Willie’s Shed Floor

     Willie Suchanek had some unconventional ideas.  He thought his tractor cab should be big enough to stand up in.  Having been confined to sitting in my tractor cab all summer, I think it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

     I helped Willie out the summer of 1961 I believe it was.  He had a Cockshut tractor, a product of Canada.  It had a six-foot cab that allowed the operator to stand.  It was still a bit primitive as far as cabs go.  The windows didn’t open.  You either had the windows in, or you took them out.

      It got powerful hot with the windows in, so sometime in June, we took the windows out.  The “windows” were really plastic sheets that collected dust and scratched pretty badly when you tried to wipe the dust off in order to see. Getting rid of the plastic-paned window was a good thing.

     The cab was pretty much a sunshade from then on, a sunshade you could stand up under.

     Willie’s cab ideas evolved.  He had sinus problems.  His doctor told him he needed to get out of the dust.  When he traded for a new tractor, the cab was not only big enough to stand up in, had real glass windows, but was also air-conditioned.  Willie’s otolaryngologist was happy. He was out of the dust.

      Willie also liked to store his tractor inside out of the weather during the winter months.  The six-foot cab on top of the tractor created a problem.  A mere eight-foot door wouldn’t work.  The door would have to be at least ten feet if not higher.

     To store his tractor and his pickup, Willie had a pole shed built, which he always called “the shed”.  To accommodate the unusual tractor cab, the shed had a high east side with a tall door.  It looked like someone had taken a normal shed and went up the roof slope until he got high enough to admit the tractor cab, then cut it off at that point.  The east slope of the roof was truncated.  Meanwhile, the west roof sloped down to about six feet above the ground.

     Inside, the floor sloped up so that it was head-bonking territory on the west side of the building where roof and floor sloped towards each other.  When I started helping Willie, the floor was dirt.  That would change.  It would be concrete before the year was done,

      Getting the floor ready for concrete took some time.  One day we called on Johnny Emmerling who had a fresno.  A fresno?  A fresno was a horse-drawn dirt scoop.  It was about five or six feet wide, about three feet front to back with a blade suitable for scraping the dirt, and the capacity to hold maybe a third  of a yard of sand or gravel.  It had a long handle extending out the back of the contraption for the operator.  In its original state, it was meant to be harnessed to a team of horses.

      We loaded the machine into Willie’s Dodge pickup and headed back to the shed.  We unloaded down by the reek south of the shed.  We harnessed the fresno to the pickup with a twenty-foot length of rope.  I drove the pickup with strict instructions to stay well away from the creek bed.

      Willie manned the fresno while I made a series of circles with the pickup.  Willie guided the fresno into the gravel in the creek.  By raising the handle, he could force the fresno to dig into the gravel.  When the scoop was nearly full, he would pull the handle down, and the fresno would scoot along with its load until It was well out of the creek.  Then Willie raised the handle until it was vertical and the fresno dumped its load in a nice compact pile.  My first and only experience with a fresno.

      The gravel piles were for the concrete we would mix to run the shed floor.  After we had a a few piles, we unhooked the fresno and shoveled the piles onto the pickup.  We hauled the gravel up by the shed where it would be handy and made a big sand pile there.   We worked a few days getting enough gravel in the pile.

       The shed had been there a few years, long enough to have collected any building’s quota of junk, oil, grease, antifreeze, spare parts for various pieces of equipment.  That all had to be moved.

       It was while moving that stuff Willie got a cricket in his pants.  Who was to know if it might not be a spider or something poisonous?  Willie dropped the cardboard box he was carrying, jerked down his pants, and started flailing away at the invader.  After several slaps, he muttered, “Got to be out now, bastard.”  I think I didn’t laugh right then, but I have laughed several times since.

       We had to level the dirt and set up some forms, but we maintained the unconventional slope of the floor.  It would rise from east to west at better than an inch per foot.  Willie insisted we wrap the poles with galvanized flashing where the concrete would meet post.  I thought that was entirely unnecessary, but experience has taught me it was a good idea. 

     How many wooden posts have I replaced in fences where a well-meaning person poured concrete around a wooden post?  The post nearly always rots off where it meets the concrete.  Here some fifty years later, Willie’s posts and his shed stand firm, no rotted poles.

      I don’t remember for sure, but I think we actually did the concrete work during teacher’s convention, which would have been a four-day weekend in October.  We worked two or three days, and I know we didn’t work on Sunday.

     Willie borrowed our little cement mixer, which could mix maybe a third of a bag of cement with the right amount of gravel.  An eighty-pound bag of Sack Crete just about fills the mixer.  If such a thing was available then, we didn’t know it.

      There was no electricity at Willie’s shed, so he took the electric motor off and installed his Lawson auger engine, the same one I use today.  auger engine.   He had stockpiled bags of cement.  He also had many buckets of water, which we could refill from a windmill and stock tank near the creek where we got the gravel.

      We set up the mixer and began mixing sand, water, and cement powder.  I think we placed the cement mixer where we could dump it where the concrete was needed, so we didn’t have to wheelbarrow the stuff.  We would slide the mixer left or right and back away from the developing floor.

     Hilbert Korsvold helped the first day.  It was long and grueling.  Each dump of the little cement mixer didn’t make much of a dent in the four-inch floor.  Hilbert had a cold.  He didn’t show up for the second day, so Dad got pressed into service.  After two days, (or was it three?) the north half of the floor was done.  

     I don’t remember doing the south half of the floor.  I must not have been involved.  I was in the shed enough times after that to know that the south floor did get done.

     The tractor could go into the shed door, the front wheels rolling up the incline.  When the back wheels were in far enough to close the door, it was time to stop so the top of the cab didn’t contact the rafters.  It worked fine.

      Willie would go on to have a third tractor with a tall cab.  He would continue to farm into the late seventies when he sold out to the neighbors and retired permanently to Denver.  Some of his unconventional ideas survive him, as does his shed with its cement floor.