Rt 1, Box 75A Ivanhoe, Minnesota 56142
One morning last February, coffee cup in hand, I stopped by the
kitchen window to look out at an old WC Allis Chalmers sitting on
the far side of the garden. As I watched the snow swirl around it I
began to recall my association with it and the events that brought
it here.
I know almost nothing of its earliest existence. I know from its
serial number that it was made in 1942. In fact, I can guess that
the dust from the attack on Pearl Harbor had barely settled when
this tractor came off the line all shiny and orange. The war forced
changes in manufacturing methods at Allis Chalmers as that company
and the nation geared up for war. But, this is essentially a prewar
machine. It was probably shipped to a farmer in southwest Minnesota
and put to work growing food.
My personal experience with it began about 1962. My dad was a
farm boy and although we lived in town we always had a garden, the
bigger the better. We also heated our home and did much of our
cooking with a wood burning furnace and an old Kalamazoo cook
stove. To help with these chores Dad bought the Allis. Our wood
cutting was done before it became as trendy as it is now. Our
equipment consisted of the Allis, a 1949 Chevy pickup, an old Wards
chainsaw and a buzzsaw that Dad made using a two wheel trailer and
an old four cylinder Wisconsin combine engine.
We would go to the creek bottom south of town where someone
wanted a pasture opened up or had bulldozed some trees to get at
the gravel underneath. Dad would pull a tree out where we could get
at it. My brother and I would brush it out with axes and Dad would
cut it into lengths for the buzzsaw. We did all the splitting by
hand with hammers, wedges and axes. We needed twelve to eighteen
full size trees plus some corn cobs to get through a winter.
For several years Dad and a friend of his went together to raise
potatoes for both families. We put in about two and a half acres of
potatoes and a few squash and pumpkins. This led to the only time
that we had a close call with the Allis. Bill, the son of Dad’s
friend, was to return a borrowed disc and then run the tractor to
their house and park it. I wedged myself against the left fender
with my foot against the drawbar. My brother Glenn sat on the right
fender and with Bill driving, down the road we went. The bridge
across the creek had a steel railing. As we approached it in road
gear I could see that, while the tractor wheels would clear the
right railing, the disc would not. I yelled and Bill swerved just
in time to clear the railing by inches. No one was hurt but it was
a near thing. We could have ended up, three kids on the creek
bottom with the tractor disc and railing on top!
We continued with the wood cutting and potatoes for several
years, with the Allis doing its part in the routine. I can still
see it sitting in front of our barn on Main Street, or all muddy on
a hillside covered with patchy springtime snow.
But time does slip by. In the spring of 1968 I graduated from
high school and a year later I was drafted. The home I returned to
in the spring of 1971 had changed in many ways. My brother was
married and had moved out on his own and Dad was in business for
himself. Part of that business was a Case backhoe. We still cut
wood for heat but the Chevy had been replaced with a newer Ford. A
new Homelite replaced the buzzsaw and the old Wards chainsaw, and
our house had an oil furnace for backup heating. Of course the Case
replaced the Allis. In the summer of 1971 Dad asked me to drive the
Allis the thirty miles to my grandmother’s farm. They had sold
their 1939 John Deere A and were without a tractor. Though they no
longer farmed, Dad thought that they could use the Allis. A year
later it had hardly moved. My cousin Paul, fresh out of the Navy,
had bought an acreage on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Dad suggested
that if Paul could use the Allis he should come and get it. He did,
and for the next ten or twelve years the Allis did service running
a small sawmill, pulling logs and performing other chores in the
north woods. I used to visit his place regularly and I got in on
some of that. The time I remember best was the weekend that the
high temperature for the weekend at his house was minus-30 degrees.
We wanted to go to town. His Volvo would not start but the Allis
did. So there I was, on the open seat of that old tractor, driving
down the road pull-starting the Volvo. Lucky for me it didn’t
take long.
By the mid 1980s the engine on the Allis was going. There was a
noticeable loss of power and the usual cloud of blue smoke. Rather
than overhaul it, Paul decided that it had done its duty and
retired it to the woodlot.
In the meantime, my life had changed radically again. We lost
Dad in 1974, and my brother Glenn in 1987. I picked up an
engineering degree from the local university. I got married and had
a family of my own.
