounds inviting in comparison to what was ahead of me.

     Chrysler engineers interred the battery beneath the air filtering apparatus in the right front corner of the engine compartment.  By looking closely you can barely see the positive terminal hiding in the dark below and between the air filter housing and the right front headlight housing.  See, yes.  Reach with hand or tool, no. 

     (See it?  Top center-to-right is the air filter housing.  The hexagonal bolt head in the center is the hood support.  The battery terminal is the two little bolts in the crevasse between the air filter and above left of the hood support.)

      Still not thinking clearly, we went home in the pickup.  The Goodwife prepped the prime rib for the oven as I gathered socket wrench set and screw drivers, finally a whole tool box.  Having stood in the sharp wind for a few minutes while studying the situation under the engine hood, I also donned my Carhart insulated coveralls.  The prime rib went into the oven, the timer set to go off in one hour.  Would anyone be there to hear it?  It was 3 o’clock.  Back to the post office we went.

       The air filter box came off with only one broken plastic ear.  The positive battery terminal was now accessible.  A thorough cleaning took about fifteen minutes.  The negative terminal?  Still hidden beneath the headlight housing.  The battery has to be “slud” (thanks to Dizzy Dean for that wonderful word) back to get to the negative side.

      The fender well is about an inch behind the battery, leaving no room to slide the battery back.  There is a removable plastic panel in the plastic fender well.  If I remove that panel, will the battery run into the right front tire?  I have heard that to change batteries on these cars, you have to remove the tire.  I really didn’t want to do that there in the parking lot.

  

     Then the idea hit me.  Why not try jump-starting the thing?  If cleaning the positive terminal didn’t work, I could jump-start it and take it home to the privacy of my own garage to disassemble the thing and screw it up out of public scrutiny.  That seemed a better idea than tackling the removable panel and maybe a tire.

      I reassembled everything.  Behind the steering wheel, the start attempt was rewarded with a repeat performance, bells, lights, clicks, but no start.     This time, when I removed the key, the instrument panel continued to flash and click.  Oh no, what did I do to the thing now?

     The parking spot on the Chrysler’s left opened up, so I stood in the space while the Goodwife backed the pickup out of its space, backed up going the wrong way, and pulled into the vacancy to Chrysler left.  The jumper cables were behind the Dakota seat the whole time.  Why did it take so long to think of them?

      The battery in the Dakota is on the left side.  The cables were about five feet short of reaching across both engine apartments and the space between vehicles.  So we waited and waited for the driver of the car on the Chrysler right to appear.  Finally he showed.  The Goodwife stopped traffic by backing up and poising the poor old Dakota in position to take the soon-to-be vacated parking spot.  Eventually, the guy pulled out, the Goodwife pulled in, the traffic cleared, and we were ready to try again. 

       It took a few trips between vehicles to get good enough contact to run the Chrysler starter.  It started.  And died.   (Later: starting and dying seem to be part of the computer readjusting things, as it died all three times when I started it after breaking the electric contact.)

      No matter how I tried, I was never able to get good enough contact with the jumper cables to get the starter to run again.  It was nearing 4 o’clock.  The stove timer would be sounding soon.  The very careful cooking instructions said an hour on, then off, do NOT open the oven door EVER until ten minutes before meal time.  (Heat for another hour before mealtime, no matter when that time comes, but do NOT open the oven door.)

     The Goodwife vacated the coveted parking spot and headed home to shut the oven off and do a few other things preparatory to Christmas dinner.  I would try one more time, and if that attempt failed, we would have to abandon the Chrysler to the post office parking lot for the approaching night.

      The air filter stuff jumped right off, being used to the routine by now.  I was tackling the removable panel in front of the tire when the lady walked by, apparently for the second time, and wished me Merry Christmas.  She was the second of three of all the people who came and went during my predicament who spoke or acknowledged that I was there.  The first person was an old guy who asked if I needed a jump.  I explained we were waiting for the parking spot we needed.  He nodded and left. 

     The plastic fender well panel came off without breaking anything.  After removing the hold-down, the battery would slide back.  By lifting it slightly and resting the back end on the tire, I could just get a wrench on the negative cable clamp.  I could bring the cable out far enough to clean it thoroughly.  The battery post was a little more difficult.  I wasn’t sure the battery could come out without removing the tire, so I gave the terminal a fair scouring with it in place.

      I was getting the air filter back in its place when a lady parked on Chrysler left.  She came around her car to see if I was okay.  I assured her I was okay and explained I was about to finish the repair and check the results. 

     The Goodwife arrived while the lady was in the post office.  The lady returned just as I was getting behind the wheel to give it another whirl.  She got in her car and rolled down her right window so she could hear the results of my attempt.

    The Chrysler started.  And died.

     I tried again and this time it continued to run, roughly and smellily for a little while, then normally.  The lady gave me a thumbs-up and departed.

     It took a while to clean up, gather the tools, put the removable panel in the trunk.  The Goodwife got in the car, but she advised me to follow her just in case.  So home we went in tandem.  The Chrysler was safely in the garage and we could rush about getting Christmas supper ready to go.

      I walked into the house and glimpsed the unwrapped presents scantily clad in wrapping paraphernalia on the couch.  Oh well.  If someone snooped, that was her shauri.

       Our guests arrived a bit late, the prime rib got a little overdone due to our imprecise guess as to meal time, not due to subpar cooking instructions, I’m sure.  (No, we did NOT open the oven door until we removed the beef from the oven.)

  We had ourselves a Merry Little Christmas, in spite of the day’s imperfections.

Hauling Wheat

     The price of wheat crossed the $6 mark a week or so ago, on the way up from the $5.50 range.  The weather felt more like October than December, reaching into the sixties at midday.  I was growing soft, lazing around till the sun gets up before I rise, taking a nap in front of a boring tv show in the evening. 

     In the back of my mind lurked a binful of wheat and the specter of a huge blizzard roaring down the plain, leaving unnavigable drifts across the yard.  (I inherited the ability to worry about every imaginable catastrophe from my mother.)  The price of wheat would rise with the drifts and ebb as the obstructing snowbanks slowly melt in the spring, and I would be unable to take advantage of the bad weather market rise.

      Add the chainsaw sans fuel or chain oil, leaving me no real excuse to get outside into the sunlight.  The weather, the wheat market, the mental irritants, all got under my shell enough to provoke a little action.  We shall have to wait to see if the result is a pearl or some other less worthy secretion.

     The factors all came together with enough critical mass to overcome the winter inertia.  I took the next step.  I put it on the calendar.  I would be gone, hauling wheat from Tuesday till Saturday, probably. 

