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He said many people wouldn't believe where he got some of them. "At the public dump years ago," he marvels. "You wouldn't believe what people used to throw away. I'd find those Vindex pieces there, and then take them home and fix them up."

Quentin Christman of Rugby, N.D., started collecting old cast iron toys 30 years ago. He attended an auction at Bantry, N.D., and bought a Vindex cast iron tractor for a friend for $11. "Some of the ranchers there thought I'd flipped my lid," he laughs. He liked the looks of it so much that he not only decided to keep it, but he began to collect Vindex (and Arcade) cast iron farm toys himself.

He knew he had had some of the toys when he was a kid, but his mother said she had thrown them away. "So I used a digger and manure spreader to go through the trash pile from all the years we'd lived on the farm." But he wasn't as lucky in finding them as Dale Johansen was out at the local dump. However, when Quentin sold the Vindex John Deere tractor, he had the last laugh: he received more than a hundred times what he'd paid for it.

People who remember the Depression will tell about how they 'made do' for farm toys. Some they made of cardboard backs of writing tablets, snipping out tractor bodies and parts, making axles out of pieces of wire or pencils, or plowshares out of spoons, or wheels out of empty thread spools. However, homemade toys didn't last long in the sand. Besides, these children wanted real toys, like those in the Vindex line. Many of them took advantage of the union between Farm Mechanics magazine and National Sewing Machine Company. The magazine offered Vindex cast-iron toys as incentives to children who sold subscriptions to their magazine, and, unknowingly, created the scarcity (or lack of) of various Vindex toys that exists today. For example, the toy John Deere combine (#86, "cutter and reel operate; imitation motor exhaust; painted in John Deere colors; removable man"; today worth $2,700-$5,500, depending on condition), which required five three-year subscriptions to the magazine ($1 per three-year subscription), is very rare. Meanwhile, the toy Case tractor (#36, "equipped with power pulley; removable nickelled driver; lug rear wheels; $475-$ 1,000) could be had for only a single three-year subscription, and these Case tractors are common, as Vindex toys go.

Farm Mechanics also offered a Vindex toy hay rack (#89, "front and rear standards collapse; green and red), for two subscriptions, and the Vindex John Deere hay loader (#85, "revolving chains and teeth; positive drive wheels") and John Deere thresher (#88, "removable straw stacker and grain pipe; loose drive pulley"), each for three subscriptions.

Occasionally the seller's subscription to Farm Mechanics would count to help "purchase" some toys, as with the toy John Deere gas engine (#79). On others, like the rare ones, only subscriptions garnered from other people counted.

Vindex also made a series of trucks (Stake Truck #6, 7, and 8 - each a different size in red, blue and green; Box Truck #48 and 49, Autocar Dump Truck and Crane #65, Autocar Dump Truck #64), as well as cranes (P & H Power Excavator #55), which at 3 1/4 pounds and $18 a dozen was only a third of the weight (10 pounds) and cost ($48 a dozen) of the P & H Power Excavator #70. These are very rare.

Vindex also made a few racecars (Speed-Demon Racer #45), motorcycles ("Mike" The Speed Cop #1, P.D.Q. Motorcycle Delivery #3), a Belvidere Blimp #51 (silver with gold letters), and airplanes (Lockheed Speedy Mail Plane #41), and Fokker Planes #40 and #90.

Which brings up an interesting story. One day sometime in the 1930s, Wade Leaich was told to take some barrels of scrap cast iron and steel and separate the cast iron so it could be remelted for sewing machine heads. In the barrel among the broken parts he found parts for a Fokker airplane.

"I put the parts together myself," he says, "took it to the paint shop, and they didn't know what color to paint it, because these particular Fokkers had never gone into production."


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