Steve's '63 Chevy

    “Hey Steve, there’s a highway patrolman out here wants to talk to you.”

     “Oh sure,” Steve said.  We were standing in his living room twenty miles from any paved road.  “I believe you.”

    It was a Sunday morning.  I’m not sure why Brother John and I went up there, maybe for him to catch a ride back to Denver.  We drove the half mile or so east from what is now County Road 28, then known as the “mail route”, into Steve’s yard. 

     Neither of us had noticed anybody following us, yet when we got out of our car, there was the “highpo” pulled up behind us.  It was not a city cop or a sheriff’s vehicle.  It was a state trooper’s cruiser, white with chrome lights atop the roof, the Mickey Mouse symbols, state patrol logo on both sides.

     We of little faith found it hard to believe, a state trooper out here, 20 miles from nowhere, even when we saw it with our own eyes.  State troopers weren’t supposed to get off the paved roads, at least in our minds.  No wonder that Steve, who hadn’t looked outside, thought we were trying to pull one on him.

     Steve had this sleek dark blue ’63 Chevrolet.  He got it new when he graduated from high school.  It was built for drag racing with a 327 engine, 4-11 rear-end, and four-on-the floor.

    Those were the days when “CDR” meant drag-racing, Castle Rock, Continental Divide Raceway.  Steve often made the Sunday trek to Castle Rock to buy a ticket, sit on the hillside and have his ears blasted off by unmuffled “mills” roaring down the quarter mile strip, trailing burnt-rubber smoke.

    When he got his ’63, Steve was able to join the elite down in the pits where he got to pull up beside a competitor and try his skill at popping the clutch off the line and speed shifting gears at just the right rpms.  I don’t know how successful he was.  The privilege of joining the competitors was expensive both in terms of entrance fee and mechanical work necessitated by dragging your car.

       To enter the race, the car had to have a “scatter shield” which protected the driver in the event a clutch or flywheel disintegrated and sent shrapnel flying.  Then of course there was always clutch, transmission, and differential failures that had to be repaired along with various engine modifications designed to improve speed and performance.

     I made the trip to Castle Rock one warm spring Sunday in 1965.  The ideal was to take a beer cooler and sit back with a cool one while you enjoyed the races.  We weren’t 18 yet, the age when you could buy 3.2 beer.  We had something to drink, maybe brandy which we mixed with Coke.

     By eleven o’clock, I had enough to drink.  By noon I had enough of the heat and noise.  Watching the “slings” took some of the fun out of it.  The professional dragsters put together a machine that looked like a long pipe with bicycle wheels out in front, a huge engine balanced on the pipe, large racing-slicks for rear tires at the other end of the pipe.

    The engines were so souped up they couldn’t idle at less than 2500 rpms.  Two of them pulled up to the starting gate and sat there snorting and roaring like two stallions waiting for the gate to open so they could get out to a field of mares.

     I think there was no transmission.  When the light turned green, the driver rammed a hand clutch forward (like an old tractor?) and floored the accelerator.  Bicycle wheels popped up off the ground, rear tires smoked and squealed (not that you could hear them over the engine’s roar) and in a few seconds, the machines had covered the quarter mile.

    Then the amazing thing happened, amazing the first time I saw it.  A parachute popped out of the rear end of the slings after they crossed the finish line and travelled down another quarter mile or so getting stopped.      

     After experiencing the professional racers, the Chevys and Fords and revamped Willys seemed pale imitations of the real thing.  They weren’t nearly as loud, and as they crawled down the quarter mile strip, they seemed positively slow. 

     I was happy to leave early in the afternoon.  I never went back.  Drag racing wasn’t my sport.

     One Sunday night, probably before my trip to Castle Rock, I had a much more exciting experience.  We went to the movie in town.  Afterwards we got in with Steve to ride around.  We ended up south of town on a smooth level stretch of highway with no traffic. 

     Kenny was a few years older than us and had lots of experiences to tell us about.  He had a ’61 Chev and there was nothing for it but to see which Chevy was faster.  I got in with Kenny so that each car had the same weight handicap.

      The guy in the right seat of the left car rolled down his window, raised his hand, and when both drivers were ready, he dropped his hand and yelled, “Go!”  Away we went.  All I remember for certain was that in one of the three or four races, Kenny missed third gear.  There was a terrible grinding when he tried to shift but hadn’t coordinated shoving the clutch down at the same instant he rammed the gear shift towards the dash in search of third gear.  We lost that race for sure.   