     Monday was already taken.  The barbershop “boys” (I’m pretty sure I was the youngest singer) sang Christmas carols at two Fort Collins assisted living facilities.  Otherwise, I could have given myself another day to meet the challenge of man and machine versus Murphy’s law.  You do have to have priorities straight.  By leaving on Tuesday, I still made a mighty sacrifice, the first barbershop gathering in my new residence where we would do something other than Christmas carols (Bathless Groggins shudder.) (If you understood that allusion, I know two things about you:  You are older than dirt, and you read the Sunday funnies.)

     Off I went early (9 o’clock) Tuesday morning.  I had a few calls to make in Limon, insurance agency, barbershop (the real haircutting kind, there were five guys in there, I’m still shaggy), e-waste stop, hardware store for a dust mask for when I have to enter the grain bin and scoop—pretty optimistic, eh?

     Around one p.m., I pulled into the farm and set the house to warming—started a fire in the stove, turned up a couple of heaters.   I ate a little lunch which I had thoughtfully provided, and I tended the wood fire.  Then I turned to the matter at hand, hauling wheat.

    I had four motors to get started.  Three might be difficult but doable.  One was very questionable.  It was the Willie Suchanek Lawson auger engine.  It hadn’t run for at least ten years.  It must be fifty years old. 

     No sense in doing anything until I got that engine started.  It was still mounted onto the sprayer deck on the “water trailer” in the red barn.  Off the engine came and out into the warm midday sun where I attempted to start it.  Priming it by putting a few drops of gas down the air intake produced no result. Neither did a few drops of gas in the spark plug hole.

      This is serious.  No spark.  The flywheel has to come off to get to the breaker points.  Remove fuel tank, cowling, then the flywheel.  It can be difficult, but with a gear puller putting pressure on it, it popped right off with a pry from a screw driver.  I filed the points flat and reinstalled everything.  It now sparked.  I couldn’t see the spark, but I could hear it snapping. 

     This time it took off when I primed it.  After two hours of work, that was a positive.  But it would only run as long as I dripped a little gas down the air intake when it sputtered.  Carburetor time.  Pulling the carburetor off reminded me that once while transporting the engine from sprayer to auger, it bounced off the golf cart and broke the bracket that holds fuel tank, air intake and carburetor mount.  That repair involved a weld, some silicone gasket goop, and some JB Weld.  I ended up having to redo the silicone and the JB Weld.

      That ended day one of the wheat hauling adventure.  Time to let the goo dry.

      Wednesday morning the thing started right up and ran a little better.  I drug out the sixteen foot auger from the combine shed and hauled it to the grain bin with the golf cart.  Some digging was required to open the channel under the granary floor.  That auger got a lot heavier over the past ten years, but I got it into place and mounted the engine.

     The Mayrath auger took a little work, but started right up.  Add belts and it was ready to go.  Both trucks cooperated.  By about 1 p.m. I was set to give it a try.  For a while, I would start one auger engine.  When I went to start the other auger engine, the first one would die.  Finally, the Briggs decided to keep running so I could attend the Lawson.  It would run just fine as long as I stood right by it.  When I left to open the grain slide under the granary, it would die.

    Finally I got the slide open, both engines running, and some grain actually hit the truck floor.  The Briggs decided the load was too much, so it died.  While I was starting it, the Lawson died.  Back and forth I went.

     During this time Neighborly drove up, unnoticed by me.  He saw the open door on the east end of the combine shed and thought he better investigate.  When I failed to notice him, he yelled.  I jumped, a big.  He caught me totally by surprise.  We had a short visit and back I went to rope-pulling wind sprints.

     When it came time to move the truck, the Lawson would stop when I left it.  I must have pulled that starting rope a mile if you add up all the three foot tugs.

     As the truck filled I had to move it four or five times.  About two more moves and it would be full.  The Lawson died again.  I shut the truck off, restarted the Lawson, went to move the truck one last time.  It wouldn’t start.  Quickly I released the tension on the Lawson belt, stopping the flow of wheat.  Now I had leisure to find the problem with the truck, but with both engines running, I couldn’t hear what the truck was doing.

     So I had to shut both auger engines down.  A corroded battery cable was soon diagnosed and cured.  (I just realized how dependent a mechanic is on hearing—better he should lose his sight than his hearing.)  “Pulling dem ropes” yet again, I topped off the load and tarped it.          

     The truck loaded, I got to town about 4 o’clock.  The boys at the elevator had a tomorrow deadline to get ten train cars loaded, so I had to be worked in.  It was dark when I got about halfway home.  Pulling the truck light switch lit the instrument panel, the tail lights, the clearance lights, but nary a headlight.  I carefully felt my way home the last three miles.

     Day two, one load down.  Thursday morning, the Lawson was back to stage one, no spark, no fire, not even a pop when treated to a little ether.  This time flywheel removal revealed that I had not tightened the flywheel onto the crankshaft tight enough during the first surgery.  What running it did had completely chewed up the square key that holds flywheel to shaft.  Worse the key ways in both the flywheel and shaft were buggered.

      I began to entertain the thought that I would need a new engine before I could haul a second load of wheat.  I had no eighth inch key stock, so a trip to town was necessary.  I cleaned up the key way on the shaft and flywheel, but I hadn’t a lot of hope that I could hold the flywheel in time with the shaft.  J B Weld to the rescue.  Hey if it was good enough for the carburetor, why not the flywheel?

       I put some goop around the key way and mounted the flywheel.  No spark.  Quickly I removed the flywheel before the glue set up.  I filed the points again.  They may have been fouled by metal flecks from the disintegrating key.  Reglue and reassemble.

     While I waited for the glue to set up, I found another thing on the carburetor to clean.  Fortunately, I could remove the jet without removing the carburetor.  A brief soak in some solvent followed by some good air blasting and a light wire brushing returned the jet to a normal state.

       This time, priming with a few drops of gas followed by a tug on the rope resulted in a smoothly running engine.  A miracle!

       Mount the Lawson on the auger again.  It started right up again.  The Briggs gave me a little trouble, but when I went to attend to it, the Lawson kept running.  I got loaded and headed for town between 2:30 and 3:00.      

      By four o’clock, with the sun threatening to die on me (starter rope not long enough to reach it) I was in position for a first.  When I started both engines, they both ran straight through, getting the truck fully loaded without once having to restart something.  Tarp the truck and call it a day.            

      Friday morning I scaled the truck a few minutes after eight.  I was there again at eleven.  I returned the third time about 1:30.  So I should have tried for a fourth load?  A check of the bin revealed I would get about 100 bushels loaded, maybe 200, and then the rest would have to be shoveled.  I wasn’t up to that.  Besides, I wouldn’t be done.  It will take two trips to town.

