Uncle's 21 Massey

      My memory reminds me of a big plastic bag filled with water.  At first, there’s just a little drippy leak.  Then it develops into a stream, and then a gush as the pin hole spreads into a fissure.  First, the memories come slowly, and then the rupture brings them out in a gush.

    So it was with the old Massey.  As I explored that story, another one came forth.  http://50farm.blogspot.com/2014/03/21-massey.html; http://50farm.blogspot.com/2014/03/21-massey-part-2.html

    Sometime in the early fifties, Dad borrowed Uncle Walter’s 21 Massey.  It was about a fifty mile trip between our farm and Uncle’s place.  As harvest time approached, Dad hired neighbor Gene to haul the Massey on his GMC truck. 

    I vaguely remember Dad going with Gene to fetch the combine.  He was gone most of the day.  I have a more specific memory of their arrival and unloading the combine.

     In those olden days, the lane from what is now County Road 26 ran straight west from the house to the county road.  That road left a ten-acre patch south of the lane and bordering the quarter section next to our “home quarter.”  In 1960, I believe it was, the folks decided to reroute the lane to run along the half mile line between our property and what then belonged to Baughman Corporation.  

     Somehow, the county crew did the road building.  It may have been a deal allowing the county to haul gravel out of our pasture, but I’m not sure.  The county boys dug two ditches with their machines, using the removed dirt to elevate the roadway to its present level a foot or two above the bordering fields.  They also hauled gravel and bladed it smooth.  For a few months, until spring and time to plow the field, we had two lanes running from CR26 to the house.  Hardly anyone ever used the new road.  Willie Suchanek referred to the new road as the “Interstate” and the old road as a “service road.”  Like everybody else, he took the service road.

      It wouldn’t be until the spring of 1960 when the old road was subjected to first the chisel, then the oneway disk that we started using the new road.  The mailbox had to be relocated to the new junction, and from there on out, the old road was history, fading gradually, but not completely, into the adjacent field.  Standing west of the farm house, a good eye can still detect the old road’s route by the slight rise running due west.

     The extreme southwest corner of the ten-acre patch, also the southwest corner of the farm, stood four or five feet above the road level due to natural terrain and somewhat to the road builders having shaved a bit off a natural rise to smooth out the road.  Instead of a ditch, the removal of dirt to elevate the road left a “cliff” (at least it seemed a cliff to us plains children used to the flat terrain) from the field’s edge down to the “ditch”. 

     As a kid riding on combine or tractor with Dad, making that first round which, passed by the cliff, was scary.  If tractor or combine wheel slipped over the edge, we would surely roll!  The new road took away that danger.  Now, when you turn off the county road, you climb a gentle incline of eight or ten feet, at which point you are at the apex of the hill, and it is gently downhill all the way to the farm yard.  No more cliff.

          Before the road revamp, the cliff did provide a platform to load and unload equipment.  Custom combine crews always used that corner of the farm to load and unload their combines.  They used scoop shovels to dig and pile so that the truck’s rear dual wheels were level.

     I remember Gene backing up carefully to the cliff.  It was a bit of a chore to get a truck crossways on the county road in order to have the truck’s bed square to the field edge.  Gene was in and out of the truck as he checked his progress and made adjustments to get the truck situated properly.  The combine got unloaded.

     After harvest, it was time to return the combine to Uncle Walter.  There was something about riding with Gene, or something else, that made Dad decide that the combine wouldn’t go back the same way it came.   Dad said something about Gene being a nervous wreck during the whole trip.

     So bright and early one late July morning, Dad and Uncle Ricky mounted the combine and took off for Yoder at about eight or ten miles per hour, the combine’s top speed in road gear.  The rest of the family followed in the car a few hours later.

       I don’t remember a lot about the trip.  Our combine drivers took country roads to avoid the highway traffic.  We tried to follow in their wake. One thing I do remember was meeting a combine on the country road headed in the opposite direction.  The driver flagged us down and asked for directions to Karval.

      I couldn’t hear much of the conversation sitting in the back seat.  What I remember was seeing and hearing the whine of the two big drive belts on the side of the combine, just outside the car window where I was sitting.  It certainly wasn’t an earth-hugging Massey, as it towered over our old Chevy.  In later years, I would recall that machine and speculate that it was a John Deere 55, a fairly recent addition to the self-propelled combine inventory.

       I seem to recall that we eventually caught up with Dad and Ricky.  Their trip had been interrupted by a thunderstorm that sent them to the rear of the combine where they took refuge under the bonnet covering the straw walkers to keep from getting soaked.

       I remember very little of the rest of that trip.  I think we went on ahead to “Aunty and Uncle’s”.  I don’t remember the combine finishing the trip.  I was probably distracted by playing with Cousin James.  We probably had supper and headed for home, all seven of us in the ’50 Chev, as we did occasionally in those olden days.

     My guess is that Dad decided that neither hauling nor roading a combine fifty miles was to his liking.  He would buy a well-used 21 Massey of his own and even go on to repair the old John Deere number 3 pull type.

      I’m not sure what happened to Uncle’s 21 Massey.  I’m guessing it was sold at his sale when they left the farm and moved to Kansas.