|
|
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Ok, if that’s true, then the before picture of "Dorothy" says it all. That picture is exactly the way I found her. I distinctly and vividly recall thinking as I waded into the thorny blackberries, "This is what dreams are made of". I didn’t realize at the time that it is also "what money goes into"! I ruined my spiffy attire and had to buy a new set of clothes along with band-aids, what with all the holes from the thorns in my clothes and body. In The book "Old tractors and the men that love them" Roger Welsh says that sometimes you don’t pick the tractor, the tractor picks you. That statement pretty well summed up how it went. I had no idea of what I’d found, and further I had no idea of what to do. But I did decide right then and there that it would run again. How to accomplish that goal I assure you I had no clue. The First thing that I did that evening was to call Larry and tell him of my find. I then called Leonard Hamor (one of those rare and true friends that you only find once in three of four lifetimes) knowing that I could sweet talk him into helping with this new project. I hauled good ole Leonard out of bed at the crack of dawn the following Saturday so we could be on the "job site" by 9:00am. By the time we arrived, I had filled his head with the tale of my find and had assured him that with his help everything would turn out ok. I don’t believe I convinced him then, and to this day I still don’t believe he’s convinced of my sanity. Anyway, I had brought along a borrowed book of Larry's (150 years of international harvester) and that is what Mr. Leonard is looking at in my favorite picture of this entire adventure. After we cut the blackberries away, the next important task was to identify our catch. We spent a great deal of time looking, discussing and arguing (we do a! lot of that) and came to the conclusion that we were looking at either an f-20 or f-30 farmall. We didn’t know which because neither one of us had ever seen one before, but we knew it was a farmall because the old decal was barely visible on the gas tank. After several hours of me basking in the glory of the find, and Leonard muttering "your nuts", we began to develop a plan. The plan we devised had several options. Plan #1) Dig a hole and bury it! (We, and by that I mean I, decided option #1 would be used only as a last resort, and in fact during this ordeal I almost used it a time or two) Plan#2) figure out a way to get her to roll and plan #3) figure out who we know that is nuts enough to help us load and haul this chunk of gold. Ah, Larry has a trailer and he lets Tom Treadaway use it once in awhile to haul valuable assists such as this. Maybe He’d let Tom use it to haul my project home? But first we had to get it to roll.
We are proud to be members of: 
|