A few months ago, I was mowing the grass at our place near Dalhart, Texas, with our 1949 “B” and a 7-ft. sickle mower. It was cool outside, and there was just a bit of breeze. As I tried not to chop off our little fruit trees, I listened to the “snickidee-snick” of the mower and the “dup-dup-dup” of the “B”, and my mind wandered back to time spent on my father and mothers tractors on their farm near Aloys, Nebraska.

“Snickidee-snick; dup-dup-dup.”

Different voices ring in my mind; one is me yelling as I ran out of the house with the porch door slamming behind me and rattling the house windows, “Dad, where are you?” I would keep yelling this and walking until I heard him yell back, “I’m in the tool shed” or, “ In the machine shed” or, “In the barn” or, “Down in the trees.” I would go and help him if I could, and watch and play if I couldn’t.

If it was time to cut hay, Dad would be down in the trees hook’n up the sickle mowers. One was an IH mower on an H Farmall, and the other was a Massey- Harris that was on a JD “50”. Later on, when we got an Allis D17 with a mower on it, the Massy was retired. Hooking up mowers was easy when Dad was there, but a real chore by yourself. You had to get it just right so the clamps or bolts lined up and, if

your young arms were a little too short, you couldn’t ease the clutch forward on the “50” to back up, and still crane your neck around to see the mower you’re trying to hook up to. The Massy had a heavy spring contraption that secured one side of the mower, and a ball-type hitch on the other. He made modifications to the back of the “50” in order to attach the Massy mower.

Once the mowers were hooked up, you drove out of the trees and up to the spindly legged fuel tanks located under the single row of trees on the south side of the farm. While the gas gravity-fed into the tractor, you would go around and let the mower bar down, and then back around to shut off the gas before it ran over. The grease gun was in a steel holster bolted to the tractor frame next to the engine. You grabbed the gun and greased every fitting on the mower while you were in the shade by the fuel tanks. Interesting thing about grease guns strapped to a hot tractor in the summer; the grease gets really runny. I remember my brother, Tom, stopped to grease out in the field in the middle of the day, and I was coming up with the other mower to stop and grease also. As I came within range, he started shooting hot grease at me with his grease gun.When it was hot, it would shoot ten or fifteen yards out of the end of that gun, if you knew how to slam the handle just right. Makes a terrible mess on the tractor. We didn’t do that when Dad was around; or maybe, come to think of it, it was Dad who showed us how to shoot hot grease. Anyway, the mowers were always well greased and ready to go.

Mowing in alfalfa on the first cutting of the year was the easiest because there were no haystacks to mow around. At that time, Dad put up alfalfa hay in loose stacks in the field using a stacking frame and a Jayhawk. The process was time consuming, but at least it was not the slave labor of small square baling that my brothers did for our neighbors, and that I did on a dairy farm in

Grandson Caleb now drives the “50” by himself.