Gosh...this project was faster than usual...enjoyable is the proper term…when 76- year-old men can spend time with 70-year-old tractors... it is a reunion with old friends and a rerun of the old movies when both were young... my first car really was a little red Farmall Cub Tractor. The official purpose and justification for the little red tractor was to till the ground and raise food for people and animals. But we also used it to pull the trailer with the boat in it to the river to catch fish, crabs, or the occasional eel. We did not see any Mark Twain era river boats...but there were yachts with pretty girls and tug boats chugging thru pulling barges full of cedar logs. The river was part of the inland waterway and near the locks at Great Bridge. Yep, that CUB Tractor was essential to the neighbor boys carrying their fishing poles, barefooted; and cutoff jeans, straw hats and a bottle of mosquito repellant, were the uniform of the day (usually about 6 of us).
The tractor here is a 1950 and belongs to a neighbor who got tired of me pestering him to let me paint the tractor... about 4 weeks ago he drove the tractor into our yard and presented me with a box of OFFICIAL Farmall CUB red paint and the new decals. He said, "we are going to be gone to visit our grandkids for a month, you got a month to make the old tractor look pretty again". The most demanding part is wrestling those back wheels off so they can be sanded and painted, but where there is a will, there is a way. Most of the 1950s kids who were on or near a farm have memories of the gray Fords, the green John Deere or the red Farmall tractors and shifting gears while straddling a noisy flat head engine struggling to pull something thru the dirt. Ahhhhhh...those good ole days of yonder years.
… and then there were Helicopters........
This latest offering by Lud Creef comes from Highland County, where he and Peggy spend their summers. He says, “…as you can see, life goes on in the mountainous country where the modern people drive out for fresh air in an electric automobile and look at our old stuff that still works and say, "What is that thing"? We stifle laughter and explain how we use it to make apple butter and that thing is the paddle used to stir it to keep it from scorching.”
--Linda Bradley
