Perhaps man’s second-best friend.
Let me just say that a man on a tractor with a dog following behind, is having an especially good day. I know there is a little something, maybe dormant, in my own DNA that ignites fully when I get that very rare chance to drive a tractor. A few weeks ago, my son in law took a chance and let me do a little tilling on the Kubota.
Of course, no farmer is going to let me drive his new John Deere 9 R Series tractor. Feel free to take a spin in my new Oldsmobile city boy, he will agree, but leave my tractor alone. My uncle Roy, a farmer of great skill and knowledge, must have regretted putting me on that old Massey 44 every summer to do the annual summer fallowing with a ten-foot cultivator. He did have a good sense of discernment to appreciate and see a positive return on some cheap labour. That all fell apart of course, the day I filled the diesel tank with gasoline.
Or perhaps it was the day when I unhooked the cultivator and drove off with the hydraulic hoses flapping in the breeze.
I did love that old red Massey 44. Massey Harris built approximately 84,000 Model 44’s between 1947 and 1953. I am not sure of the birthdate of that old workhorse but I drove it in the years 1959-62. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that I was stepping into an early Saskatchewan binary. I was essentially inducted into Massey Team Red. The opposite was Team Green led by John Deere. There was a lot of tribal rivalry: Team Liberal vs Team CCF, Team Co-op vs Team Safeway, and of course Team Curling vs Team Hockey.
But back to tractors. The really great thing about tractors has always been the golden opportunity to actually drive something with a motor before you get to the magic age of sixteen. Just ask anyone who was raised on a farm the question, “how old were you when you first drove a tractor?” Their answer will both shock and make you envious.
You wish.
I have a very good old friend in Saskatoon who still goes by the name of Howard Derkson. He’s a tune playing, Mustang driving, tractor collecting prairie character. Well, truth be told, these days his guitar fingers are seizing up, the Mustang is more at home in the garage than on the streets and I believe the barn full of Cockshutt tractors he collected over the years have gone to good homes. The tractors may be gone but my image of my friend is constant. He’s a tractor man.
The reason Howard loved and collected Cockshutt tractors was because they were embedded deep in his family history. His father owned the Langham Cockshutt implement dealership. Howard grew up in that small town, main street shop and as a kid would fuel the tractors, clean the tractors and sweep under the tractors. He got to know the history and story of the Cockshutt tractor from a front row seat.
The Cockshutt tractor was a unique Canadian manufacturing story. The Model 30 hit full production in 1947 as the first major production tractor in Canada. Since both the Massey and the Cockshutt tractors had inaugural debuts in 1947, I can’t help but note that my parents inaugurated my own little self into the world that year as well and started a family production line of seven.
The Canadian era of the Cockshutt tractor ended in 1962 when the White Motor Company bought them out. So, there was a “Canadian tractor pride” element to Howard’s youth as well as the scut work in the shop. A farmer’s love for his new tractor was something Howard observed as a kid. He recalls at an early age overhearing a conversation with one of his uncles and a neighbour. The neighbour was breathlessly describing in detail his new Allis-Chalmers tractor. As Howard remembers, the tone was almost swathed in romantic, detailed mush as one would describe a first date that went very well.
His youth was tractor-centred even more than the filling, cleaning and sweeping. His dad had to move those tractors all over the province. Things that big had to be either shipped or driven. Trucking was expensive, not all that available, but twelve-year-old boys were both cheap and available.
Yep.
Twelve-year-old Howard would get himself on a bus for Moose Jaw or Swift Current. There he would take possession of a tractor and drive it back the 200 miles to Langham, the shop and his father. He did this all the time. One journey had him passing through the city of Saskatoon. A cop stopped him.
“How old are you kid,” he inquires. Twelve, says our boy. “Well, you better come with me,” says the cop.
Miles and miles of prairie roadways with no earbuds, no cab and no drink holders. Yeah, I got bored, he reflects. So, often I would pick up a hitchhiker. Helps pass the time, he suggests fondly.
It’s graduation night in Langham. Howard and friends have a fine time and he was feeling the afterburn in bed the next morning when his father rousts him up and of course, puts him on the next bus to Prince Albert to bring home one more tractor.
Happy graduation kid, enjoy the ride.
I have a vague memory of driving one of Howard’s vintage machines in a local parade in Radisson some years back. Parades were part of his job as a kid and I just assumed he might have loved those opportunities to pilot a new tractor down some small-town main street.
Not so much, he says. It was scary. Flying candy and flying kids picking up that flying candy. You had to be completely focused on the singular possibility of tractorcide.
Ask any farm raised person when they first drove a tractor and odds are good it would be between ten and twelve. My grandson Riel, is not intimidated by internal combustion of any kind. The tractor DNA goes back a long way on his fathers’ side and a shorter journey on his mom’s. Family lore has his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather all driving tractors well before their twelfth birthdays. Riel was ten when he started driving the family Bobcat. Today, he can drive anything on wheels, but he is still two years from being legal. His dad and the tractors in his life will ensure this young man will have that fine streak of “handy” in his future.
The family John Deere has been reconditioned and painted by Riel and his dad and is reluctantly now up for sale. It will be missed but probably replaced, as a guy just always needs a tractor around the place.
There is an old tractor story still worth a smile.
Years ago, a farmer placed an ad in the Western Producer:
Gentleman farmer interested in matrimony seeks a woman of good character with her own tractor. Please reply with photo…of tractor.
And finally, I got a kick out of Tom Power on CBC yesterday, so thrilled with a note he got from a guy in Saskatchewan who sent the note from his tractor. The kid on the radio was quite taken by the whole thing.
All three of my boys (none of whom have licences) are better tractor drivers than I will ever be.
I painted grain elevators across Saskatchewan in the late sixties for a couple of summers. One of my most vivid memories of that time was on a late spring/early summer day when I was on the top of the elevator and something went wrong on the ground. Doesn't matter what, and I can't recall anyway, other than it gave me a first an hour and then two hours on the top since it would be too tiresome to go down and then come up again. So I had two hours to watch a tractor pulling a seeder around a field across the tracks from the elevator. As he seeded, the ground turned from dusty brown to deep brown. The seagulls followed him in diminishing circles, feeding on the insects disturbed by his machines. Since I couldn't be down with him on the tractor, I spent two hours vicariously doing what every farm kid did as they spent what could have been school time instead out on the land with nature.