     Both guys had been there before because they knew where the quarter mile started and stopped.  That was much more fun than watching the professionals.

      Apparently the local gendarmes were aware that such things went on.  One time at a safety presentation the highway patrol always put on at the high school, the patrolman talked about drag-racing and how it was a good sport when done on an approved drag strip.  “But the drag strip isn’t 109 south of town,” he said and he pointedly looked right at Steve.  Steve blushed and looked down, but later his notoriety gave him bragging rights.

     So here was a patrolman standing by his cruiser in Steve’s yard waiting for him to come out of the house so they could have a conversation.  Steve was having none of it.  Finally, we maneuvered him around so he had to look out the window where he could see the patrol car.  Then there was a change.

      His face registered shock as he arranged his person and hurried out the door to see what the cop wanted.  We took occasional glances out the window as we whiled away the time Steve spent with the policeman.

     Finally, Steve got out of the patrol car and headed back to the house as the cop car turned and headed west out of the yard.  It seems the patrolman had chased a car the evening before and had lost it.   

     The cop had the numbers of the license plate, but not the letters.  He suspicioned it had been Steve, but he knew it wasn’t Steve as soon as he saw Steve’s car.  So he told Steve the story of how he had chased the car , with license numbers different than Steve’s, was using radar to track him when suddenly the car disappeared from radar and view.  Did Steve have any idea who it might have been?

     Well, yes, Steve knew exactly who it was, another young farmer, who had a ’62 Chevy, who lived in the area the policeman described, who had a metal farm building that would shield his car from the radar.  That’s what he told us.

     But of course he didn’t tell that to the cop.  He did call Jerry right away and got the other side of the exciting story of the chase, which ended in the Quonset.  It was a long time, months, before Jerry dare venture out in his ’62 Chevy.  His pickup was good enough to get around for a while.

 

      Once Uncle Jerry, who as city manager did cop duties, said to me.  “Sure it’s fun trying to get away from the cop.”  He took a drag on his cigarette, hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets, exhaled smoke, smiled and said, “It’s a lot more fun trying to catch ‘em!” 

   

Wheat Planting, Again

     August 21^st.  That’s when we always started planting wheat north of Bovina, unless the 21st was Sunday.

     It fell on a weekday in 1964.  I was a senior in high school.  Football practice must have started on August 23.  We weren’t done planting wheat, had just barely started.

    It was before global warming when we still feared another ice age, maybe caused by nuclear winter (Seven Days in May was popular then) or even some natural phenomenon like sun spots or something.  A jacket was a necessity later in the afternoon perched on top of the open tractor.

     The same jacket felt good in the early morning while greasing the drill.  It probably came off during the drill-filling exercise.  The use of an auger run by an electric motor powered by the truck’s battery wasn’t in vogue yet.

    We pulled the blue Chevrolet truck up behind the drill’s press wheels, almost touching the press wheels with the truck’s left tires.  We clambered up over the grain sides into the wheat and grabbed a scoop shovel.  We aimed the shovel full of wheat at the hinged edge where the drill lid joined the drill box.

    It was probably three feet from the truck side rack to the lid on the drill box.  We had to throw the seed at the drill box because if we leaned over the truck side and tried to reach the drill box with the shovel, it was a real strain on the back.  When the truck was full at the beginning of the planting season, we risked losing our balance with 12 or 15 pounds of wheat in the scoop of the shovel.    We could easily go tumbling out of the truck onto the drill.  Later in the season, when the wheat in the truck had dwindled, the difficulty was lifting the loaded shovel over the sideboard and getting enough oomph to propel the wheat to the drill.

     So we tried to get the shovel filled just right, no seeds tumbling off the front or sides.  Cock back, swing forward, and at the right moment, drop the shovel from under its load of wheat. If done correctly, there would be a brief second between leaving the shovel and before hitting the drill lid and box when the form of the shovel could be seen in the bottom of the wheat seeds, like molded Jell-O.

     If done right, the wheat would hit the base of the lid and bounce back into the drill box.  There were obstructions to be avoided, the spring rods that held the lid open, and on the older drills, the divider in the middle of the drill where two lids joined.  We tried to miss those things because if you hit them, wheat bounced off them onto the ground.

     The other danger was undershooting the drill box.  If we undershot the box, a big bunch of wheat spilled to the ground.  Mostly, we did our job well.  Still, two or three weeks after planting, when the wheat was all up, we could always see where we had filled the drills by the abundance of wheat growing all in a line perpendicular to the drill rows.  Sometimes, at harvest the next summer, we could see where we filled the drills by that perpendicular line of wheat out of the rows.

