Every Picture Tells A Story
A copy of the 34 MM calendar. featuring Lea Norgard.
By Cindy Ladage
Dan Shima, Eldridge, Iowa, has been collecting Minneapolis-Moline memorabilia and tractors for a long time. But last summer, when he met Lea Norgard, the original Minneapolis-Moline calendar girl of 1934, he ran into someone who had something special.
An experienced collector of all things produced by Minneapolis-Moline, Dan was in his element when he attended the third annual show put on by the Minnesota chapter of the Minneapolis-Moline Collectors Club at Rockford, Minn. The show is unique because of its location outside of Minneapolis, where MM tractors were built. The event is billed as an annual reunion for Minneapolis-Moline employees.
"It is our club," Dan says, "but they promote it as an employees' reunion to get as many retired employees to come as they can."
"I killed three birds with one stone," he says. "I went to an MM sale which Kurt Aumann did for collectors' members, I visited my daughter on Saturday night, and I went to the show on Sunday!"
What he didn't count on was meeting a real-life Minneapolis-Moline calendar girl.
"I was at one end of the building, looking at members' displays," Dan says, "when one of my good friends came running to me and told me she had someone I had to meet."
That someone was Lea Norgard. Dan's friend, Phyllis Erickson, had heard that Lea and her husband, Knute ("Kay") Norgard, were at the show with Lea's copy of the original 1934 calendar.
The calendar, like most MM calendars, shows a Model KT in a farm scene. The KT had been "spit-shined like at the big farm shows" for the photo shoot, Dan says.
"The hubcaps are chrome, the straps that hold the gas tank are chrome, and the air breather is also chrome," he says.