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"I always had an interest in that stuff, but I didn't know I was going to end up involved in it full time."
Although that might have been predicted.
"I was like a lot of other farm kids," he says. "I sent in cards to get literature sent to me, and got some from implement dealers, who really liked to give it out in those days. Some of those pieces I looked at so much that I wore them out."
"Sometimes I'll run onto something unusual, like some literature made by one of those short-line companies that only made one or two farm machines, and went out of business," he says. "It's usually a low-dollar item, but I'll definitely keep that stuff.
Green (Or Red, or Yellow) All Over
For some people, collecting farm literature is merely another way of staying in contact with the farm machinery line of their choice. Like Ken Updike, of Evansville, Wis., who clearly remembers how his love affair with everything red got started.
"We grew up on the edge of Milton, Wis., and the people who rented our farm land had all IH equipment," he says. "The woman who lived next to us also rented out her land to someone who used just IH equipment. And my mom's parents used IH equipment."
In the 1970s, he and his buddy saw ads for International Harvester tractors and tractor-combines in farm magazines, and began cutting them out, and putting them in scrapbooks. One day Ken was asked to ride along with his uncle, who had bought a brand-new International milk truck.
"He stopped at the dealership where he had bought the truck, and I don't know if he did it for us or not, but when he stopped there, the first thing we did was head for the literature rack, like always, and we raided it like all kids do, big and saucer-eyed seeing all that neat literature," he recalls. "I picked up a handful like always, and one of the pieces was an IH truck with an eagle on the side of it, the IH 4300 Eagle brougham. That's the piece that really turned me onto trucks. I wanted to have a track like that. It looked neat and very big and very impressive. I'm still looking for the real one yet today. If I ever find it I'd pay someone a cash reward for it. I was 12 years old, and I'll never forget that day. And I still have all those ads and scrapbooks today."
Another collector who likes to keep up with his chosen lines of machinery is Wayne Sucker of Grand Rapids, Minn.