       I was faced with removing the auger from the bin, putting everything away, and starting all over again another day.  The elevator keeps no Saturday hours this time of year.  The weather is predicted to take a nasty turn for the weekend.  I really didn’t want a truckload of wheat sitting in the shed for who knows how long.  Remember that vision of a blizzard roaring down the plain?

    So I used the remaining afternoon to put everything away.  Next time it will be easier to get everything running because I know it can be done.  Well, unless I have to pull that Lawson flywheel again.  JB Weld can be pretty strong.

      Maybe I’ll take what’s left to the farmer’s market.  Let’s see, about 800 bushels equals 48,000 pounds, about 4,800 ten pound bags.  The old Dakota pickup can haul about . . . .

                   

             

The Willie Suchanek Lawson Engine

     “How do I start this thing?”

     “Insert the knot of the starter rope into the notch in that flywheel pulley.  Wrap the rope around the pulley three or four times, hold the choke wire in full-on position with one hand while you pull the rope with the other hand.”

     “No, no, no, not the engine.  That’s not what I meant at all.  This story, how do I start this story?”

      It’s is fitting and proper that this story is as hard to start as the little Lawson engine can be.  This began as a story about hauling wheat.  Like the road to heaven, tempting diversions spring up everywhere.  I seem to follow Yogi Berra’s sage advice, “when you see a fork in the road, take it.”   So, here goes.

     Life didn’t begin at birth.  Life began when the conscious memory began to create and store images.  I’m told that I badly burned my feet as a toddler by walking onto the floor furnace grate.  I was a patient in Children’s Hospital.  I have absolutely no memory of that.  (Woops, another sidetrack.) I was still more vegetable than animal then.

     There are things about the farmyard that go back to the beginning of my life:  An old red barn, two red chicken houses, a hog house (the cement floor survives), a wind charger on a three-legged tower, a tank house (right where the current pump house sits), the shop and milk house (pretty much unchanged in appearance except for the plastic siding and metal roof), the red granary a few hundred yards north of the farmyard.

     The old grain auger belongs in that list.  Like the sun, moon, and stars, it pre-existed me.  It was always there.

    

  Back in the forties or fifties, Dad and Willie Suchanek bought nearly identical set-ups, sixteen foot augers with Lawson engines.  Picture the rear axle of a rear-drive vehicle, the wheels on either end, a differential in the center with a drive shaft protruding forward.  Replace the drive shaft with about a one-and-a-half inch galvanized pipe about ten feet long, the galvanizing so old it has turned blue, used as a hitch to pull the machine behind a vehicle.  Back to the differential, place about a two-and-half inch pipe coming out of the differential vertically at a right angle to the drawbar. 

     Inside the vertical pipe was a slightly smaller pipe that could be raised or lowered by a crank and cable device.  On top of the vertical pipe was a healthy piece of square tube forming a tee with the movable pipe.  On one side of the square tube, the six inch auger was strapped.  On the other side of the tee branch was a metal frame used to secure the Lawson engine.  When you turned the cable crank, the auger, engine and all rose up. You needed a ladder to service the engine.

    A long belt ran from the pulley on the motor’s drive shaft to the top of the auger.  The drive pulley was on the top of the shaft that held the auger flights.  That pulley was at right angle to the engine pulley, so two angled idler pulleys directed the belt around the corner.

     There was one difference between our auger and Willie’s auger.  Our Lawson had a small pulley on the drive shaft to run the belt.  Willie thought that would run too fast, so he had a gear reduction boxed mounted on the end of his drive shaft.  He found that he had to put a much bigger pulley on the gear box shaft to get the auger up to speed.  Hmmm.

      There was another downside of the gear box addition—the gear reduction also reversed the shaft rotation.  If you used Willie’s engine to replace a normal engine, you had to figure a way of placing the engine so that the drive belt would go the right direction.  See? (Willie would have said.)    

     We had a lot of trouble with grasshoppers in the fifties and sixties.  They would eat the wheat into nothingness.  We had a poison spreader that was a 50-gallon drum with a ground driven whirligig beneath it.  You put poison bait in the drum and pulled the machine behind the pickup.  An adjustable gate in the bottom of the drum let the poison grain fall on the whirligig.  You hoped the grasshoppers found the bait before they found the emerging wheat seedlings.  It was usually a fall chore to keep the grasshoppers from devouring newly-planted wheat. 

    One year the hoppers were bad in spring and early summer, so bad Dad hired Nelson Stake to fly his Piper Cub over the headed-out wheat.  The hoppers would bite the wheat stem in two, letting the immature wheat head fall uselessly to the ground.  Nelson’s Cub had a barrel full of chemical where the back seat should have been.  Spray booms were attached to the wings.  It took two or three fills to spray 160 acres. 

     Dad and I “flagged” for Nelson.  We stood at the west end of the field until the Cub got lined up on us.  Then we took 15 or 16 steps north, getting out of the way of the low-flying plane, and waited for the plane to turn around and line up on us from the other direction.  Then we took another 15 or 16 steps.

      Nelson instructed Dad in the art of flagging on the telephone. We never saw the man except for glimpses of him as the plane flew by. 

      What was the chemical he sprayed, Aldrin?  DDT?  I don’t remember, but to think we stood out there within 45 feet of the plane spewing the poison seems unimaginable today.  They routinely used diesel fuel as part of the “carrier” for the chemical in those days because diesel stuck to the plants (and us?) and prolonged the chemical activity.  I doubt we took a bath or changed clothes right after we finished spraying.

     Ground rig sprayers came into use.  I remember Dad trying to build his own sprayer by using an auto engine oil pump.  It didn’t work, so one year we rented a spray rig from Ed Hock at Simpson and Company Elevator.  

     Willie had bought a small sprayer that had a belt driven pump mounted on a steel frame with a place for a gas motor.  Willie’s Lawson auger engine wouldn’t work because if you put it on the frame where it was supposed to go, it turned the pump the wrong way.

     The one and only time Willie used the sprayer, he borrowed our Lawson engine, identical to his except for the reversing gear reduction box, or he borrowed one from his hired man Lawrence Andersen.  Willie and Lawrence (L.M.) set out to spray DDT on the grasshoppers. 

     They mounted the sprayer and a 50-gallon drum in the back of Willie’s Dodge pickup.  Willie had a twelve foot pipe “boom” with an assortment of nozzles on the end.  The idea was to extend the boom away from the pickup far enough to avoid the drift.  But apparently it didn’t work. 

