PULL THIS LEVER...

            The crane was a 30 ton P&H truck crane. My Uncle Gerald Allen was the operator. The Compagne Construction Company was the owner of the crane. Their yard was located about 3 blocks down the street from where we lived in Cortland New York. The crane looked huge to my 5 or 6 year old eyes, and I suppose that for it’s time it was pretty good sized as truck cranes went. It was seldom in the company yard, and Gerald and his oiler went all over the state lifting things with it, or digging with a clamshell bucket, etc. At that time (about 1960 I suppose), truck cranes hadn’t been around all that long, and they weren’t as big as they are today.  Today’s truck cranes are rated from 15 to 400 tons, and I should mention that when we speak of a 400 ton crane, it is a reference to the amount of weight it will lift, including it’s boom and rigging, etc.

            Since it’s been around fifty years since this story took place, and Gerald has been gone for several years now, and the company may be gone as well, I feel safe in telling it! On this particular summer day, Gerald and the crane were right in Cortland, and my mom had taken me to watch him do whatever it was he was doing that day . I believe he was knocking down an old building to make room for a new one, but I don’t know for sure. Anyway, when he saw us standing there during a lull in the action, he yelled for me to come over and climb up in the cab with him! WOW! Of course, he didn’t have to ask twice! I rode with him for some time as he worked the levers and foot pedals to make the crane do his bidding. Then I got another surprise- Gerald told me “Pull this lever”, and (with his hand still on the lever, too) I did. The cable went up! WOW! After that for what to me seemed to be the rest of the day, MY HANDS WORKED THE LEVERS OF THE CRANE!!! Of course his were really doing the work, but to me at the time, it was me doing it!

            I asked Gerald why he kept working his feet, and he explained that for each cable there was a brake and a clutch to control the winch. The brakes were controlled by the foot pedals and the winch clutches by the levers. Then he showed me how to swing the crane, and took us in a

FULL CIRCLE

! WOW!!!

            The whole thing probably lasted all of 15 or 20 minutes at the most, but it seemed to be quite a while for me, and of course I loved every second of it! I doubt if my feet ever hit the pavement at all on the way to the car! I doubt if any of this could ever happen today.  Nowadays, you have to have a hard hat, yellow vest, insurance on top of insurance, etc. Not to mention that the machine itself probably cost well over a million dollars (some in the multimillions),and I can’t blame the owners for being cautious with their investments, but I feel sorry for that kid who would like to have the ride of his life but can only watch from afar these days. But for me, this experience was one of the neatest things to happen to me up until that point in my life, and I look back fondly on it to this day! It also gave me a life-long “thing” for cranes.  To this day, I still like to count cranes every time I pass through Denver (the nearest really big city to me) or watch them at work every chance I get. I recently (well, a year and a half ago now- amazing how time flies!), watched for 2 nights as 2 cranes set bridge beams for an overpass along I25-in mid March and very cold weather with snow falling lightly one of the 2 nights!

            I was somewhat disappointed, though, because they were newer style hydraulic cranes with telescoping booms, not the old lattice booms that were erected in sections.  These new cranes are much quicker to set up, tear down, and move than the lattice work boom cranes were (or are), so I suppose that’s why they used them. The beams were 120 feet long and weighed in at 250,000 lbs. each! One of the cranes was a 400 tonner and the other was a 360 tonner. I hadn’t been aware until then that telescoping boom cranes were getting that much lifting capacity.

            When Uncle Gerald started in cranes, that 30 tonner was pretty goo sized, but by the time he retired in 1977 (If I remember the year correctly), the last crane he ran was a Link-Belt 300 tonner with 300 ft. of boom and a 30 ft. gib. (A gib is a short section of boom which is added above the normal boom head section and usually at about a 45 degree angle to it, so that it allows the crane to reach out further horizontally than it normally could, but at a significant loss of lifting capacity.) The job he was doing with it was setting transformers that weighed around 15 tons on pads where they would be working. The pads, though were behind a building and more transformers, out of Gerald’s vision. They had to be lifted, swung over the top of the building and the other transformers and their high tension wires, and placed on their pads, all by directions given by Gerald’s rigger over a radio headset! Talk about nerve wracking!

            This is not, believe it or not, an uncommon occurrence for crane operators today. At work, we have on many occasions had a crane reach over the top of one of our buildings and lower his hook through a temporary hole in the roof and lift a broach or press form a horizontal position in which it was brought through the door into the building, to it’s upright, vertical position where it will be used.

