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Found a picture I was trying find for a few years

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 7:14 pm
by robinson46176
We have been sorting thousands and thousands of pictures we have as I am working on our family trees. We have inherited pictures from all sorts of older family members especially those that left no descendants. In a few other cases there were off-spring but they just didn't want the personal stuff. Then of course we have boxes and boxes of pictures of our own.
Today after about a week of sorting my wife showed me a picture from the Connor Prairie Living History Museum where until the last couple of years we did live demos yearly at one of their events.
Two of those years we enjoyed the company of Roy Underhill both at his presentation and out at our location. On Saturday evenings we would all eat supper together.
I have not tried to follow up on it but one year he came out to where we were and said that he was trying to write a book. He didn't want to give anything away but he did tell us that for the book he needed to know a little about manure spreaders. Someone had told him that I was a farmer. Surprisingly there are very few farmers at that show. Most who restore and display old farm tractors at that event are hobbyist instead of farmers. We had a nice chat and when my wife took the picture below he was asking me questions and taking notes.
When we came home that night I looked in a file drawer of manuals and I found a thin booklet that was a parts breakdown for an old John Deere manure spreader. The next morning before his presentation I went to the tent where he did it and gave him the booklet. When I went in he was pulling pictures from his camera and moving them to his laptop and at that time he was looking at pictures of our grandson. I wrote my name and email address in the booklet and told him that if he got stuck on anything just email me. I figured that he probably had an anonymous email he could use to protect his privacy. Afterwards somebody asked me if I got his autograph. I said of course not, I gave him mine. :D
He is the same guy off screen as he is on. :)
I'm in the center on the right. The guy on my right (behind me) is a neighbor who is a friend of mine and a very good friend of my son. His wife spent a lot of time at our house as she was growing up with our 3 daughters. My son is standing on my left (in front of me). The guy with his back to the camera is a friend who makes his living working for a company that restores old John Deere tractors.
BTW, the other guy is Roy... :)
I was the only one there that had ever used a manure spreader...


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Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 8:05 pm
by camerio
That is a very nice story and picture ... thanks for sharing with us.

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 8:21 pm
by BuckeyeDennis
We had a manure spreader when I was growing up on the family farm. I don't recall ever begging my dad to let me drive the tractor for that chore. :rolleyes:

The local Massey Ferguson dealer was fond of announcing "I'll stand behind any piece of equipment that I sell. ... ... ... Except for the manure spreaders". :D

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 8:55 pm
by JPG
robinson46176 wrote: . . .
I was the only one there that had ever used a manure spreader...
. . .

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Well that certainly explains much.:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 12:08 am
by idcook
Cool. Besides being informative Underhill is good fun to watch. :)

I like your autograph quip. :D

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 1:21 am
by curiousgeorge
He should go to Washington if he is interested in manure spreaders. It's FULL of them.:rolleyes:

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 8:54 am
by fredsheldon
curiousgeorge wrote:He should go to Washington if he is interested in manure spreaders. It's FULL of them.:rolleyes:
No need to go to Washington, we have plenty of them here in Texas :)

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:14 pm
by debrown
I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming and remember that my Dad actually used a wooden wheel horse drawn manure spreader. He did adapt the tongue to be pulled by a tractor. As a kid of 7 or 8 I remember the tough part was to pull it real slow (yep he let me drive the 8N) cause it wasn't designed for anything faster than a pair of draft horses.
As a side note he was known to spread it far and wide, and I may have that same gene.....:D :o

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 10:58 pm
by billmayo
BuckeyeDennis wrote:We had a manure spreader when I was growing up on the family farm. I don't recall ever begging my dad to let me drive the tractor for that chore. :rolleyes:

The local Massey Ferguson dealer was fond of announcing "I'll stand behind any piece of equipment that I sell. ... ... ... Except for the manure spreaders". :D
I worked for a very large John Deere dealer in the late 50s before rejoining the Navy. Several of my fellow workers took about a month to assembly a new manure spreader and needed many extra bolts and nuts to complete the job with lots left over. I got to help a few times. The assembly manual was a medium size book and it came with over 50 pds of just nuts and bolts. It was one of the most complex machines to assemble that I have seen, much more than a hay bailer or grain combine. So I got my boss to let me do the next one. I got a multi level cart to lay out all the bolts and nuts that took a day according to size and label each pile. It took me 2 weeks with lots of breaks to finish assembling the manure spreader. I got the new equipment assembly job for the remaining time I was there. The owners had a large farm behind the dealer so I got to actually test and adjust each new piece of equipment for an hour or two. I would clean and repaint the equipment after using it and put it in the new equipment space. I really believe that John Deere made the best farm equipment at that time.

Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 1:42 am
by skou
curiousgeorge wrote:He should go to Washington if he is interested in manure spreaders. It's FULL of them.:rolleyes:
OK, this is the quote of the, uh (decade, century millennium, forever) ALL TIME!!

However, I can think of about 50 state capitals that would come in as a close second!:D

steve