Dayton Daily News & Radio’s ‘Joe’s
Journal’
It is always easier — and much more fitting — to give flowers
to the living. But Elmer Ransburg wasn’t the talkative kind,
and getting information out of him was much more difficult than
taking his picture reminiscing beside an old Rumely Oil-Pull
basking in the line-up at The National Threshers at Wauseon, Ohio,
a year ago.
Oh yes, everyone at the National Threshers seemed to know Elmer
Ransburg — his name, that is, and possibly a thing or two — but
certainly not enough to write a story about.
‘You know, Elmer Ransburg was a fine fellow to work
around,’ said Iron Man Percy Sherman, ‘but I’ve worked
with him when he wouldn’t say more than two or three words the
livelong day.’
From N. T. A. secretary, Lucille Blaker, came little more than
the fact that, ”Elmer Ransburg lives in Quincy, Mich.
He’s been helping us here for years.’
But then, during the ensuing months, the sad word arrived by
grapevine that Elmer Ransburg had passed beyond, and our attempts
to honor him while living just couldn’t be met. Thus it was
that, the following year, the story about the hard working but
sparse worded Elmer Ransburg was divulged by his lovely widow, the
faithful Naomi who, always at reunion time took her seat at the
National Threshers’ secretary’s desk to take memberships
and fill out cards — the one whose brown, piercing eyes always
seemed to look right through to your soul when asking, ‘Name,
please!’
They were always a fixture at the annual N. T. A. reunions —
Elmer and Naomi Ransburg — Naomi always occupying her usual place
at the Registration stand, Elmer more often than not out with the
tractors and engines, but now and then sitting straight and sober
as a judge beside Naomi for those brief respites from the
summer’s sun.
‘When Elmer was a little boy, and the threshing rig came to
their farm, he used to pray that it would rain so the threshing
machine would have to stay over the weekend,’ muses Naomi
Ransburg. ‘He’d go out and sit for hours on the big engine,
pulling all the levers and dreaming of someday running one
himself.’
‘Elmer was raised on the farm where we lived,’ says Mrs.
Ransburg. ‘The farm had been in the family for one hundred and
four years. In 1870 a new brick house was built where Elmer was
born.’
For a period of twenty years, Spark Plug ElmerRansburg left the
family farm to eke out his youthful fortune beyond the line fence.
For a while he worked in the Studebaker garage, repairing those
rather unpredictable contraptions of the urban nobility known as
Studebaker Electrics, often as eccentric as a Metropolitan Opera
soprano, and as balky as a Missouri mule. At nights he worked on
generators.
For a while Elmer worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Company,
manufacturers of a product somewhat unbefitting our Noble Spark
Plug’s mechanical status but nevertheless requiring the same
full measure of acumen and genius to keep them functioning as did
the ‘eccentric Electrics’.
SPARK PLUG ELMER RANSBURG, a fixture at the annual National
Threshers, Wauseon, Ohio, contemplates an old Rumely-Oil Pull. For
years he was head salesman for the plant, as well as representative
and trouble-shooter when things went wrong. It was one of his
labors of love at N. T. A. to stick the name tags on the engines,
but he always paused longer before the old Oil-Pulls. Later he got
oil smudges on his clean trousers, when at 82, he climbed up onto
the big fly-wheel to show us how he used to start the things. He
loved big engines, ever since as a lad he used to pray it would
rain so he could sit on the threshing engine, and pull the levers
over the weekend.
But it wasn ‘t until he began an eight year stint, working
for the Advance-Rumely Company out of St. Louis, Missouri, that our
Spark Plug, Elmer Ransburg, returned to his first love of being
around the big tractors and engines he so admired in his boyhood.
As a salesman for the company, Elmer Rans-burg delivered Oil-Pulls
to many a midwest farm that had established itself in the fabric
and pattern of an expanding American agriculture. But best of all
he was sent out as special factory repairman and trouble-shooter
whenever anything went wrong with an Oil-Pull backed by the Rumely
guarantee, to the extent of dispatching their ablest representative
to remedy whatever the situation.
‘When the combines came in and replaced the threshing rigs,
Elmer went to work for The Imperial Clock Company of St.