    Another exercise in judgment required by drill filling was when to quit.  When we thought we had the drill filled just right, we would hop out of the truck (we were young, still in high school) and spread the grain by hand to get the drill brimful.  We had to overfill the middle of the box because we couldn’t completely fill the ends of the box or where there were obstructions.  If we hadn’t got enough grain in the drill, it meant another clamber into the truck.  Conversely, too much wheat in the drill box (the lid wouldn’t close) meant grabbing the shovel, raking the excess off into the shovel and throwing it back into the truck.

          The drills filled and greased, it was time to take the truck back to the farmyard, service the tractor and take it to the field.  The jacket went back on.  We would work up a sweat filling the drills.  Sitting on the open tractor cooled us off in a hurry.  Sometime around ten or eleven o’clock, the jacket came off and had to be stowed somewhere.  We would want it again along about four or five.

      The drills would have to be filled at least twice or three times a day.  A Kansas friend said he always caught cold in wheat-planting season.  He would work up a good sweat filling drills.  Then he would get back on the tractor and get chilled as the sweat dried.  I don’t remember catching cold.  I do remember practicing jacket management.

      Then came football season.  Practice always began the week before school started.  We would quit or be relieved about three and head for town.

     The first few days were non-contact without pads.  Helmets were required even for the first few days’ workout.  We did all kinds of torturous exercises, sit-ups and leg lifts to name a couple of unfavorites, and the wrestler’s bridge.

     For the wrestler’s bridge, we bent over, helmet on the ground, still standing.  We turned right and left, helmet keeping the same position, only using your hands for balance, eventually turning a complete circle.  Besides the contortion, our new helmets had vent holes in the tops.  Our football field was dirt populated by Mexican sand tacks, tire-puncture weed, whatever you call it.  (A friend dubbed our field “Marti-grass”—the grass was Marti-thin.)          

    When we straightened up from doing the wrestler’s bridge, the dirt that had been ground into the new helmets through the vent holes came cascading down into hair, neck face and mixed with the sweat.  We learned to remove the helmet before straightening up.  The “scrubs” didn’t have the problem—the old helmets had no vent holes in the tops.

     So imagine the morning after the first football practice.  Every fiber of our bodies hurt, even our hair.  There was the truck, half-full of wheat sitting behind the drill.  Nothing to do but crawl up into the back of the truck, grab a shovel, and ouch! begin filling the drill.

      It didn’t get much better the rest of the week as we continued to discover muscles we never knew we had.  Saturday was a full day of wheat-drilling.  Sunday was off.  School started on Monday.

    I usually wasn’t around for the end of wheat planting.  It would mostly be done by Labor Day.  Then summer was over, school going for real.  Saturdays would find us stacking some hay, maybe, if we didn’t have a Saturday afternoon football game.

     Later, when I was teaching school, I would try to get the wheat planted over the three day Labor Day weekend.  At first, that was late planting.  Nowadays, that would be early planting.   

     No matter the time, when I crawl up into that truck in order to fill the drills, I will think of football practice and find something to be thankful for—no wrestler’s bridge in my near future.

          

Time to Ship

      When September rolled around, the buffalo grass dried up, the sage emitted its pungent odor, and it was time to “ship cattle.” September meant a lot of other things, too, like starting back to school, finishing the wheat planting (we used to start planting in August), mowing, raking, stacking the millet to feed the cattle through the winter.

     It was time to put in a call to the local truck line and arrange for a date to load the cattle that would be going to market.  That meant herding the cattle into the old loading corral where we would sort the mama cows from the yearlings that would be taking a ride on the truck. 

     Shipping cattle was not a good time.  The cattle were used to roaming free in the pasture.  They never willingly went into the corral.  And one more thing nobody really liked to acknowledge:  it was time to say goodbye and abandon animals, some of which were like pets, to their fate.   

     I was recently reminded of that sadness I sometimes felt as I watched an animal disappear up the loading chute.   At the fair where we ran our usual shaved-ice business, a couple of young ladies were literally in tears as they waited in front of our booth for a cool treat to help them through their difficulty.   

    Earlier in the week, the sleek animals had been carefully curried and led around the show ring, the judges had pronounced, the ribbons had been awarded, congratulations offered by friends and family.   Just the day before, the buyers had made generous bids for the show’s top animals.

