Farm Collector Articles Spur Memories of Growing up on the Farm in Iowa

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I have just read the April 2009 issue of Farm Collector. Three stories brought back memories. I was born in Jefferson, Iowa, in 1937, and our family lived on a farm southeast of Lanesboro, Iowa, in Carroll County. Dad was one of the first to use gasoline tractors and the last to maintain a “threshing run.” Your story about “Breaking Records” with threshing machines made me think about the following.

As a young boy I was assigned the task of running the Farmall M that Dad used to power his threshing machine. When the hay wagons were late, I pulled the throttle back to an idle, or even took it out of gear. When a loaded wagon arrived I had to get the machine back up to speed. I had to advance the throttle slowly, so as not to slip the belt and throw it off. I learned to listen to the sound of the engine, and recognize what it sounded like when under load. I’d push the throttle forward until I reached a pencil mark Dad had made. What a cool job for a 10-year-old.

The story about “Perspective” made me think about all the equipment Dad had just to harvest oats. He had his trusty Farmall M and for smaller work he had a reliable Allis-Chalmers WD. He had a binder he used to cut oats and tie them into bundles called shocks. After the field was cut and shocked, the shocks were stacked in bundles, with the seed up, to dry.

On harvest day, the shocks were loaded by hand onto a hay wagon (though my dad did not own a hay wagon). The wagon was pulled by a smaller tractor or horses to the threshing machine, where shocks were manually unloaded into the machine. The straw was blown out the back chute as described in the “Blower” story, and the oat seeds loaded into a grain wagon. I really never understood how the seeds were separated from the straw, but it happened reliably.

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