     Willie got a face full of spray drift as did L.M.  Willie rinsed off in the stock tank.  L.M. didn’t bother.  The next day, L.M.’s face puffed up and he was out of action for a day or two.  Willie was okay, but he never wanted anything to do with that spray rig after that.  He gave it to us.  In exchange, we sprayed his grasshoppers a few time over the years.  

    Willie’s auger must have gone out of use about that time, because somehow, the Lawson engine came along with the sprayer.   Our Lawson engine suffered another fate.

      Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, Dad bought a new Mayrath auger from Snell grain in Genoa.  It was longer than the old auger and the Lawson wasn’t big enough to pull it.  So we got a nine horse Briggs and Stratton engine to run the new auger. 

     The Lawson became the center piece of many attempts to build a gocart (yet another fork in the road).  I think it may have been subject to an overhaul attempt too.  It ended its life in  pieces, some of which still remain in a junk pile on the farm. 

    With the demise of our Lawson, Willie’s engine had to be adapted to the sprayer, a machine I used into the 80’s as a sprayer and even later as a fire-fighting machine to take to the harvest field.  Uncle Ricky may have been in on the adaptation.  Angle irons welded to the original sprayer frame allowed the Willie engine to sit to the side of the sprayer pump and thus turn the pump the right direction. 

     I mounted the pump and engine on an old trailer Dad used to carry a welder engine.  He tried to use old combine engines that never would start.  He eventually bought a 220 volt Montgomery Ward welder and abandoned the trailer.  I bought a 150 gallon poly tank and mounted it on the trailer.  I still use tank and trailer to water trees.  Gravity flow works for that job, no engine power needed.  But the Lawson remained a part of the water tank trailer.  Thus it spends most of the year in a shed out of the weather.

    Willie’s Lawson engine got returned to auger duty when we put up the new grain bin.  When we ran the cement for the granary floor, we formed a channel in the floor of the bin that would accommodate a six inch auger.  We covered the channel with iron plate.  At the end of the channel in the center of the bin, a metal slide works as a gate to control the flow of grain.  

     I attached Willie’s Lawson motor to the end of a sixteen foot auger that slides into the channel under the granary floor.  It has plenty of horsepower for that job, as the grain only moves horizontally and isn’t elevated.  The old Mayrath with Briggs and Stratton engine does the elevating job.

     So now you know the story of the Willie Suchanek Lawson engine.  As the other nearly-identical Lawson engine was always a part of the farm in my memory, the Willie engine must be as old as our old Lawson, as old as I am, and still running.

 Now I can tell the story I set out to tell, about hauling wheat in December.

New House Update

      It is December.  We have had six weeks of thatching our burrow.  We’re not done yet, but here is a progress report.

 

    Not quite enough stuff yet.  Stay tuned.

     The piano waits patiently to vacate the now-cluttered garage and move into the music room.

    The television got replaced by the “new” antique step cabinet.  Looks like the books might have to go to make way for the tv.  Sounds like a familiar story.

     There are a few cardboard boxes to be emptied.  Where will all that stuff go?  We really had all that?

     Meanwhile, out of doors. . . .  I brought the chainsaw the last time I returned from the farm.  I went out Monday to do some serious tree trimming and removing unwanted volunteer saplings (upstart Aspens?  Not sure).  No chainsaw gas or chain oil.  Don’t blame me.  They weren’t on the list of stuff to bring from the farm.  Who made the list?  I shall do so another time, said Jack. 

     So, I fell to with the loppers. The trees’ reprieve was the shrubs’ expedited executuion.

 

   

  

   Healthful, invigorating trim, or butchery?  Idle hands shouldn’t get ahold of tools?

    The idea is trim now and avoid the spring rush.  It may backfire.  Spring may find me removing dead plants and planting new ones.

    

   One load of rose vines, juniper branches and whatever else has already gone to the recycle center.  Some pine branches have been held back in case Someone wants to make wreaths and other holiday niceys. 

   

The Show across the Street

 “Did you see the show?”

     “Oh, I hardly ever go to the movies.”

     “No!  I’m talking about the show across the street!”

     “No, what show?”  I had backed the old blue ’55 Chev half way out of the driveway when Georgette* accosted me and came around to the left side where I could not get out of the car.  So I rolled down the window.

     Bill, as usual, was at the base of the situation.  Some time ago he had decided he needed to build a “four-place” hangar, a building big enough to house four airplanes.  He had lined up a sponsor, another Bill, a bank president who agreed to provide financing for materials.  Bill was to arrange for the labor and necessary equipment.  They each would own half of the building.

     Our Bill had made several purchases including several used REA poles, some of which were milled into two-inch lumber by a local miller who was trying to get a start, a bunch of used bridge planks from the local county road shop, and brand new roof trusses and tin for the roof and walls.  Somehow, he lined up a local Electrical Company employee to use the company posthole digger to dig the holes for the used REA poles. 

    Bill had researched pole buildings through the Kansas State Extension Service.  Of course, he had bettered the plans some.  The plans called for ringing the perimeter with healthy poles spaced 10 or 12 feet apart.  Of course the doorways had to exceed 30 feet to accommodate an airplane’s wing span.  So Bill decided that he should put a few poles on the inside of the building to support the roof trusses.

    I spent one Saturday running an old Farmhand that used pipes and cables and encaged the old Minneapolis Moline tractor to raise and drop the REA poles into the newly drilled holes.  I was appointed the tractor man because I knew how to handle the Farmhand.  The “ground crew” fastened a chain from the Farmhand “stinger” to the pole just a little above its mid length.

      When I raised it, the pole would be nearly vertical.  I would maneuver the tractor to the appointed hole, dodging the other posts and holes.  If I got it right, I could slowly lower the pole into the hole and the ground crew would only have to remove the chain so I could back away and they could level the pole and dump in enough dirt to hold it in place.  If I didn’t get it just right, the crew used bars to fit the pole into the hole.

   Anyone who has ever run the old Farmhand is scoffing right now at “slowly lower the pole.”  To let the old Farmhand arms down, you jerk out on the control lever and things come down right now.  To stop the descent, shove the handle in to the neutral position and the arms come to a tractor-jarring halt.  Some inventive genius had plumbed a shut off valve such as found in any water supply system into the hydraulic line on this Farmhand.  I could simply crack that valve open by turning the valve’s wheel and control the speed of descent.  It was such a good idea, I modified my old Farmhand similarly.

     As the building progressed, many of the extra interior poles we had installed had to be removed by chainsaw because they were in the way of roof trusses or some other structural component. 

    I missed the installation of the roof trusses, but the Minnie-with-Farmhand came in very handy for that operation.  I also missed one of the two dramatic incidents that happened during hangar construction.  Keith, the shop teacher, was running the tractor (I think), raising trusses into position.  Gary, the music teacher, was one of the monkeys helping position and nail the trusses in place. 