    The girls had just experienced the flip-side of pocketing a big check for their show animals.   They had loaded their pets onto the stock trailer for their last ride, the trip to the abattoir where they would be turned into steaks and chops.  It was a feeling I sometimes experienced at cattle-shipping when a bucket calf or an old familiar cow who had been a good mother but was getting to the age where she could no longer bear a calf climbed the chute into the truck.

     I suspect that feeling may have been at the root of Dad’s dislike of all things relating to cattle. 

     Of course, there was the opposing view.  No one was very sad to see the tail of the “fence-crawling stinker” pass through the truck’s end gate.  Or the wild one that would just as soon chase you and knock you down as look at you.

     We experienced our “shipping” moment ourselves this August.  Last year we posted a “For Sale” sign on our shaved-ice booth.  We had a couple of nibbles, but due to the business of moving from our house, we didn’t follow up and lost both prospective buyers.

     This year, the “For Sale” sign was up again, and we announced that it would be our last year whether we sold the business or not.  “Oh you said that last year,” said a friend who always drops by our booth during the Fair.  So I told him a farmer story (he’s a farmer).

     An old farmer picked up an old lamp and rubbed it.  Out popped a genii with his offer of three wishes.  “I want a 50-bushel wheat crop,” said the farmer.

     “Done,” said the genii.  “What is your second wish, Master?”

    “I want the price of wheat to go up to $8 a bushel.”

    “Done,” said the genii.  “What is your final wish, Master?”  But scratch his head as thoroughly as he could, the old farmer could not think of anything he really wanted bad enough to justify that important final wish.  

    Finally, the genii returned to his lamp, telling the farmer that when he made up his mind, he need only rub the lamp again and the genii would return to grant his final wish. A year went by before the genii received his summons.  “What is your final wish, Master?" asked the genii.

    “I want $8-a-bushel wheat.”

    “But Master, you have already had $8 wheat.”

     “I know,” said the farmer, “but this time I’m going to sell.”

     Sell we did.  It didn’t happen the way I had hoped.  I wanted someone to back their truck up and load everything right there at the fairgrounds. I would be done messing with it.  Or maybe somebody would take it all over on Thursday or Friday and we wouldn’t have to go at all on Saturday. None of those dreams worked out.

     Saturday afternoon came and the tenth block of ice had been converted to shavings.  We tore down the set and loaded up as usual, no buyer in sight.  A couple of people came by and got our phone number, but no truck backed up.

     Sunday we got a phone call.  The party would take the whole business.  OK.  I didn’t hold my breath.  We made an appointment for midweek and sure enough, they did show up in a pickup and I helped load up the shave-ice stuff for the last time, I think.  (Never say “never”)

    So the shaved-ice business was “shipped.”  There was some sadness to think I wouldn’t be the good-humor man at the fair any longer.  That feeling was quickly tempered by the thought I wouldn’t be maintaining and lifting the machines any more.  The stand, freezer, and canopy would clutter up the barn nevermore. ( Knowing how empty space attracts clutter, something will replace it.  If you build them, (shelves, storage space), it (junk) will come.)

      The Goodwife told everybody we had been doing it for 26 years.  I think, longer.  We bought those machines when we lived in Fort Morgan, 1985-88.  Even if it was ’88, that would still be 27 years.  Oh well. 

    Many adult customers remembered coming to the Fair to get a “snow cone”.  One lady brought her two kids and said she had been telling them both how much she looked forward to shaved-ice at the fair.

      A young cowboy (late 20’s, maybe 30) came by on Saturday to have a shaved-ice before taking his family home.  We remembered him as a young kid, and he reminisced  about fairs past.  When he left we were guessing his age and how long ago it had been. 

      Another guy who had been standing there waiting his turn and had listened to the conversation said, “I’m 42 and I can remember coming to get a shaved-ice at the Fair when I was a kid.”

     That cinched it.  We’ve done it long enough.  Bon voyage, shaved-ice business.

  

The Old “D”

    “Hey, it moved!”

     Somebody stepped on a snake?  No.

     A five-year-old kid playing with his front tooth?  No.

     A couple of old fellows playing in the machine shed?  Yes.

     In old tractor and engine lore, to free up a frozen motor, you jack up the hind wheel and tie a bar or post or something to the wheel to keep torque on the engine crankshaft.  Then you spray the cylinders with rust-penetrant every day or as frequently as you can.

     Then you wait.

    This strategy requires patience.  The picture was taken in July 2013.  I’m not sure how long after I rigged up the yard arm that I took the picture.  The daily anointments probably spaced into monthly applications during the cold months. 

