"You've probably never heard the song, 'The Old Gray Mare, She Pooped on the Whiffle Tree,' have you?" he asks a visitor.
As you wander Otis' property, he recalls stories connected to individual pieces of equipment. In fact, nearly every piece of equipment has a story attached to it.
The left-handed, wooden-beam cast iron plow was found in an old corncrib on the Indiana homestead of Otis' great-grandfather. A wheeled cultivator with steel rims and hubs was found buried in Nemaha County, Kan. A small dumping wagon, probably used to harvest root crops, has been specially outfitted with hoops and a tarpaulin cover. Otis takes it to shows billed as
The hay carrier is from his grandfa- ther's barn. A Papec silage filler remind Otis of the summer he spent cutting silage on 40 drought-stricken Kansas farms when the dead corn wasn't good, for anything else. He worked straight through the summer and sold his origi-nal machine on the last day he worked. He bought his next one 50 years later as a collector's item.
One of Otis' favorite stories concerns a Rumely gas engine based on an Olds design. He found it in Kansas, literally grown into a tree, high off the ground and embedded in the wood.
"We cut the tree down and sawed it out," he says. "I guess they just leaned it up against the tree, and the tree kept growing."
Otis likes to demonstrate his collection at shows, sharpening knives or running his steam-powered sawmill. With the Front Range Antique Power Association, he's exhibited at the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo 17 years in a row. He sponsors a picnic to show off his collection at least once a year.
His collecting has necessitated countless trips for the Mellenbruch family back and forth on Interstate 70 between the Colorado Rockies and the corn belt, often pulling a flatbed trailer. Of course, they weren't always prepared when they found a valuable item. Otis recalls hauling the sled curler from Kansas tied to the top of a Ford sport coupe.
"We really got some looks on that trip," he says.