     Keith and Gary mis-communicated and a truss came down while Gary was still checking out the alignment.  The truss hit Gary on the head.  It stunned him, but he had the presence of mind to grab a pole and hang on.  The blood came pouring down.  Crew members raced to get Gary safely to the ground.  Keith had trained as a volunteer EMT.  He administered first aid and Bill rushed Gary to the emergency room where his scalp was stitched back together.  Gary didn’t take part in further hangar construction activities.  A person could still find the indelible proof of Gary’s contribution to the project if he knew where to look in the hangar.

     Once the roof trusses were in place there remained the task of putting on the “skin”, long sheets of galvanized corrugated tin.  It took more than one weekend to get all the roof sheets in place and nailed down with ring shank nails.  Once the roof was done, the walls had to be covered with the same material.

    So it was that we were still hanging tin on the walls in the afternoons after school.  We were in a little bit of a hurry, as Daylight Savings was coming to an end.  Under standard time, we would spend more time getting tools and materials ready, then cleaning them up and putting away, than we would nailing up tin in the shortened evenings.

      This particular afternoon, I had returned home for supper, had eaten and was backing out of the drive to use the last hour of daylight to work on the hangar.  The Goodwife reminds me that she, too, was present.  Was she taking me up to the airport and taking the old Chev somewhere, or was she just out in the pleasant evening seeing me off?  Neither of us can remember, but she was present as Georette approached us with the question, “Did you see the show?”          

       “What show?”  Across the street, a rather dysfunctional family of four had replaced the folks who had lived there for a long time.  When we moved in, Tim had lost a leg to some kind of infection.  Mandy pushed him around in a wheel chair.  Mandy made an impression on me when she mowed the lawn wearing blue-striped coveralls tucked into shin-high rubber boots, hairnet, and an old cap in the August heat.  Tim died not long after we moved in.  The widow moved soon thereafter and I never really got acquainted with them (a rarity as the Goodwife said I knew all the old ladies, and some of the men, up and down the block as well as across the alley). 

     “What show?”

     “Why, that ******* girl and that ##### boy came running around the garage and they proceeded to have intercourse right there on the lawn!”  

       The ######’s moved in with teenaged son and first grade girl.  They were new to town.  Neither child had many friends.  I had the son in English class, and the girl would come over to visit whenever I was working in the yard.  Neither child did well in school.  I remember trying to teach “Suzie” numbers while we were playing catch one afternoon.  “How many can you catch?  One for one. . . one for two. . . .”

    “Suzie” reciprocated by trying to teach me how to ride a skate board.  I was the poor student in this case.  In another interesting incident “Suzie” took a classmate at school to task for calling her own mother “Gay.”  “Don’t you call your mother gay!  That’s not nice!”  “But that’s her name!  Her name is ‘Gay’!”

      The ******* girl had given birth to an illegitimate daughter only weeks before this day.  The courts handed the infant to the foster system and friends of ours were caring for her.  Of course they fell in love with the baby and sought to adopt her, but the court, in its blind wisdom returned custody of the child to the biological grandparents.  The foster family was heartbroken and suffered some trauma as a result.  God only knows what became of the infant who would now be in her 40’s.

      Somehow “Jerold ####” and “Gladys *****” struck up a friendship, I’m not sure how, because “Gladys” was not in school, but their relationship grew beyond friendship, apparently.

      So the show across the street had upset the Octogenarians who lined the block on that side of the street.  But Georgette lived on our side of the street, and three doors further west.  How had she found out about the show?

      Well, next-door neighbor Trudy apparently saw the initial rush around the front of the ##### garage to the west side adjacent to Trudy’s driveway.  When things went so far as to involve removing some clothing, she had alerted Erna on the far west corner of her side of the street.  Erna communicated with Georgette.  Apparently, the three ladies (with or without Erna’s husband I’m not sure) gathered in Trudy’s window and watched the act to completion.

     And we, poor souls, came out upon the scene a short time after the culprits restored themselves to full dress and removed themselves from the scene of the crime.  Georgette was apparently on her way home from being an eye witness to a crime when we appeared and she reported to us.

     The rest of that day has faded from memory.  I know I went to the airport and related my experience to Bill and whoever else might have been there as we worked.  The story wasn’t over, however.

     Georgette worked at the courthouse.  After further consultation with the other witnesses, she decided that in order to uphold the oath of office she had taken, she must register a complaint with the magistrate, which she did.  The county sheriff investigated.  Why not the city police force, I’m not sure.  The sheriff interviewed all the witnesses.  Were they sure that an act of sexual intercourse in public had taken place, or was it just an injudicious display of affection?

      One witness, Erna, took umbrage at the sheriff’s questioning her judgment, so the story goes.  Erna had been a widow most of her life and had remarried rather late in life.  She had had to work to support her family, and she was a very strong person. 

     After she grew tired of the sheriff’s attempt to get her to say she wasn’t totally sure of what she had seen, she is reported to have exclaimed, “Young man (the sheriff was in his 40’s), I am eighty years old and I know a prick when I see one!”

      And that was the end of the story for the community.  The young couple refrained from further public display.  Both their families left the community in a year or two.  Since both criminals were juveniles, the court record was sealed.

     The public’s interest in prurient affairs is transient, soon replaced by a new scandal. The witnesses to this crime of passion have all gone to the next world where I hope they all are blessed.  I have disinterred the story here for entertainment purposes only.  I can only hope that this disclaimer will free me from any charge of calumny.

     *Many names have been changed to protect the blogger.

       

    

    

         

     

     

       

Murray Edwards Part 2

After the success Cathy, Murray and I had playing for the grade school and the local elite that formed the music club, we were in some demand.  We provided entertainment for the annual Farm Bureau meeting one year.  We played for thirty minutes while folks gathered and socialized.  We were the “front” for the speaker who did a “power point” (a slide show in those olden days) on boot posts.  He travelled Western states in his line of work and had taken hundreds of photos of old boots decorating fence posts and outbuildings around the country.  He had developed a humorous monologue to accompany his photos and was really quite entertaining.

      The featured speaker got off on the wrong foot with Murray.  We were about fifteen minutes into our thirty minutes when the guy decided he needed to get his screen and projector coordinated.  He put up his screen front and center stage, about five or six feet in front of Murray.  We finished the number we were working on.  Murray shifted his bow to his left hand, holding both bow and violin.  Instead of launching into our next number, Cathy and I watched as Murray pushed the screen away stage right.