             I’ve even run one crane myself, but that’s another story for another time!

Olivers

Olivers were snazzy looking tractors! At least the row crop models from the 60 to the 88 were. When the “Super” series came out in (I believe) 1949, Oliver couldn’t resist the urge to “improve” the tractors by going from their signature red wheels to the same “Meadow Green” as the tractor bodies were painted. I think they look much less appealing than those with the red wheels. In about 1960, the White corporation bought out Oliver and changed the color scheme to green and white-period. No yellow grill, no red or yellow stripe surrounding the model number where it was cast into the frame below the radiator. Yuk!    

            My Uncle Wilson’s “big” tractor when I was a little kid was an Oliver 70 or 77, I don’t know for sure which. Probably, it was a 70, but there are little shreds of a couple of memories in my head that lead me to think it might have been a 77.  One of those is of a picture in one of my coloring books of the front grill of a tractor that looked suspiciously like a 77’s nose, with horizontal bars and so on. I colored the grill yellow and added a red 77 beneath the grill and showed the picture to my Dad and told him that it was Uncle Wilson’s tractor. He didn’t believe me, but was surprised the next time we went to Wilson’s farm, which we did almost every Friday night.  It’s one of those “I’m almost sure this is right, but not quite 100%” feelings, if you know what I mean.

            The other memory is more concrete, at least in part.  Wilson’s farm was mostly side hill, and it was about a hundred yards up his driveway to the house and barn from the road. On one of our Friday night visits, the Oliver was parked above the barn facing down the driveway. Wilson was milking when we arrived, and after getting our usual tin cup full of warm milk from the Surge bucket milker, I asked if I could climb up on the Oliver and pretend to drive it. He said okay and away I went! I was “driving” up a storm when I managed to step on the clutch and now I was REALLY driving, and scared to death! We were gaining speed at a good clip, and somehow I managed to take my foot off the clutch, and we came to a stop just as Dad and Wilson came running out of the barn to see what all the yelling was about! My dad would have tanned my hide, but Wilson told him that I had asked if it was okay and he had told me it was, and he hadn’t checked to see if the brakes were wet, which they hadn’t been.  What makes me think the tractor had to be a 77 is that the clutch pedal on a 70 is on the left side of the transmission case, and the one on the 77 is on the left also, but comes up above the operator’s platform, and it would have been much more easy for me to step on it if the tractor was a 77. 

            Another memory fragment, though is of riding with Wilson on the Oliver when he was plowing on of the fields. I seem to recall standing between the fender and the transmission case, which would have been more likely on a 70, because the operator’s area on a 70 has floor pans placed on either side of the transmission case, and the 77 has an operator’s platform above the transmission case and has just the axle housings between the platform and the fenders.

            Whichever model it was, I guess I will never know for sure, since Wilson and anyone else who might have known for sure are all gone now.  My Dad is still alive, but he doesn’t know. On one of my visits back home in the late nineties or very early 2000’s , I asked Wilson if he knew where it had wound up after his farm sale in 1961. He told me he did, and we went to see if it might be for sale, as I had by then begun collecting tractors. Unfortunately, the man who had bought it was not home, and his wife said he had Alsheimer’s disease and would probably not know where it had gone when he traded it for a 770.  I tried to contact a tractor collector in Cortland County by the name of Roger Cairn(s), who my relatives told me had several Olivers, and might know where the tractor was, but there was no response. So Roger, if you are still out there, and you happen to read this and know where the tractor is, and what model it is, please let me know!  

O.H. “RED” FRIESEN

O.H. “Red” Friesen was, to put it bluntly, one of the finest people to ever walk the earth! I am lucky to have had his friendship, and both surprised and saddened to learn of his recent death at the age of 87. I had always thought he’d make it to the 100 mark if anybody could.

            Red was a very handy individual who could build or fix almost anything. He’d grown up on a farm in Minnesota and learned to get by for the most part with what was at hand, and it was a skill that served him well all his life. At one point in the late 1990’s, Bill Baker, Brian Alexander, and I were in the process of building a roll-back bed on a Mack truck so that we could haul our tractor pull sled on that instead of having Bill drive it to the pulls. The bed was going to slide back about 22 feet on telescoping rectangular tubes, and we had to cut a slot in the bottom of the outside tubes to clear the hinge where the bed would tilt. When we did cut the slot (with a torch), the tubes warped badly, and we had no luck at all in trying to get them straightened out. Bill called Red, who jumped in his truck and headed down to give us a hand. With the aid of the truck frame, a couple chains, a hydraulic jack, a sledge hammer, and Red’s directions, we had both tubes straight again in about an hour. I asked him where he’d learned that trick, and he told us that when he worked for the construction company where he spent most of his working years,  someone had rolled one of their large off-road haul trucks (essentially one of those huge mining haul trucks) and bent the frame. They needed the truck, so Red and one of his mechanics stripped the truck to the frame and used those same tools to get it straight again, and had the truck back in operation in 3 days! It was very typical of Red to be willing to help out whenever he could.

