On the Moraine Part VIII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

One winter, along about 1958 or 1959, my brother and I came across a young pigeon in the haymow that was in distress. The temperature was cold, and the pigeon was weak.  

We talked our parents into taking it back to Troy, and we let it loose in the shop, which was heated. Mother fed it, and soon it was flying all over the shop.  

In response to us saving its life, or perhaps because it needed to go to the bathroom, “Pidg,” as we called him, kindly decorated everything in the shop with a permanent encrustation of white coating.  

I don’t remember how long this went on, but after a few weeks Dad declared Pidg healed, and we took him back to the farm.  

Now the punch line.  

For a few Saturdays after that when we went to the farm for the weekend, Pidg would swoop down from the barn and land on my brother’s head as he walked about. This didn’t last long, but it was a funny experience.

Dad decided we needed another tractor. He found an old, unstyled John Deere Model A at the Cummings IH dealership on Route 124 on the edge of Hillsboro.  

We would get to know the Cummings family much better when we permanently moved to the Beaver farm, but that was in the future. Paul Cummings had just built the dealership building. It is now a church recreation center. We bought the John Deere for $300, including a mounted set of two-row cultivators. This tractor became pivotal in my life, but I eventually killed it – a later story.

This tractor is what I learned to drive – in the third grade.  

This tractor was also responsible for my interest in mechanical things, ultimately leading to my mechanical engineering education at the University of Cincinnati.  

One winter, Dad decided this tractor needed a “ring job.” There was a building on the farm that had a tractor shed on one side and a corn crib built in that served as the other side. This is where we decided to work on it.  

The corn crib became something of a tool bench, since it had no corn in it. We would take parts off the tractor and lay them there. We also had a few cans of oil and other related materials in the corn crib as well. I noticed that on the sides of the oil cans it would have things like “SAE 40.” I tried to pronounce “SAE.”  

Dad corrected me and told me that was an acronym for “The Society of Automotive Engineers.” He went on to explain such organizations exist to create standards by which to manufacture and operate equipment and other devices. Roll forward a few decades, and one finds that my wife Laura has worked for SAE at their headquarters in Pittsburgh.

But that was in the unforeseen distant future. I was fascinated by taking the tractor’s engine apart and putting it back together again. And, even more miraculous, that it roared back to life after such “surgery.” I was hooked on mechanical devices.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.