Half a century afterward, Charles Haecherl of Veseli, Minn., discovered that in the old iron world, what goes around sometimes comes around.

When he set out to restore the tractor he'd used as a 15-year-old, he encountered damage inflicted by an irate teenager … himself.

'I had to pound out dents in the fenders,' he chuckles ruefully. 'When I was a kid I'd get frustrated if the tractor wouldn't start, or if I'd get stuck while plowing, so I'd take a wrench or a hammer and pound on the fender.'

Biggest tractor on the farm

Charles' father, Andrew, bought a new 1950 Custom Model B tractor for the Haecherl farm near Lisbon, N.D. Custom Mfg. Corp. of Shelbyville, Ind., made the tractors starting in 1947. 'Custom tractors were different because they had a 6-cylinder Chrysler engine,' Charles says, 'and not a lot of tractors had a 6-cylinder at that time.' It was equally unusual for Chrysler automobile dealerships to sell tractors.

'The local Chrysler dealership, Hansen Motors of Lisbon, had that Model B with the narrow-front on the lot and Dad brought it out to the farm,' Charles recalls. 'We used it for a while, until Dad told them he would rather have a wide-front than the narrow-front, which came on the Model C. So they ordered it for him, and when it came, Dad returned the B.'

The 1950 Custom Model C was the largest tractor on the Haecherl farm, ahead of a 1946 Minneapolis-Moline R, so the C was used for most of the small-grain work. 'We field cultivated in the spring, plowed in the fall, seeded, planted corn, harrowed, pulled loads of grain, did everything with it,' Charles says.
As a 15-year-old in 1950, one of Charles' jobs on the family's 320 acres was plowing. 'I was really happy to be driving a new tractor out in the field,' he says. 'But in August, when it got really hot, I had to take a 2-bottom Minneapolis-Moline plow and plow 60 acres. Dad always insisted on plowing around the field, instead of up and down, and that 60 acres seemed like it took forever.'

The tractor's boxcar hitch slowed progress. Strike a rock, the hitch trips and the plow comes loose. 'You'd go 20 to 30 feet before you got stopped,' Charles says, 'and then you had to back up, get lined up, hook up and then you'd go on your way again.'

Charles' dad insisted on plowing around the field to reduce the number of dead furrows. 'Every time you would strike out a section,' Charles says, 'you would have a dead furrow. You could have several in a large field, and those dead furrows could get pretty deep if you weren't controlling right and working the levers right. In the spring you'd have to work and work those furrows to get them filled in. Dad wanted only one dead furrow, which would be in the middle of the field if you plowed around it, starting on the outside.' At the time, he didn't agree with his dad's methods, Charles says, but now that he's an adult, he understands.