21 Massey Part 2

  

     The old 21 Massey was the first combine I ever drove, had complete control over.  In an early attempt at combine driving, I was supposed to cut through the middle of a field where the wheat on one side was still a little green yet, but ripe on the other side.   Dad rode along with me on my maiden voyage, standing beside me on the operator’s platform.  When I stopped at the edge of the field, shut down the separator and throttled down the engine, he looked out over the field at the cut I had made and said, “A snake would break his back trying to follow that.”  I took a look back and had to agree with him, not too straight.

      But then the Massey lacked power steering, and in the words of Ed Berridge, the local mechanic guru, it had “about a foot of play” in the steering linkage.  Steering straight was an act of anticipation, trying to figure out which way the old gal would choose to go next.  When day was done, the operator’s shoulders and neck would be on fire.

    Add to loose steering linkage loose drive chains.  Roller chains drove the big front wheels.  These roller chains were quite worn and had a lot of play in them, too.  If you went in reverse, then shifted into first gear, it could take a couple of seconds before the slack chains caught up and actually propelled the machine forward.

      One dry fall, Dad borrowed a neighbor’s Peacock drill.  A Peacock was a rugged chisel machine with shovels four inches wide which threw up big ridges and could be made to penetrate quite deep into the soil.  It was used as a soil conserver, the high wide ridges protecting against either wind or water erosion.  The Peacock drill had a grain box, ground-driven seeding mechanism, grain tubes etc.  If there was any moisture in the soil at all, you could get the seed down to it with a Peacock drill.

      But then there was hell to pay next year at harvest time.  Imagine driving your vehicle over a field of four or five inch pipes spaced 16 inches apart.  Imagine cutting wheat growing eight inches from either pipe.  It wasn’t too bad if you could go parallel to the pipes.  You did a lot of steering because the back wheels fought each other to see which one got to laze along in the bottom of the row and which one had to stay about half way up one of the Peacock ridges.  It was a slalom event.  

      But of course you couldn’t always go with the rows.  Sometimes you had to angle across them, sometimes perpendicularly, a rough ride indeed.  It might have been that year that the Ford pickup snapped a front spindle off in Pratt’s wheat field.  If it had been a horse, we would have had to shoot it.

       You didn’t go too fast across the ridges for sake of man and machine.  In first gear, the Massey would slowly crawl up the ridge, reach the top, and race down the other side of the ridge, landing in the bottom of the row with a whump!  There it would rest until the loose drive chains took up the slack and the process started all over again, climbing the next ridge.

    For whatever reason I don’t remember, but Dad decided the old Number 3 John Deere pull-type machine was worthy of fixing up.  So for two or three years we had two combines in the harvest field.  It was then I came into the picture.  And the GMC truck also came on the scene.  We were both ’47 models.

    I learned to drive the old Massey.  One time we were moving from the east field to the west.  The whole family was involved in the move.  Mom was driving the old pickup, now converted to fuel-tool wagon, along side of us, on her way back to the house with the “kids” with her.  I was driving the old Massey and was ahead of Uncle Ricky who was driving the “G” John Deere and pulling the Number 3, following me.  Brother Harry was driving the GMC truck somewhere in the parade.  Dad was standing on the operator platform beside me and we were hauling along, in 4^th gear (road gear) no less. 

      Suddenly, the Massey stopped dead in her tracks.  Before Dad or I had a chance to say anything, the Massey gave a mighty lurch simultaneously with a metal-crunching sound.  Dad grabbed the grain tank to keep it from crushing his ribs, and I gripped the steering wheel for dear life.  Then we stopped again, just as suddenly as we had a split second before.  The engine of the Massey was roaring at full idle, accomplishing nothing. 

       I throttled down and was fumbling with the shifting lever when I began to her Uncle Ricky calling me some uncomplimentary names and asking why I had stopped suddenly in mid road.   He had rear ended me with the “G”.  It seems he had been gesticulating at the folks in the pickup along side of us and had only barely grabbed the “G’s” hand clutch before the collision.   

     I don’t remember the order of events, but we examined the “G” (crushed radiator grill on the left side, no radiator damage, as I recall); checked out the straw spreader and straw-walker

bonnet on the Massey’s rear end (bonnet dented and kinked to the left, no straw-walker damage, straw spreader unharmed but the mounting rail mashed in); and Dad discovered the mystery of the sudden stop:  one of the old drive chains couldn’t take the speed and jumped off the sprocket, so we stopped.          