Louis,’ recalls Naomi Rans-burg. ‘Then he went to work for
a company out of Minneapolis, installing burglar alarms and bank
clocks. Many a time he told about getting claustrophobia (fear of
confinement), when locked in those big bank vaults installing time
locks. Believe me, I wouldn’t have trusted any of those fellows
locking me up in some bank vault!’
But Elmer Ransburg was a real genius with electricity as well as
machinery. When Elmer came home to take care of his mother, after
the death of his father, he set up his own farm workshop, made his
own tools and had his own power saws as well as all the necessary
machinery for the well-equipped farm of that day.
‘We took care of Elmer’s mother for twenty years, and
farmed his boyhood family farm,’ says Mrs. Ransburg. ‘We
farmed the eighty acres — a small but good farm in Branch County,
Michigan. Elmer was industrious and thrifty — we weren’t rich
but we were happy and we made that eighty acres pay.’
‘Elmer always wanted to buy an Oil-Pull, but whenever he
tried someone always beat him to it,’ reminisces Naomi.
‘Around the farm we always had two small gas engines — a Witte
and a Cush-man which were used a lot, pumping water and doing other
jobs until we got rural electricity.’
MADAME SPARK PLUG – a perennial fixture at the National
Threshers asks, ‘What’s your name?’. Mrs. Naomi
Rnasburg always had a soul-searching way of asking, ‘Name,
please!’ One almost felt she knew your name before she asked.
She survives her husband, Spark Plug of the Month, Elmer Ransburg,
who long sold and serviced Rumely Oil-Pulls.
‘We had a John Deere tractor to farm with. I hated to see it
go at auction,’ says Mrs. Ransburg. ‘Elmer and I did so
many things on the farm together with it, and he always kept it in
tip-top condition. He knew how to take care of it and overhaul it.
It ran perfectly.’
‘Elmer and I were always sorry we didn’t join the
National Threshers the first five years. We just didn’t know
about it till later,’ recalls Naomi, the epitome of dignity and
charm, whether making out your membership badge or conversing
nostalgically about Elmer. ‘For years my husband did about
everything for the reunion here, such as building this platform for
our secretary’s desk where we’ve taken registrations every
year or whatever he was called on to do.’
But most important of Spark Plug Elmer Ransburg’s
contributions to the Annual N. T. A. reunions was) licking the
stamps to put identification tags on the engines. There he was the
most familiar fixture on the National Threshers grounds — going
from engine to engine, tractor to tractor — with always a bit
longer pause before some ancient Rumely Oil-Pull which inevitably
fetched back those memories of boyhood when he used to sit for
hours on the big threshing engine rig, and the ensuing years when
he served as master salesman and trouble-shooter for the Rumely
Oil-Pulls which were threshing the golden grain and feeding a
growing America.
‘I still have one of the big eight-foot electric wall
regulators which was made by the Imperial Company Elmer worked for
years ago,’ explains Naomi. ‘It was shipped as a master
clock to some school, but got damaged and was returned to the
factory. Elmer repaired it and had a floor stand made and I have it
in my home as a grandfather’s clock.’
To the Ransburg man-and-wife team who’s done so much over
the years to enhance our visits at the National Threshers — in
solemn respect and memory of a towering genius to the honored line
of Rumely Oil-Pulls which he’s made to function so perfectly
over the years, and his widow, Naomi, now retired from the N. T. A.
registration desk — we honor these two for having made the world
better for their being with us.
To Elmer Ransburg, our belated thanks for having done so much
without embellishing the deed in bragga-doccio and burdensome
words, the honor of becoming Spark Plug of the Month is but our
maudlin and ignoble efforts at recompense. To the widow, Naomi, for
nurturing the aspirations of the man in the noblest traditions of
the American farm wife — we repeat our chorus of praise.
For the Ransburgs — Spark Plug Elmer and wife Naomi — the
world has been blessed by your being.
And Elmer (if you can hear) — our apologies for those oil
smears you got on your clean trousers that Naomi had just pressed
when, a year ago at the National Threshers we asked how you used to
start a Rumely Oil-Pull and all eighty-two years of you climbed up
onto the spoke of that big fly-wheel to show us.
It is indeed noble for a man to be a good citizen, pay his
taxes, feed his family and go to church. But Elmer Ransburg did all
that, and much more — and never talked about it.