     Products applied included WD-40, a Liquid Wrench concoction, and even some automatic transmission fluid.

    I didn’t want to mess with blocking up a wheel, so I attached straight to the flywheel.  In an exuberant burst of optimism, I even connected a safety chain to the upper end of the twelve- foot two-and-a-half-inch pipe I used for a lever, just in case the rust let loose suddenly just as I (or somebody else) was walking beneath the yard arm.  Nothing like erring on the side of safety.  OSHA made me do it, maybe.

    We waited and watched for at least two years.  I began to believe the old strategy was bogus and began dreaming up other solutions. My favorite:  on a cold, cold day, take a torch to the bottom of the cylinder block.  Maybe the cylinders would expand sooner than the piston and the difference in expansion would crack the rust.  I never got to try that one.

    I had already tried tapping on the cylinders with a heavy hammer before and after applying rust penetrant.  I also used a log cut to firewood length, laying it in each cylinder in turn and giving it a whack with the sledge.  Not a whit did the pistons budge with such heavy persuasion.

    Then one wet day in July of 2015, when the wheat was too damp to cut, Brother Harry meandered across the barn floor, reached up, and gave the pipe a playful tug.

    “Hey, it moved!”

     Could it be a figment of his imagination?  It wouldn’t move any further despite some serious pressure exerted on the yard arm.  Attempts to reverse the “movement” were stifled by the weight of the arm plus the looseness of the chain holding the arm to the flywheel.  We had to move the arm about 10 minutes on the clock, from the 10 o’clock position to 12 o’clock position in order to get the chain tightened for the reverse attempt.

     When the arm neared the 12 o’clock slot, it slid through the loosened chain to the floor.  The arm was not any good for torqueing either direction while resting on the floor.

    Other priorities beckoned. The “D” had to wait for a sunny Sunday morning following a Saturday evening quarter-inch rain shower.   We could see the neighbor’s combines sitting idle on a hilltop two miles to the east.  If they moved, we would know it was probably dry enough to harvest.     

      Back to the”D”.  With the east door open, we had good light for our project and we could easily keep an eye on the neighbor’s combines. The arm and the snub chain were removed from the flywheel and a flat bar inserted into the slot in the flywheel.

    With the bar, we could rock the crankshaft and flywheel back and forth the tiniest distance.  The firewood log was handy and a sledge hammer soon fetched.  With one of us applying blows to the log and the other pulling on the bar, we made progress.  By applying the log and hammer to the other piston and pushing on the bar instead pulling, we could go back to the original position.           

     Examination of the cylinders revealed that some kind of cleansing would be needed.  The left cylinder was fairly smooth with only a few rust spots.  The right cylinder was much worse.  The right piston had been farther back in the cylinder and the filthy mice had built a much bigger nest, had deposited a bushel or two of feces and tinkled a few liters of their caustic urine in the right cylinder.

      (Often I think we must look like mice in God’s eye, especially when I approach the Front Range and look at the “improvements” we have made on Nature.  Won’t there be a big box of D-con in our neighborhood soon?  Or has He figured out that given enough time, we will poison ourselves?  There could be a pretty big mess by then.)

     The best tactic for ridding the acne in the right cylinder seemed to be a stiff wire brush on an electric drill, replaced by a grinding wheel for the worst lumps.  A contributing factor may have been a judicious application of Iron Out, a laundry supplement for folks who have lots of iron in their water. 

     After a wire brushing, we would wipe out the residue with a newspaper page and go at it again with log, hammer, and bar.  Success breeds success.  Each attempt moved the pistons further.  With renewed vigor we attacked the rust deposits, and eventually the flywheel had made a complete rotation.

     A little oil in the cylinders and the flywheel could be turned by hand, without the bar.

 

      Then we were like the car-chasing dog who finally catches a car—now what?  We settled for making sure the cylinders were well oiled so as not to rust right away again.

     Woops!  The combines on the hill were no longer on the hill.  Instead, they were kicking up dust on the hillsides.  Time to get back to the wheat field.

John Deere #3

       As usual, harvest brought wet weather this year, though not nearly as much as some years.  The lack of substantial rain was a good thing.  Had it rained much, we would have had a real weed problem.  Harvesting wheat with green weeds is no fun.

     We had one full day and two or three half days when the grain was too damp to store in the grain bin.  So we had time to get into mischief.

     There were three “subjects” of our idle-time bullying.  The old Number3 John Deere combine was the first victim.  It has rested in the same place since 1967 or1968 or something like that.

