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First Things
Early Birds Get the Show Guide!
By Leslie C. McDaniel
The 1999 show season is in high gear, but at Farm Collector, we're already looking forward to the next season. This fall, we'll produce Farm Collector's first show guide - for 2000. Starting with events on Jan. 1, our guide will capture all the action in farm collectibles, nationwide, all year long.
Since our guide comes out early (copies will be available in December - perfect for holiday gift giving!), we start producing it early. Your deadline is Oct. 8. If you'd like to be a part of this guide, call us today! Let us help promote your club, show, museum or special event to a national audience!
In return, let us do you a favor: Do you have friends who'd enjoy Farm Collector as much as you do? Let us know their name and address, and we'll introduce them to Farm Collector. If they share your interest in antique farm equipment, they'll appreciate the gesture!
Enough with the commercials: on with the show! This issue is packed full: harvesting tobacco, college kids learning the classics (and we're not talking Shakespeare here!), a big show back east, runaway tractors, and the evolution of the American silo.
The latter is something I have only limited experience with. As a small child, while visiting the farm home of family friends, I had opportunity to crawl up into a silo while the adult keepers were otherwise engaged. When my disappearance was noted, full-scale pandemonium broke out at the silo's base. Once I put both feet back on the ground, the tales of silo danger and dread were laid on so thick that, for years after, I regarded the once-benign landmark as a vaguely sinister structure somehow capable of swallowing little girls up whole.
Years later, of course, the silo is vastly smaller. The only threat it poses these days is to the hapless livestock that might be in its path when it finally falls: It has taken on a remarkable Pisa-like list. It can't be used, and someday the owners will wake up to a pile of rubble on the ground, but for now, the old silo - warts and all - is a storehouse of memories.