    The poor boot fellow knew he had got the boot.  He waited till we were done to finish his prep.  He didn’t endear himself to Murray when he said at the beginning of his program that he wished he could play the piano like that fellow (me!).   Maybe it was payback for Murray who was the star. (Murray always referred to the rhythm folks in the band as his “seconds.”)

      Murray was a great favorite with little kids.  He played a game where he would take a small toy and toss it across the room.  The child would retrieve it for him.  After a few tosses, Murray would fake the toss and quickly hide the toy in his lap beneath his left hand.  The kid would look and look until Murray would find the toy in midair.  Magic! 

     Once Murray had about worn the game out, but Tisha wasn’t ready to quit.  She brought the toy to him and begged him, “Dissappear it!”  Murray got quite kick out of that phrase.  Rarely was he too busy to “disappear” something for Tisha.               

       Murray was an artist as well as a musician.  He took up painting in his sixties. (Check out Lawrence World Herald article for a fuller story of Murray’s art career. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19700706&id=RUsxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OOYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=7130,614186) He did leather work all his life.  During the thirties, with a wife and young family, he trekked to the west coast.  Besides the hard times, their young son was diagnosed with dust pneumonia, a result of the “dust bowl”.  He did not follow the Joad family in trying to make a living fruit picking or other ag-based labor.  Instead, he hired out to a saddle-maker.  He was quite good at tooling leather.  He made many of his leatherworking tools himself.  When a son-in-law dentist discarded dental tools, Murray used them to make specialized leather working tools.  He had quite a few of the “tooth picks”.  I still have three that he shared with me.

     An interesting story from the West Coast days came from son Clifford who was an English professor at Fort Hays University.  He taught three or four classes I took while getting my master’s degree, which is where I heard the story.

     One day the Edwards family visited an Indian Reservation.  They were invited to eat with the natives.  Maude, who was part Delaware Indian and knew a little bit about the conditions on the reservation, politely declined on her and the children’s behalf, but Murray accepted a plate and ate.  After he had finished eating, they came upon the dishwashing crew—squaws holding the plates while dogs licked them clean, followed by a quick wipe with the squaws’ skirts.

      In the early forties, Murray and family returned to Kansas, where with help from his parents, he started a cattle herd.  They managed to make a living, raise three kids, and buy their own farm home and still have time to fiddle, rodeo, and do leather work.

     One thing Murray wasn’t good at, something he didn’t like, was mechanic work.  He used horses to do the farm work whenever he could instead of a tractor.  Maude once commented that they spent long summer evenings sitting on the back porch in the shade of the cottonwoods.  The horses could only work so long before needing the rest, so there was leisure time in the evenings.  That went away with the tireless tractor.

      Maude also commented once that all Murray’s gates and barn doors had leather hinges and latches.  Murray didn’t want to mess with metal ones. Leather was for him.

   He was also good with a rope.  Late in his career he was invited to St. Louis to participate in a week-long festival of folk artists.  He took his paintings, his leather works, his fiddle, and his lasso.  A picture in an art magazine caught him with the lasso loop spinning over his cowboy-hatted head, the famous arch in the background.

     One fall when we returned to Kansas after the summer break, we saw Murray on the street.  The girls raced to him and hugged his legs.  He was quite pleased that the girls were attracted to him, but he didn’t know who they were.  When I asked him something about his fiddle playing, he asked me who I played with.  The sad truth dawned on us.

     Murray had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and had had surgery.  The operation saved his life, but he never fully recovered his mental faculties after he came out of the anesthesia. His care became too much for Maude.  For her well-being, the family had Murray moved to the Good Samaritan Home, where he spent the last years of his life. 

     Eventually, Murray knew no one, not even Maude.  Once he asked her, “Do I know you?” 

    “I think you do,” she said.

     “I think you are someone I love,” he said.

     Occasionally, a fellow fiddler would call on Murray in the home.  He could hand Murray a fiddle and get him started on a tune, and Murray would take off and play the tune.  The other fiddler would duet with Murray or switch to guitar and accompany him.  Murray could do that for as long as he was physically able.  

      Murray, Maude and Clifford are all interred in Chardon Cemetery in southern Rawlins County Kansas.  All three are an important part of my life.

     I had four Murray Edwards leather works, gifts of the Goodwife at various times, two belts, a plier pouch (long since worn out) and my guitar strap.  We also have a 6” X 8” leather “picture” of a horse, a gift from Murray or a purchase.

Murray Edwards

     Trenton dam, Trenton, NE, circa 1971.  A Friday or Saturday afternoon, probably September.  Most of those gathered in the sand in the shade of the cottonwoods were teachers.  There was an exception.

    Maude and Murray Edwards were there, invited by the social studies teacher.  The social studies teacher came to us from California where he had worked at LA International while finishing his degree in social studies and getting his teaching credentials.  He took his position as history teacher in December after his predecessor had been forced to resign in a student-teacher romance scandal.  (The predecessor, when confronted with the evidence of his inappropriate behavior, replied that he loved all of his students.)

     Gerry, the California transplant, was a bit different, too.  He resembled a Las Vegas gambler with flashy clothes and an open hand, especially when it came to buying rounds of drinks, with money he could ill afford to spend, as we learned later.  As he revealed his background working at LA International, the question always arose, why would he give up that well paid job to take up teaching, especially in Kansas?  His reply drew guffaws from his new colleagues:  “I wanted a job where I would be respected.”

     Gerry was outgoing and ignorant of small town social mores, so he could and would talk to anyone from bank president to pariah sex offender-child abuser.  He would take his “planning period” when he was supposed to be preparing lesson plans, grading, working individually with students and such like to go down town to the local coffee shop and schmooze with the locals.  When the school secretary told him he shouldn’t be leaving school except for school business or an occasional personal errand, he told her it wasn’t his wont to take orders from a secretary.  So much for respect.

      Gerry was a bit of a musician, owning a small piano that was two octaves short of a full 88, upon which he could hammer out a few tunes.  (I had a lot of trouble getting anything meaningful out of that piano.  I kept falling off either ends of the earth on that keyboard.)  He also had an old guitar and would belt out his favorite song, “Aw Hell, Play Anything.”  Somewhere, he had run into Maude and Murray and had had a jam session with them.  He had unknowingly defied the unwritten social rules and invited them to the beach party with the teachers.  They were not teachers (though Maude had been a teacher in her youth) and they were several years older than most of us, being grandparents many times over when most of us had either no children or very young ones.

      Gerry broke out his old guitar and prevailed upon Murray to get out his fiddle, which he was reluctant to do, being that close to the water.  But he did.  Whereupon Gerry broke another rule:  he suggested I play Murray’s guitar, also safely stowed inside Murray’s car.

