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Some years ago when Old Mange, the best dog I ever had, was in her worthless stinking half-blind senile years, she would sneak out of our house in the middle of the night through the cat door, trot a quarter-mile to the old Miller farmhouse and bark outside to be fed, waking up my elderly parents.
My mother, Ol' Food, would get up and open the back door with something for the old dog to eat.
We apologized. My mother just shrugged. "She's old, like us. You just have to put up with some things," she said.
That's the way I feel about our 1948 Farmall "C" tractor.
I CAN'T PROVE IT, but my guess is that Uncle Jim, the doctor, was behind the purchase of that tractor.
My grandfather, W. Fred Miller, the baby of his family, would have been 64 in 1948. He had worked the Miller farm all his life with horses. My sisters, who are older than me, remember riding on farm wagons and sleds pulled by his last pair of draft horses, Maude and Dot.
Even in the 1940s I don't think it was possible to make a living solely from a small traditional farm, even with the economies of growing and preserving most of the food themselves. Grandpa Fred worked part-time as a deputy county assessor, which would have brought in some hard cash. The money he made from selling milk, eggs and hens to regular customers in Chester and along the way would not have gone far.
The reason Fred ended up with the 132-acre farm intact was that years ago Uncle Jim had lent him the money to buy out the other siblings, Edgar and Belle, and later forgave the loan. Jim and his wife had only one child, Elizabeth, who died a young adult. A successful physician in Steubenville, Dr. James Edwin Miller left a good bit of his fungible estate - stocks, bonds and such – to Fred when he died in 1953. It's not a stretch to imagine that Uncle Jim anticipated that life bequest with the gift of a tractor to his baby brother - something to make life a little easier in his later years.
I know that a tractor is an unfeeling piece of machinery, but you can see the sentimental attachment here.
SENTIMENT, HOWEVER, does not stop us (and by us I mean mostly me) from using the old Farmall tractor. It's not an antique showpiece or a yard ornament. It's a working tractor.
Neither does sentiment blind me to its faults and weaknesses. It overheats easily. It doesn't have a lot of power.
But it always starts, and it will do the job - like hauling a trailer load of firewood – if not overtaxed.
We have another Farmall tractor, a 1953 "Super C" that belonged to Grandpa Fred's neighbor farmer, Carl Allison, and had been passed along to his son, Raymond, who was a heavy equipment operator, drove school bus and continued to farm the adjacent property.
My brother-in-law, General Doc, bought the Super C at the farm auction after Raymond passed away in 2006. It has a lot more power than the "C," and it doesn't overheat, but it has its own issues, namely electrical. We can't seem to get it to charge the battery, so in season I park it on a slope and use gravity to drift start it, letting it roll and popping the clutch in fourth gear to turn over the engine. That can make things interesting because fourth is highway traveling speed. But if I try to start it in a lower gear, the tractor stops dead because it still has good compression. In contrast, I can drift start the "C" in second gear.
The Super C was in bad shape when purchased, and was rebuilt by Ron and Tom Miller (no relation), sons of the late Earl Miller and inheritors of his small engine repair business on Tomlinson Church Run Road. Earl used to work at Fellows Supply in Steubenville and knew Farmalls inside and out. We go hat in hand to Ron and Tom when the tractors won't run, as well as for problems with chainsaws, lawnmowers, log splitters, snowblowers, and every other small engine that is a blessing when it works and a curse when it won't.
Both our International Harvester Farmall tractors have the same simple fuel line system, with a glass bowl to let contaminants settle out instead of an inline fuel filter. Both of them tend to get the occasional goober blocking the gas line now and then. My remedy for that is to disconnect the fuel line and blow backwards to clear it, trying not to inhale much gasoline in the process.
During pumpkin patch season we use the Farmall C to pull a little trailer and take people on free tractor rides down through the old pasture and creek. Son Worshrag used to drive the tractor for these rides; now, son Seed and his son Rufus sometimes do the honors. I still like to take people on the rides, turning around in the tractor seat to tell them the history of the farm and point out interesting things in nature like butterflies and wildflowers.
"The tractor is a 1948 Farmall C that my grandfather Fred bought new," I tell them. "It's two years older than I am and in better shape."
I don't mention the overheating, lack of power and fuel line goobers. With age comes problems, whether people, tractors, dogs, whatever. While we live, they are just things we have to live with.
(Fred Miller's book of 100 stories, "Falling Under Honey's Spell," is $10, available locally at Connie's Kitchen, Davis Bros. Pharmacies, Frank's Pastry, Giant Eagle Calcutta, Museum of Ceramics, Pottery City Antique Mall, and at fredmilleratlarge.com.)