Paul and I spoke of the old Allis from time to time. He thought
at one point that he might replace the engine with one from a
Toyota or a Pinto. At another time he thought that he might reverse
the operator’s position to face the rear and put a snow blower
on it. Paul is a professional machinist and is blessed with an
uncommon amount of Yankee ingenuity; I’m sure that he could
have made either project work, hut he didn’t undertake either
one.
I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that I would like
to have the Allis. I always wanted a place in the country, but,
most of my life I’ve lived in town where a tractor just would
not fit. I was still in town when I first mentioned to Paul that I
might like to buy the Allis someday. The subject came up
periodically and was dropped again.
Three years ago my wife and sons and I finally had all we could
stand of town life and moved to a farm site twenty-five miles from
the old home town. Shortly after that, the discussion began in
earnest. ‘Could I use the tractor?’ ‘I think so.’
‘It’s pretty well shot.’ ‘I know that, but it was
Dad’s and I would like to fix it up.’ ‘You can have it
but getting it down to your place might be a problem.’
‘Well, let’s see what we can come up with.’ We talked
about it, a little now and then, for over a year.
In the meantime we were working together to empty Paul’s
mother’s garage near where I live. In the garage was a 1952
Chevy that Paul needed to have up on his end of the state. This
looked like an opportunity to solve two problems at once. We would
rent a trailer and I would haul the car to the Iron Range and the
tractor back. One of my new neighbors had a trailer that he rented
out. He is an Allis man and used to run a WC in the local tractor
pulls. This was the trailer he used to transport it. We knew that
our WC fit. My truck is a little 1983 Ford Ranger, 2.0 liter, four
speed. Would it pull a tandem axle trailer 800 miles in two days,
loaded in both directions? I had my doubts, but I kept them to
myself.
The arrangements were made and Paul and his wife Edie came down
to help load and escort me up. We winched the Chevy onto the
trailer and were soon roaring down the highway at about 45 mph. I
used to drive an old VW bus and this was about the same,
power-wise. We got to Paul’s about sundown and unloaded. Paul
had cleaned the plugs and points on the Allis, put air in the tires
and gas in the tank. After seven years sitting in the woodlot it
fired right up. The next morning Paul backed it onto the trailer
under its own power. Then it was log chains and load binders and
back out onto the road. Paul gave me an escort for the first one
hundred miles or so then I was on my own. The trip back was
uneventful, except for a nasty surprise I got when I turned onto a
concrete road. It seems that the distance between the rear truck
tire and the front trailer axle was the same as the distance
between joints in the highway. At any speed over about 15 mph this
caused the trailer to want to waltz while the truck tried to tango!
After a mile or so of that, I found a tar road south and took it. I
was pleasantly surprised at the amount of attention that old iron
gets going down the road. People would slow down to have a look,
smile and wave.
I got back about sundown and you can bet I was one tired, happy
and proud individual when the little Ranger came down the driveway
and rolled to a stop in the yard.
Paul was right about the condition of the tractor. Every place
that can leak does. The plies of the rear tires are separating and
it still has a strange lifter nose that I remember from the
Sixties. We found the original front rims in Paul’s woodlot and
brought them home. Paul donated a set of rear tire chains he had
bought for it. He had also added a PTO while he had it. I found a
spare FMJ magneto in a landfill and bought two good rear rims for
five dollars at an auction. I just missed a model 60 Allcrop
harvester at another sale. I was elsewhere on the grounds when it
sold for twelve dollars and fifty cents. The engine alone is worth
more than that. (A note to the collectors out there. The machinery
that fed the world through the 1940s is going to the scrap heap
fast.) In June we bought an IHC 2-14 plow for ten dollars at
another sale and two weeks later we found a one row potato
digger.
Of course we have a big potato patch, and with me riding the
digger and my oldest son on the WC, potatoes came out of the ground
a lot easier this year, ton of them. We enlarged the patch for next
year and when the plow hit the prairie sod it was obvious that the
little Allis didn’t have the ‘snort’ that it used to.
We know the cure for that and in the spring when the weather warms
we are going to make it shiny and orange again. The boys want to
help. It will be good experience and probably build some new
memories of Dad’s old WC.
