The H at the 1996 Dresden Tractor Show.
For some strange reason, the H is the first Farmall Dad owned, yet it is our last tractor to have a story added to our website. Maybe it's a 'beginning-end' sort of thing.
I don't quite know why Dad bought the H. We had been working our little farm with a Ford 9N that had a Sherman 2-speed auxiliary transmission. I was the only help Dad had at the time, and since I was a bit small to do most of the manual labor being all of 9 to 10 years old, I got to drive the Ford a lot. Although they didn't have one at the time we became friends with them, our farmer neighbors, the Becks, had an H at one time, and perhaps they talked about it with Dad periodically. Maybe Dad cringed too many times watching me head down a hill with a wagon load of hay hoping the little Ford had enough butt to hold back the load. I must add that I don't recall too many bad happenings: Dad had me well-schooled even at that green age to drop down a gear or two and to stay off the brakes. Perhaps I have a genetic predisposition to understanding how things work, but with respect to the brake thing I just mentioned, I thought it fascinating that as long as a tractor's rear tires are rotating in the direction you're going, they afford some traction on slick surfaces, but as soon as the tire rotation is stopped (going down a hill), you may as well be on skates. This coaching and thorough understanding of this phenomenon was to serve me well throughout my life.
As I'm writing this and thinking back almost 40 years (holy crap! I'm gettin' old when when I see that in print!) Dad very likely wanted get real serious about farming, and the little Ford just wasn't cuttin' it--literally. Maybe the 'last straw' came when Dad and I made some alfalfa hay off a farm three miles to the north of us. Dad read about using a Bush Hog rotay mower to cut hay. This involved removing a side panel from the mower and letting the mower knives cast the cuttings immediately out to the side. As Dad explained it, my 10-year old brain told me the theory was sound: the knives broke the hay stems, which was a form of conditioning, and the mower left a reasonably 'baleable' windrow--no hay conditioner and rake required.
Dad borrowed a genuine Bush Hog mower with a removable side panel from a farmer in Chatham that our neighbors, the Becks, knew. Everything was in place for our state-of-the-art hay making operation but there was a slight problem with our mowing rig. The Bush Hog was a 7 footer! The alfalfa was pretty heavy, and the Ford wanted absolutely no part of a full 7' cut. As I recall, it took Dad a ton of time to cut that field as he was forced to use only half the cut width of the Bush Hog just to give the 9N a fighting chance. This incident may have been the catalyst for the following events.
I recall Dad and I tractor shopping back in 1966. Such fun it was! We were always into something (we were always into something before 1966, too!). I didn't know where we were headed most of the time, but it didn't matter to me--I was with Dad, and where ever our trips took us the results were most always a treat. Heck, sometimes just for kicks, Dad would drive around to the many different tractor dealers we had in the area at the time just because he knew how much I loved looking at machinery. I suspect he liked it, too. Dad seemed to have taken a liking to a tractor dealer located in St. Louisville, Ohio, a small town about 10 miles north of us, and many 'go-and-look' trips found us in the St. Louisville area. It seems for quite a spell, every Saturday was ripe with tractors of many flavors--ACs, David Browns, Olivers--you mention it. In the lower level of this dealer's shop sat an odd-looking red tractor that said McCormick on the side and had a wide front axle. It was odd to me--it had a Farmall color but had no tricycle front end. It had some model number that began with a "W." Didn't know what to make of it. That dealer is still in business, and occassionaly when passing through St. Louisville, I'll pull into the lot just to look and reminisce a bit.
I distinctly remember Dad looking at a JD 720 Diesel a few miles east of St. Louisville. Good Lord! What a massive beast that was! Just one of its wheels seemed larger than the entire 9N! The 720 had a blown pony motor, and Dad backed off on that deal. I was disappointed, but a weekend or two later we went to an Amish farm 12 miles north of us to look at a Farmall H. At 10 years old, the details of our journey and 'tire kickin' are not clear in my brain, but the next thing I know, the Ford was gone, and a very nice looking Farmall H was parked in our barn!
