While at the Kansas-Oklahoma Show at Winfield, we met Delbert
Johnson, of Caldwell, who told us about a family RD-6 Caterpillar
and later sent us a tape and pictures with more information.
Delbert is a big booster for Caldwell, and sent us some old
newspapers so we could read more about it.
He told us via tape that the RD-6 Cat ‘was in the family of
a lot of unmarried aunts and uncles, and as the time came,
everything was left to their mother, and she was 96 when she passed
away.
‘She had these two boys, and they loved to play at making
steam engines and things. They got their mother to buy this RD-6
Caterpillar in the Thirties, the early Thirties, and it stayed in
their shop. They never used it… As near as I can remember, this
tractor stayed in the machine shop, that they built specially for
it, for 32 years.
‘As time went by, they passed away and I bought this
tractor, as near as I can remember, in 1964. Up until that time,
this tractor never did a day’s work. We had a kind of cowboy
driver, and it hadn’t put in a hundred days of work in all its
life put together. We pushed a few of the catalpa trees in the sand
on the Shegaskee River and that’s all it’s done. The
tractor has never been painted or anything, has no wear on it
doesn’t show any wear, period.
‘Then we have another Caterpillar that has been
worked, 1928, and its number is PS 4417. And the RD-6 number is
292618.’
Delbert also has an old M & M tractor, 1936, a KT-88; a 1942
truck; a 1946 truck; a Massey Ferguson 1946 tractor, and an IHC
sand-` tractor, 1930. Because of age and health, he and his brother
are seeking to dispose of them.