            Red had been in B24 Liberator bombers during World War II and was shot down on his second mission. He was the last of the crew to get out of the plane and he once told me that the cows he could see on the ground were nearly full sized when his parachute opened. The landing  had injured his back, and it hurt him throughout his life. After our second year of pulling with our sled, we took it to Red’s place and Red and I removed the engine so another member of the ownership group could overhaul it for us. Red had told me to be there on the appointed day at 9:00 am, and when I got there he was sitting in his shop with 2 rolling carts full of tools ready to go. We each took one side of the engine and began removing all the connections and accessories. The truck was a 1963 International cab-over, and the radiator had to be removed to get the engine out. When I was removing the radiator bolts on my side, I discovered that there was one underneath the radiator that required you to lay over the front tire and the top of the engine and the radiator and reach down in front of the radiator to get at it. I knew Red’s back was being particularly painful at the time, so I told him as I came up with my bolt that I would get the one on his side, too. But as I said it and looked over at him, he was coming up with his bolt in his hand, and he looked at me and grinned and said “This getting old isn’t for sissy’s you know!” As I’ve grown older myself, I’ve thought of that incident many times and got another chuckle from it and thought how true it is! Red always had a great attitude and a smile was on his face more often than not for all the years I knew him.

            I’ll miss Red for these and many more reasons than I have space to relate here, and I know all his friends and acquaintances feel the same.

THE MODEL R JOHN DEERE- AWESOME

The first time I climbed up to the seat of the R, I was struck  by the view over the hood. The hood was long and wide compared to the other tractors on the farm. It reminded me of the time I was with my Uncle Gordon and we stopped at the Allis Chalmers dealer in Cinncinnatus, NY where Gordon lived.  That would have been in the early 1960’s I believe. They were also a hardware store, I think, but they had a brand new D21 in the lot. The D21 was the largest tractor in the Allis Chalmers line at the time, with over 100hp. I climbed up in the seat and was amazed by the length and breadth of the hood! I thought it must be like a locomotive engine would look (although it was to be many years before I ever got to touch one of those!). The R hood had the same effect, and I was going to get to drive it!!!

            My first John Deere experience had been in 1966 when my cousins, the Taber’s of Mecklinberg, NY bought their 2510 diesel new. I have bled green ever since, and by the time they came across the R, I had been interested in antique tractor collecting for some time and had a couple of JD’s of my own. So I knew that the R had been JD’s first production diesel tractor, and had been in development for about 10 years before it hit the market, and that when it did, it became an instant hit (well as instant as tractor models get).  They were known to be workhorses that were hard to stall and could do more than their hp rating would lead you to believe it could. About the only failing they had ( if it could be called a failing) was that their pto system could be a little trouble prone. It had a starting engine (or “pony motor”) like Caterpillar diesel tractors did at the time , and I remember being shown where the gas tank for the pony motor was hidden under the hood like an oil bath air cleaner bowl , which was about the size of it. Then I was shown how to start both engines, and I remember thinking that the diesel sounded like somebody beating on an empty 55 gallon drum when it idled. Whatever I did with it that first day caused me to fall in love with it (which isn’t too hard for a tractor to do, really), and I would choose it whenever I could.

            On one occasion, I took it, with a load of  manure in a large spreader we usually pulled with the 2840 (an 85 hp tractor), up to the field on the top of the hill, which has about 18 inches to 2 feet of soil above a layer of shale. It had been a wet year, and I was told not to stop or I would be stuck. I was told to use (I believe) 3^rd gear and keep it wide open, which I did. We were chugging along making a nice cloud of black smoke when I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye, that mud was flowing into the tire tracks behind the rear tractor wheels. I looked more closely, and was startled to see that we were rolling along on the surface of the shale, and that was about 18-20 inches deep at that point. WOW!! I knew that if we did come to a stop. I would have a heck of a time getting to the edge of the field from where we were without losing  a shoe or 2 in the mud! But , much to my amazement and relief, we kept chugging along until the load was gone.