     There I was, a young, probably irresponsible kid, lounging in a cheap lawn chair in the sand, drinking a beer.  Would you want to place your guitar in such hands?   Murray had Maude hold his violin while he returned to the car, dug out and tuned the guitar, and telling me to be careful, reluctantly placed the old guitar in my hands.  So we played.

      That was my introduction to old time fiddling.  I had of course accompanied Dad on his fiddle at various Lions functions when, as entertainment chairman, he couldn’t line up any other entertainment, he filled the gap himself.  But Murray’s fiddling was different.  I was unfamiliar with most of the tunes, but many of them were three-changers, so I got along.  Murray was unimpressed.  He suggested I should be playing A and D chords on the first three frets like normal people instead of up the neck four or five frets where I was much more comfortable.

     The sun dropped out of sight, the evening cooled off and grew dank. Murray announced the humidity was making it impossible to keep his fiddle tuned and he feared the effect the moisture would have on his instruments.  He cased the fiddle and the guitar, said his goodbyes and departed the scene.  I would have no further interaction with Maude or Murray for nearly a decade.

      In 1980, I gave up teaching.  I foresaw that I would be required to teach junior high school, a position I didn’t want, and I was uncomfortable with someone else raising my daughter.  So I quit and became a house husband.  As such, I had some leisure time.

      A neighbor’s daughter fancied herself a guitar player.  She knew four chords, C, F, G, and D.  Sometimes she could fetch an E.  She loved Murray and loved playing guitar to his fiddling.  Many fiddle tunes are played in E, and Caty couldn’t get B7.  Thus she applied to me to teach her a few things.

     I was quite uncomfortable with having her come to my house during the day, as she was quite an attractive woman with two young boys and a little bit of a reputation.  Gerry may have been ignorant of small-town ways, but I certainly was not.  I knew the gossip that would be generated if Cathy called on me more than once or twice.  The lurid imagination of my octogenarian neighbors would assume the beautiful music was from the bedroom.

     The solution to the problem arrived in a timely and natural manner.  Cathy suggested she might make more progress in guitar playing if we involved Maude and Murray.  She arranged it all.  Tisha and I would pack up and meet Cathy at Maude and Murray’s, or sometimes they would pack their instruments to our house.  Cathy lived 12 miles out in the country.  I don’t think we ever went out there.

     I had to borrow an acoustic guitar, but I did use the old Gretsch some.  One of the things I did for Cathy was mount two or three electric pickups onto her guitar and try to get them to work.  In the process, I connected with Gary, former band teacher at the high school, who also had given up teaching and went to work for a music store in Norton.  He provided the pickups on a trial basis until we found the right one.  Then Cathy could plug into the amplifier and make as much noise as I could.

     I can’t remember what acoustic guitar I borrowed, but Gary provided me a new one from the music store for a good while, with the provision that I would show it to folks and make sure everyone knew it was for sale.  I did, but I had the usual success I have whenever I try to sell something.  My conscience got the best of me.  On a single income, I had no hope of buying that guitar.  Back to Gary it went. 

     I don’t remember the particulars, but somehow folks became aware we had formed a group and we began making public appearances.  Ruth, the local historian, solicited our help in staging a program on Revolutionary War songs.  She wrote and read the narrative and we supplied the music. 

      We were able to do a few “Yankee Doodle” type numbers that Murray knew and could play.  We had to learn a few songs that none of us had ever heard before.  The one I remember was “In Good Old Colony Times”.  Ruth had music, but I was the only one that could read, so I became the default piano player.  Cathy was the vocalist and guitar player.  The program was a great success when we performed it for the local music club. We were invited to repeat it for the grade school. Playing for the music club AND the grade school:  We had arrived.  (To be continued)

The Chinese Guitar

     I entered the motel room carrying my just-purchased brand new $300 guitar in its brand new case.  There were three or four people in the motel room.  For a second or two all eyes scrutinized me and the guitar case in my hand.

      The eyes filled with amusement and wonder, disbelief even.  Impulse-buying was not, and is not, a characteristic that people associate with me.  Yet here I was, gone less than 30 minutes with guitar in hand.

     The beginning of the story probably goes back to my college days when I bought an electric Gretsch guitar in a pawn shop.  It was never a great guitar.  The strings were too far from the fret board on its neck.  Plus, you had to drag an amplifier wherever you went.

      Dad called the first electric-only guitar he saw a “plank”, an assertion we got a lot of mileage out of when we were kids. In later years a history of Les Paul’s first electric guitar provided some justification for Dad’s pronouncement.  Les mounted a tail piece and a bridge on a 4X4 along with the electronic pickups.  Then he connected a neck from another guitar to the 4X4.  After some time, Les took the body of an old acoustic guitar and fixed it loosely to the 4X4 because folks complained that his contraption didn’t look like a guitar.

      My plank came to a-near end when the neck strap I was using gave away when I was talking on the phone and didn’t have either hand on the guitar.  Of course it landed right on the tuning knobs.  The neck got knocked loose.  It was no longer possible to tighten the strings.

    I couldn’t figure out how to get the neck off.  Bill, a furniture refinisher in Greeley, took out his pocket knife, dug out a soft plug, and removed an old wood screw.  The neck was off in less than a minute.  The condition of the screw (rusty) and the type of screw (flat head wood screw) suggested this wasn’t the first time the neck had been removed from this Gretsch.

    Bill glued the neck back on, but the angle wasn’t correct.  When tuned correctly, the strings were too far from the neck.  It wore out your fingers to play it very much.  A subsequent removal and replacement of the neck ameliorated that problem somewhat, but then there were electrical problems with the pickups and the adjustment knobs.  Besides, you still had to tote an amplifier and cords.

     So buying a guitar wasn’t exactly an impulse buy.  I had been thinking about replacing the plank with an acoustical model for about 30 years.

     A contributing factor was Ralph coming into my life.  That happened when he married a life-long neighbor who had been widowed.  Ralph played fiddle and being new to the community was always looking for someone to jam with.    

      We got together the first time because he needed a rhythm guitar to accompany him in a fiddle contest in Kiowa.  We had some trouble meshing at first.  I had some experience with hoe-down fiddling, having played with an old time fiddler in Kansas.  But I didn’t know much about bluegrass. I assumed Ralph was a full-blown bluegrasser.

      Somehow, we both came to realize that our real love was ‘30 through ‘50’s tunes.  Then we hit it off.  We got together two or three times a week during the summers before Ralph moved to Colorado Springs.  I used Mom’s acoustic guitar during those years.

     One year, Ralph suggested we meet at the midwinter bluegrass festival held in Denver in February.  I had never been to a bluegrass gathering.  I didn’t know it was an excuse to get together and jam with everybody you could.  I didn’t bring a guitar.