    The last time it was used, we had suffered early hail damage.  Dad watched the crop “sucker out”, meaning a new bunch of heads grew on the hail-damaged stalks.  Weeds took advantage of the late crop.

    Dad used 2-4D on the weeds, applying it with the old KB-1 International pickup with the Willie Suchanek spray rig and a 50-gallon barrel in the bed.  The 2-4D stunted but didn’t kill the weeds.  We borrowed a swather from a neighbor.  I was home from the harvest run, so it must have been in August.

    I swathed the 160 acres in two halves, north and south using a 2N Ford tractor and a 14’ swather.  We removed the reel and sickle from the #3’s header and mounted a pickup device which uses slats and springs to pick up a windrow.  It was a bit of work to resurrect the old combine even then, as it hadn’t been in use for a few years then.

     We picked up one half of that field and only had to unload on the truck a time or two.  Besides wheat in the grain bin, there were many chunks of dried weed stems about the same size as a wheat seed.  It was a mess.  We quit after picking up the first half.

     Dad drove the truck to town.  Dick, the local elevator man, took a sample.  He stamped the weigh slip and said, “Back it up and dump it in the cleaner.”  Which he did.  By the time the trash was cleaned out, we had enough seed to plant that fall’s crop.

    The old #3 went to the section line where it slowly tried to sink into the earth.  It survived the onslaught of the “hiders”, Uncle Ricky’s nickname for the iron salvagers who cleaned off tons of junk from the junk yard the section line became.  He compared the iron salvagers to the buffalo hunters who slaughtered the buffalo, skinned them and left the meat to rot, derisively called “hiders” by those early-day environmentalists who abhorred the wanton slaughter of the bison solely for their hides.

      It took a couple of those wet times to get the old combine unstuck.  Grass and dirt grew over the sickle bar.  The weights for the counter balance that allowed the combine operator to raise and lower the header deck with some ease were holding the oneway down.

     Getting the weights on the counter balance arm was a task.  Without the weights, the header slumped to the ground while the arm stuck up about eight feet in the air.  Each weight is 80 pounds.  Getting the weights from the oneway to the bed of the 4X4 was a task.  Getting them eight feet up and over the 3” pipe that serves as the counterbalance arm was the first challenge.

    A stepladder on the back of the 4X4 was not the answer.  The G had to be started, the farm hand charged with enough hydraulic oil to go up the required eight feet.  The hay fork came off and the dirt scoop went on.

     The weights were transferred to the dirt scoop.  Brother Harry accompanied the weights on their elevator and after a struggle, all eight weights made it onto the arm.  But even with all eight weights on the arm, the header remained earthbound. 

     There was also the matter of freeing the header from the dirt and grass.  That was done by tile spade on an earlier day, when we didn’t realize the counter weights were necessary to our project.  I was trying a bumper jack at various places, so Harry got most of the shovel work.

     Weights in place, dirt and grass shoveled, the header still resisted our Revile.  The Farmhand scoop went under the outside end of the header and with a little lift, the old header sprang up into the air as the counterbalance weights and arms came tumbling down.

    

    The G wasn’t up to persuading the combine out of its foot-deep tracks.  We had to chain individually to all three of the wheels and pull backwards to break it loose.  Some additional shoveling was necessary in front of the wheels.

  

     A tug forward, rock back, a tug forward, rock back, and finally, out she came.  Meanwhile, in the west the clouds blued out the western horizon. We removed the chain and hooked directly to the draw bar.  I raced across the stubble (in first gear), trying to get our prize to the farmyard before I got soaked. 

     The G decided it had quite enough.  It started running rough about halfway across the field.  By judicious use of the choke, I coaxed it along.  Nearing the west end of the stubble and nearly home, it refused to respond to anything.  It died and refused our resuscitation efforts.

     Fortunately, the rain didn’t amount to much.  We had time to pull the spark plugs and the battery before we got wet.  The next morning we returned with clean plugs and fully-charged battery, and the G revived and completed the trip.  A little muddy spot threatened to halt the journey, but we cleared that and the old #3 has a new resting place north of the farmyard.

     Now what?  Well, if nothing else, we have a new yard decoration, and a small piece of snow fence.  The motor is frozen from rust.  There are a few pieces missing, like the reel and the sickle.  Will it run again?

    We used to use the lofty grain bin as a goal for hitting baseballs, a sort of combination baseball-basketball game.  I guess it could be incorporated into the golf course.