            What an illustration of what torque does for a tractor- it’s far more important than just hp. (I wish the engineers at Kioti would learn that lesson- the engine in my CK25 could use some stroke, and therefore some torque!). John Deere has always had torquey engines, much to my delight.

            The man the Tabers bought the tractor from had told them they would never be able to stall the R, so of course we had to try to! Another job we did with the R when the 2840 wasn’t available was running the feed grinder.  It was that job we used to try our best to stall it. At the time, we still picked corn on the cob and stored it in cribs, where it would be shoveled out when it was needed.  While attempting to stall the R, we shoveled corn until the pop-off door on the top of the grinder came loose. No luck- The R didn’t appear to notice at all. So on the next load, the biggest one of us, namely me,  was sent to the top of the grinder to add my bulk to the spring pressure that held the door down. Then Carl and Paul shoveled- and shoveled-and shoveled some more. Finally, the black smoke signals slowed down until the last beat finally happened,  but it had taken all the shoveling the two of them could do! One more shovelful  and the tractor would have won!  Then we had the job of unloading the grinder without breaking it, too.

            The guys called Jake, the former owner to tell him they’d stalled the R, and he couldn’t believe it until they explained how we’d done it, and he said “but it da—ed near killed you to do it!

            So there you have it, the time we stalled the R. But we didn’t break the pto, either!

THE TRIP HOME…AND THE CROSSING OF THE CREEK…

             About a mile or so down the road from my Uncle Wilson’s farm outside of East Homer NY there lived a pair of spinster sisters whose name I don’t recall 50 plus years later. They would be East Homer’s version of the Baldwin Sisters on “Walton’s Mountain”.  The most memorable thing about them to me was that they shared one set of false teeth between them which had been their father’s I think, and they didn’t fit either of the ladies mouths well!

            Wilson and I had ridden down to their place on the Ford 8N to do some work for them, maybe plowing their garden, but I’m not sure. Anyway, when the work was done, the ladies insisted that we have a glass of cider with them before we headed home. They went to a barrel in their barn and drew out a large glass of some of the best apple cider I ever remember having, then they went to another barrel and got 3 glasses of cider from that barrel. Their glasses were even larger than mine as I recall, and mine wasn’t small. Wilson was a good visitor (conversation for the sake of conversation is something that seems to be rare today, but was a commonly practiced art then), and he and the sisters talked their way through their cider, and then they insisted we have another glass, and we did. By the time this second glass had been chatted away, the three of them had become a little unsteady on their feet, and they sat on available buckets or whatever during their third round. I don’t remember any of the conversation topics, but I do remember that it was fun listening to the folks talking and that they made me feel quite welcome.  But all “good” things come to an end and it came time to head home to the farm. For some reason that I didn’t fully understand at the time, it took all three of the adults to make it to the tractor, and I remember Wilson telling me I was going to have to drive home! When I heard that, I felt about 10 feet tall!

            The Ford wasn’t real fast, even as tractors go, and I savored every minute of the ride! We drove alongside the road so as not to disrupt traffic, even though there wasn’t much of it.  When we got home, there were cows to be milked, but it may have been Aunt Virginia who did it that night!

            Of course, the cider they were drinking was as “hard” as could be, while mine was not.  Which leads me to wonder how the term “hard” came to be used in this context?...

            On another occasion, I recall riding on the Ford to a hay field across the road from the farm. Wilson had bought another piece of property which was located across the road from the original farm. The farm was located on a side hill above the road, which was graded out along the hillside. The new piece of ground went down hill from the road to a small creek and then up the other side of the valley, which was where the field we were headed for was located.  It was my first time down the lane to these fields and the creek was flowing strongly. I thought it looked nearly impossible to cross and said so to Wilson, who told me it would be no problem. I’ve always been something of a worrier, so his nonchalance didn’t convince me.

            Wilson put the tractor in low or second gear, and we waded through the creek with no more than wet tires for our trouble. Whenever I think of this episode, it always reminds me that things can appear much larger to a kid  than they do to us adults! I doubt if the creek was more than 10 feet wide or more than 6 inches deep, and the bottom was rough because it was rocky, which also kept it from being muddy.  To this day, I think of this whenever I go 4 wheeling and come to a creek crossing…  

THE FIRST DRIVE

            I was mowing at the Western Museum of Mining and Industry the other day (one of my favorite places in the world),  using the Museum’s  1960 Ford model 661 tractor and brush hog mower.  It has a 5 spd transmission, 38hp., live pto and hydraulics, but it still drives and looks somewhat like the Ford 8N that was the first tractor I ever drove.  As it always does, the museum’s Ford took me back about 51 years to a field on my Uncle Wilson’s farm in East Homer, NY. 