      One year brother Dave and I had the chance to buy a genuine slate pool table for $100.  How would we raise $100?  It was another lean year when we would have to live on the hail insurance, the “cattle check” and Mom’s piano lessons. The wheat had been adjusted and determined to be a total loss.  But there was still some grain in the fractured heads left standing.

    So Dave and I put a battery in the old Massey, got it started, fueled, greased, tires aired up, and set off to the wheat field with the GMC truck.  The truck was nearly superfluous, not quite.  We put in a lot of hours.  Every time we stopped for whatever reason, something on the combine would break.  So we tried to keep it running and succeeded pretty well until the rare occasion when we needed to unload the grain bin. 

     We tried unloading on the go.  I drove the truck and Dave was driving the combine.  I got too close to the cut.  Dave was yelling but I couldn’t hear.  He didn’t think to just pull over a little.  Afraid to miss some of the hailed wheat, I guess.  Anyway, the Massey unloading auger bumped into the truck side board and the auger tube came apart, spilling the precious grain onto the ground, a lot of our hard work spraying into the stubble!  So much for not stopping the combine.

     I don’t know how many bushels we ended up with, but Dad took charge of the truck and we got our $100 pool table.

       I don’t know what the coup de grace was for the Massey, but eventually it went to the bone yard.    It now sits on the section line between 8-8-55 and 8-9-55, where it has been subject to various and sundry degradations and buzzard pickings since sometime in the 1960’s.  The engine was probably first to go, as it was a Chrysler and there were many ‘40’s Plymouth, Dodges and Chryslers looking for a straight six cylinder engine.  I think it went to a ’48 Plymouth, but I’m no longer sure.

     The other major part loss occurred when a 55 John Deere from Elsie, Nebraska, the”Elsie Machine,” needed an unloading auger tube.  The Massey tube was the same size.  A few pulleys and bearings went to other projects, but the majority of the machine remains.

     I tried in the ‘80’s to disassemble it to find usable angle iron, but other priorities got in the way.  My success in peddling the Ford seats gave me the idea maybe I could dispose of the Massey remnants by advertising on an antique website.  So far I have had two responses.  One came from Chicago.  The email said not to worry about shipping “the part”, and please don’t sell “it” to anyone else.  His agent would take care of the shipping.  Just send the following information and we would complete the deal.  Yeah, right.

     Sometime later, Shawn responded.  His 21 Massey is the pretty one pictured in Part I.  He has a collection of Masseys and has volunteered to help me dispose of our old gal.  He is looking for parts for a canvas header.  Unfortunately, ours is an auger header.  Shawn says, by looking at the pictures I sent him, that our combine has been converted from canvas to auger.

       I think that if cussing earns you a one way ticket to hell, the old Masseys have done their fair share of recruiting for the Devil.  They were probably the dirtiest machine, dirty for the operator, that you could ever run in a harvest field.  You sat close to the header, the grain bin right behind you, and the separator a foot or two to the right of you.  The only time you weren’t being assaulted with dirt or chaff was when the wind was blowing from your left.

     But, the old Masseys were the first practical self-propelled combine.  They were a common sight in Western Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Eastern Colorado during June and July.  Custom cutters used them almost exclusively for years during the 50’s. 

     You would see them mounted on trucks with big front wheels hanging over the edges of the truck, the header still attached, perched above the truck cab, and in many instances, the hind wheels dangling off the rear end of the truck.  You could see the huge long springs that helped raise the header hanging limply under the combine’s belly, as they did when the header was in the full-up position.  In my mind’s ear, I can still hear the noise of the springs expanding and contracting when you raised or lowered the header without the engine running.  (You could raise or lower the header without the engine running because the job was done with an electric motor controlled by a toggle switch on the “console”.)

      As a kid, I never grew tired of watching the custom cutters load and unload the Masseys.  Rarely did they use a loading dock.  Usually it was a road ditch that abutted a field with a bank somewhat higher than the road.  A scoop shovel would dig the hole that would level the truck’s rear wheels.  Backing into the bank, the combine rear wheels dangling off the back of the truck would hit the bank and the combine would start to rise up.  I don’t remember ever seeing a header come down and mash the cab as the back end of the combine rose, but I’m sure it happened.  When loading out, the front end of the combine was chained down, the truck pulled slowly forward, the combine frame came down onto either blocks or the truck bed, and the back wheels dangled.  Chain the back end down and they were ready for the road.

     I envied the crew who moved on to another territory, to another job.  Not so much anymore.  I can’t say I envy anyone who has to spend a day herding an old 21 Massey.