Now, compared to the Ford, the H is a big tractor. It is more so when viewed through a 10-year-old's eyes. Wow! You REALLY had to climb up to get to the H's seat! I thought we had really hit the big time owning this big red tractor! It sounded so much more powerful than the Ford, too, and could pull so much more. For some time I could not understand how the H could do more than the 9N--it really didn't have that much more power than the Ford. Dad just kept pointing to the 38" rear wheels and told me how important that large diameter was in getting things done.
The H was the very first tractor we
kids drove except me. It was our lead tractor on the Farm until Dad got
the JD 60 in 1969. I spent hundreds of hours on the H raking and baling
hay, and clipping our pasture. For a while we had a Massey-Ferguson 202 Industrial
tractor that Dad kept when he sold his share of a concrete contracting business
to his partner. I was quite enamored with the Ferguson: it had power
steering, a shuttle shift, live PTO, and a loader, plus it had more horsepower than the H.
At right is the H shortly afte Dad repainted it. Currently the paint has deteriorated and needs redone. This was Dad's first Farmall.
One day we were going to bale hay. I was usually the driver as the job of stacking bales on the wagon was a little bit "above my breakfast" as Dad was fond of saying. I implored him to let me bale with the Ferguson. He said, "There's nothing wrong with the H," but agreed somewhat reluctantly, hooked up our aggravatin' International 45 baler to the Ferguson, and proceeded to get on with the task at hand.
I was in my glory in the seat of the Ferguson, but after some time I noticed that the job of driving was dustier than I had been accustomed to. Oh well...so the Ferguson sits a lot lower and closer to the grit than the H, but this has power steering! The live PTO on the Ferguson was a non-issue: our baler had a two-cylinder Wisconsin power unit on it. (I can still hear that motor riding up and down on the governor as the baler's plunger cycled--harrruuummm....harrruuummm.)
All was going smoothly despite the dirt and dust until I proceeded down a hill with the baler and about a half-load of hay on the wagon. I think the baler dropped into a small rut causing the baler's tongue to un-weight the Ferguson's drawbar. In an instant the entire rig began sledding down the slope. Out of sheer reaction and contrary to my schooling, I tapped the Ferguson's brakes. This only made for additional downhill speed. I quickly realized that this is what I DIDN'T want to do, so I let up on the brakes, and at that instant another Dad situation lesson popped into my head: When a load gets away from you, whack the throttle open, head for level ground, and steer to keep the load straightened out. Well, I did just that! After rumbling about 100 yards at high speed with the baling rig, I got everything stopped. I turned around to see what I hath wrought: There was Dad still standing on the wagon, hands on his hips with almost all of the hay tossed to the ground. He was not happy! "BOY! I'm goin' in the house to get some tea. Park that damn Ferguson and hook the H up to the baler!"
Appropriately, the H was the first tractor Dad took to a show. This is from 1996.
We got the spilled bales picked up. I spent the rest of the day in the seat of the H, and you know what? There wasn't a hint of the H skating down that grade even with a full load of hay. I gained new-found respect for the H and appreciated the benefits of large tire diameter even more. The best thing about the whole day--and leave it up to Dad to put a capper on it--as he was telling Mom about our baling adventure, he was effusive in his praise for me in executing the emergency driving instructions just like he had told me. That's what was cool about Dad--he didn't harp on the stuff you did wrong, but emphasized the stuff you did right.
The H is sort of forgotten. It's in Mike's shop, but with all the other acquisitions we have made--stuff that's bigger, or rarer, or newer--it gets overlooked. This past fall while in Mike's shop, I stood next to he old girl and had silent communion with it. I thought about all the chores we accomplished together. Looking down at the H's drawbar I noticed the weld repair Dad had done after a neighbor borrowed the H to move an old shed. Apparently the shed moving was more than the H could cope with, and it was returned to us with a parted drawbar. I then climbed into the seat of the H. What was so huge to me as a kid seems so tiny now. That perception comes from a lot of recent hours looking over the longish hood of the 460 and over the bull's-butt-wide hood of the W-9. It needs some paint, but that's about it. Mike had the old gal on a dyno at Dresden some years ago, and she clocked 25 HP.
I have a feeling that Mike has something in store for the H in the near future. There's a lot of 'family' in that tractor--we've had it for almost 40 years. We'll give it the due it deserves.