A Farm Boy No More.......

But I do remember being a farm boy back in the 50's through the 70's.  While digging through a box of tinker toys and stuff from my parents home I found these abandoned two toys.  They are not from my past though but I bet my parents bought them for their grandsons to play with when they visited. One grandson lived in California and the other lived in Arizona.  Neither of them would remember their grandparents living on the farm and were visiting them in the house in town, as we would call it.

The toys are Ertyl toys made in Dyersville, Iowa.   The tractor is the model of the last one in which my dad to have purchased his last years of farming. He had two H Farmall tractors and this was a used tractor that he bought probably in the late 60's.  He also had a F tractor that he bought from a neighbor to use for powering the elevator used for lifting grain.  The F had a seat that was off centered on the tractor so you could see right down the row when you would be cultivating. I can still see that tractor being driven away down or gravel road by the lucky guy who bought it at the auction.  Every time I see one of them I  wonder if that had been my Dad's tractor.

The three major things I had to learn when growing up with tractors was to turn the tractor away from a fence, don't drive into it, push on the brake and don't back a wagon up like this photo shows.  One could break the tongue of the wagon.  In reality I have seen the tractor wheel drive up on that bar.  I don't know how I saw that but I did see it once. For some reason the clutch wasn't a problem for me.

The thing I remember most was that I didn't have the feel for the tractor at first and how it needed me to make it stop by pushing on the break which is a strange thing and hard to reach next to the clutch.  When you are young you act the same way as you do when you learn to first try to stop a boat.  You can kill the motor on a boat but the boat just keeps on moving. I mastered both the  tractor and the speed boat and really never damaged anything.  Oh yes, I guess there was this one time when I took a short cut through shallows when I was driving my dad and California brother to a fishing spot on Lake Pokegama.  My brother paid for the new prop.  Oh well...........