Remembering Leslie

     My father was a horse man.  Some where there's a picture of him in front of our barn with 24 horses.  Grandpa Lars, Dad and Uncle Sam farmed 480 acres with those horses,  That was a lot of land to work with horse power.
   Finally, in 1941, Dad bought a tractor...a '41 B Farmall, 17 horsepower, it was designed for small truck farms.  By the time he realized that he needed more power WW II made it almost impossible to buy a tractor.  He could have gone to the black market but his scruples prevented that.  It wasn't until 1947 or 1948 that he was able to buy a new Farmall H.
   Leslie was different.  His father, Sam, was mechanically inclined and in the '30's Leslie bought an F-20 Farmall and before the war a Farmall M.  The M was the largest row crop tractor that International Harvester Co.made for many years.  Leslie's tractors set him apart, might that be where I get my fascination with tractors?
   With a two row mounted corn picker on that M Leslie was busy all fall picking corn.  My friend and classmate, Lloyd, remembers Leslie coming to his farm to "open the fields."  The two row mounted picker could start at any place in a field without running over unpicked corn.  Then, the farmer, with a pull type picker, would be able to drive down the picked rows pulling his picker off to the side.
   Considered "very" modern that M was equipped with 6 volt electric lights.  Pretty dim by today's standards but that was enough light so that Leslie would pick night and day.  Leslie told me that he was once picking at night on the Teller farm.  The corn was badly lodged from a strong wind.  Picking through the middle of the field he found that when he reached the other side he was six rows away from the rows on which he started.
   The old mounted pickers were very heavy...so heavy that once the rear axle on the tractor broke.  I can only imagine how difficult it was to remove the picker with the rear of the tractor on the ground, replace the axle in the field and remount the picker.  Contrast that with my neighbor's recent experience.  His tractor wouldn't run and he called the dealer who sent a repair technician from Omaha, NB., 150 miles away.  The technician parked his van next to the tractor, worked for two hours, said "the tractor's fixed now" and never touched the tractor.
  In a subsequent blog I'll write about other tractors that Leslie owned.