By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent ROCHESTER, Ind. – Prairie Gold is their language, and when they get together with fellow Minneapolis-Moline enthusiasts, Randy Hawk of Leiters Ford and Dave Stangle of Kewanna can talk for hours.
And that’s what they plan to do when the June 15-17 Fulton County Historical Power Show hosts Prairie Gold Rush, a club devoted to MM collectors.
Both Hawk and Stangle admit they inherited their love of Minneapolis-Moline equipment from their fathers. Hawk’s father, Robert, sold the trusty gold tractors from 1959 until 1972 in the same Leiters Ford location where Hawk now repairs tractors of all makes.
For his own use, however, he is clear in his preference for MM and will have several tractors on display that he built. By that, he means he repowered tractors owned by others.
“I’ve done a lot of them,” he said.
Talking to Stangle, a former heavyweight puller whose winnings put him in the Tractor Pull Hall of Fame, is a large, and highly interesting, slice of oral history.
“Did you know it wasn’t Willys that made the first Jeep?” he said. “It was Minneapolis-Moline.”
The York, Neb., Wessels Living History Farm website, in a section devoted to farming in the 1940s, partially backs that assertion by noting that even before 1938, MM was working on the conversion of a farm tractor to serve the Armed Forces. Named Jeep by men at Camp Ripley, Minn., it never saw widespread use before Willys won a contract to build a general-purpose vehicle in 1940.
In the meantime, however, some people called their cars, trucks and even airplanes “Jeeps,” and a dog named Jeep became popular in the “Popeye” comic strip.
Even more interesting than MM’s tractor converted into a Jeep was its 1939 Comfortractor. With its streamlined automobile-style hood, headlights, an optional closed cab and a cruising speed of 40 mph, it was designed so farmers could pull a plow with it during the day and drive to town in it at night.
While it was a publicist’s delight, posed pictures of a couple in evening attire dismounting their Comfortractor in front of New York’s Stork Club failed to tickle anyone’s fancy.
That was then. Now, the Comfortractor, also known as the UDLX, is in high demand. “We’re in luck,” Stangle said. “A Pennsylvania collector is bringing one to this year’s show.”
Stangle still farms with MM equipment. He guesses he has 15 or 18 tractors, plus several pieces of machinery dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. Another collector plans to power a sawmill with a MM steam engine.
“Minneapolis-Moline made good equipment,” Stangle said. “They just ran into financial problems and had to sell to White.”This farm news was published in the June 6, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