     We all went to Ralph’s motel room and he broke out his fiddle.  Brother John was there with his twelve string guitar.  I was there with my teeth in my mouth.  John suggested we could share his guitar.  We played a few tunes, but John or I was always on the sideline.  I wasn’t too adept with a twelve string guitar. 

     After a not-so-successful attempt on my part to keep up with Ralph playing the twelve string, I said with a mix of frustration and bravado, “I’m going to go buy a guitar!” 

     Audible laughter followed me as I handed John his guitar and headed for the motel room door.  “I’ll go with you, just to see what there is,” said the Goodwife, the inveterate shopper.

     The festival was held at a Ramada Inn off of I25 on120th Avenue.  On the main floor was a huge lobby, a theatre, a couple of big meeting rooms and several smaller meeting rooms around the perimeter.  One of the larger meeting rooms was filled with vendors selling all kinds of stuff including instruments.

     In those days, a person could go anywhere without buying a “bracelet” except to the theatre or the big meeting room where the show stars performed.  (The last time I was there, I couldn’t go anywhere, including the vendor’s room, without the bracelet.)  I walked into the vendor venue and started looking at guitars.  I passed by the Martin guitars selling for $2K or more.  I located the low-cost seller who was displaying guitars listed for $800 and up.

     Hmm.  Maybe I wasn’t going to buy a guitar after all.  “Have anything in a lower-cost range?” I asked.  (I may have said “cheaper”, maybe.)

     The guy rummaged around beneath his table.  He pulled out a guitar and said, “This one is $300.”  He probably had $500 to $600 models, too, but he accurately took my measure, especially if I said “cheaper”.   He handed me the guitar.  I checked it for fret accuracy.  I played a few chords.  The neck was narrow enough for my short fingers.  The strings were fairly easy to hold against the frets without cutting slots in my fingers.  It had a good sound, as near as I could tell with all the noise in the place.

     “Will you take an out-of-state check?”            

     He laughed.  “Every check I take here is out-of-state!  I’m from Idaho!”  (Or was it Montana or Wyoming?  Anyway, he was not a Coloradan.)  I found the Goodwife, secured the checkbook, promised to pay her the $300 with cash I had saved for the day, returned and wrote the guy a check.  As I wrote, he pulled a guitar case from somewhere and carefully placed my guitar in it.

    “Gee, I get a case, too?”

     “All my guitars come with cases.”  I dropped the checkbook off with the Goodwife as I headed for the motel room. 

      “I’m going to look around for a while,” she said.  I stepped into the motel room with new guitar case proudly fronting for me.

      Ralph stood there with fiddle in left hand, bow in his right.  Nobody said anything for a second or two.  Then Ralph asked, “Where’s Patti?  Did you have to trade her for that guitar?”  Everyone laughed at that.

     The new guitar came out of the case and underwent an inspection.  “Hmm.  Made in China,” Ralph said.  Sure enough, that’s what it said right there on the interior body.  Well, it was only $300.  I’ve never been able to coax it into a proper rendition of “Chopsticks”.  It plays all kinds of intervals, not just open 4ths and 5ths.  It has forgotten its heritage, maybe.

    The guitar was properly tuned and a proper jam session ensued.  Eventually, the wayward shopper returned to the room and my denials of a barter deal were confirmed.

     To this day Ralph still asks about the guitar that I traded my wife for.

    

John Deere Psychology

Or, getting into my head.

     The 830 started pushing oil out of the left exhaust port sometime in August.  It got to where it wasted a quart of oil about every five hours.  I have friends who would have kept a quart of oil handy and let the dirt accumulate where the oil seeped out between head and exhaust manifold and would have lived happily ever after.

    There are two cardinal sins an engine can commit in my book.  The first is to be hard to start.  Nothing is more frustrating than a struggle to get an engine going when I’m ready to go.

     The second is to use oil.  So when the wheat was up suitably and the tractoring season was over, I “tore down” the engine to do a “top” overhaul.  Everything in the middle of the picture comes off.  (Exclude the radiator on the left and everything in the lower right corner behind the exhaust pipe.)

    The head weighs about 150 pounds, a bit much for an old guy.  Come-along to the rescue.

    This all happened early in October.  The head went to Burlington, the gaskets got ordered.  I was hoping to get everything back in time to work on it before the big move.  The mechanic shop rang my cell phone as we neared Loveland with a load of “stuff”.

    All things happen for a reason.  I needed a break from the clutter of stacked cardboard boxes, from trying to find things in that cluttered stack, from finding the best place to put “stuff”.  About a week or so after receiving the call, I trekked to Burlington and picked up the head and the gaskets.

    The head overhaul cost nearly $600.  Here is what a revamped head looks like.  Note the shiny new valves (the round things) and the nice green paint.

    

Here is what a $250 gasket set from John Deere looks like:  (a cardboard separator hides the main gasket from the rest of the assortment.  In the second picture the main gasket is mounted on the block waiting to seal the head to the block.)

 

    

    Speaking of sticker shock, here is what a $123 oil pressure gauge from John Deere looks like:

     The head is now buttoned up to the block.  It is waiting for an accurate torque wrench to bring it up to the required 275 foot pounds of torque.  I didn’t have a lot of faith in the Rube Goldberg device which extended the wrench’s lever by 26 inches.  I couldn’t do the math to figure out how much torque I had to show on the torque wrench when its reach was extended by 2 feet.  Plus, it was a chore to keep the torque wrench from turning on the socket handle and at the same time getting an accurate reading on it.

     There is quite a bit of work left to be done, but the covers are on and the openings closed well enough to keep out the vermin and the weather. Besides, I will need another break from the clutter of modern existence.  I will escape into the simplicity of the past where 270 foot pounds of torque are on the tractor’s head bolts, not my molars.

     Here is a World War Two joke.  A Native American joined the Navy.  During his enlistment he was trained as an electrician.  Unfortunately, he also contracted a chronic case of dysentery.  When he mustered out, he returned to his home on the reservation.  He brought with him both his electrician skills and his health problems.  Now his home was a bit behind the times as far as modern conveniences, so he set out to help bring light through electricity to his people.  One dark moonless night, his chronic health problem surfaced and he raced for the outhouse.  Because the outhouse was unlit, he failed to find it in time and the result was an unfortunate accident.  Resolved never to be embarrassed by that sort of thing again, the young man set about the very next day installing a light fixture in the outhouse and connecting to the recently-completed power supply.  He flipped the switch and on came the light.

     The completion of the project entitled him to a place in the record book as the first Indian to wire a head for a reservation.  (Thanks to that great jokester, Uncle Pete)