            The occasion was a yearly ritual known to most every farmer in Cortland County NY, and many other counties, there, also. It was the day of “pickin’ stone”. Most of my uncles were there to help Wilson with the job, which is something that to this day often still ends up being done the old fashioned way- by bending over, picking up the stones and placing them in or on whatever conveyance is handiest. Naturally, the more hands are available, the quicker the job gets done. I was 4 or 5 years old on this particular day, and I wanted to help, but of course I was too small to be of much help actually handling the stones, so I was put on the 8N to steer as it idled along in low gear pulling the “stoneboat”, which I think was nothing more than an old barn door with maybe a couple of skids bolted on to the bottom of it to prevent wear, and a chain or cable attached to either side and looped around the tractor’s draw pin to pull it. It had the advantage of being low to the ground, thereby not requiring the pickers to lift the rocks very far to load it.

            Putting me on the tractor was almost certainly just a way to keep me quiet and out of harm’s way while Dad and the others did the real work, but I had ridden with Wilson and my dad on this tractor (and on Wilson’s other tractor, an Oliver 70 or 77 row crop), many times. For those who don’t know what a Ford 8N (and the later 661) is like, they are utility tractors, which means that they are low slung for good stability, have a relatively short wheelbase, provided by a front axle that is swept back so that the front of the front tires is about even with the nose of the tractor, and the operator sits with his feet astraddle of the transmission housing and his rear end above the tractor’s rear axle. The 8N had about 20 hp and a 4spd transmission and was the third version of Ford tractor with the now ubiquitous 3 point hitch.  On the 8N, there are nice footrest pans and the clutch pedal is on the left side of the transmission and works vertically, so that the operator needs only to lift his foot slightly and then press the pedal don until it rests on the footrest. The brakes (one for each rear wheel), have pedals that work similarly and they are both located above the right footrest, oriented so that if you want to stop in a straight line, you can step on both pedals at the same time. The operator is also protected from the rear wheels by fenders which I have always though were pretty cool because the have the Ford emblem embossed into them, and the emblem is painted red, so it stands out from the gray fenders really well. All in all, it was a pretty good place to stash a tractor loving 5 year old!

            As we approached one end of the field, my uncle Chet, who at that time still lived not far away in the village of Tully, stepped in front of the tractor and bent over a stone that was partially embedded in the dirt, and he didn’t straighten up right away, which scared me!  He was probably a good 50 feet or more ahead of the tractor, and I’m sure he was aware of it coming slowly toward him, but from my perspective at the time, he appeared to be right in front of the tractor.  Sitting in the seat, my field of vision was pretty limited, so I stood up, which helped a little, but not much, because the footrests are located toward the bottom of the transmission case, which is probably a good foot tall. Chet was still not visible, so I yelled at him to get out of the way!  He either didn’t respond or told me not to worry, so I stepped on the clutch and the brakes like I’d seen Wilson and Dad do. The tractor stopped like I knew it would, and you should have seen people stand up then! None of them had any inkling that I might know how to stop and start the tractor!

            Since that day, I have driven almost everything you can drive (on land anyway), with a few exceptions: I would love to drive a John Deere 8010 someday, and also a mine haul truck. I would also like to run a railroad engine sometime (both a steamer and a diesel!).  I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to try any of these, but maybe  someday!

            To this day, I have a real soft spot for the Ford 8N.  Not only is it a fun, stylish, little tractor to drive, but I like the gray and red color scheme, too. Later, in the very early 60’s, Ford switched it’s tractors to a gray and blue color scheme, which has continued to this day with the New Holland tractors that are the present day descendants of the Ford tractor line. I happen to think that this particular shade of blue is horrendous, maybe because I liked the 8N with it’s gray and red so well. During the time frame when Ford switched colors, there was a period when you could buy a new red and gray tractor and if you wanted, the dealer would paint the red areas blue at Ford’s expense, and I think this is what happened with the 661 at the museum.  It has red underneath the blue, and sometime, I would like to paint it red again.  I’d also like to find an affordable 8N, but that is unlikely, because they are still very useful, and thus very popular and expensive.

            The stone pickin’ episode is not the only good memory I have of the 8N,  but the others will have to wait…