I’ve mentioned my foul-mouth Uncle Chet in previous columns, my mother’s eldest brother. His swearing didn’t bother me much and I loved being around him when he tried to teach me how to draw and especially when he came up with some harebrained idea that made my sensible father shake his head in disbelief. I couldn’t keep away from Chet, who farmed his mother’s 160 acres of rich bottom land. He was always busy, but never got around to doing what a farmer has to do when the time comes. Chet would much rather spend a Sunday washing his beautifully groomed milk cows’ tails, until they were snow white, or braiding his thoroughbred Belgians’ and Percherons’ tails, currycombing them to a fine sheen, then braiding the black silken tails with bright red ribbons. 

With all that to do, he sometimes got late with spring’s work on that beautiful flat patch of black earth. Such was the case on a May afternoon when we visited. My father of course shook his head when he saw Chet’s Rube Goldberg mechanical wonder. There stood this huge old McCormick-Deering tractor with massive flat fenders camouflaging its steel wheels with metal cleats. How the little fellow ever managed to make a U-turn with that monstrosity, I’ll never figure. To make matters worse, he had hooked the tractor’s drawbar to a two-share steel plow, to which he then hooked a section of terror-invoking springteeth, to which he had attached a section of disc weighted down with a cemetery marker from the family burial plot, to which he then added an oat seeder and finally a section of a flat-spiked drag that smoothed out the terror wreaked by the earlier implements on the rich friable loam and also insured that the seed would be covered. The coup de grace!

It all worked, sort of. Those oat seed sprungeth green—to borrow from scripture. And Uncle Chet went happily back to his cows’ and horses’ tails, to do what he truly loved, as he washed and combed what were essentially his pets.

I’ve always wondered how Chet dreamed up that complicated contraption. In fact, as soon as I got home from Chet’s I drew a picture of the operation, which Grandma saved because she thought I had artistic talent. (Dream on, Grandma!)

I got a possible answer in the magazine “Farm Mechanics” May 1928 issue I’ve recently been made privy to. It’s an advertisement purchased by Advance-Rumely Oil-Pull Tractor of LaPorte, Indiana. “PUT IN YOUR GRAIN CROP IN ONE OPERATION!” Shouted the ad’s subhead, then went on to call the picture below “A reasonably-priced tractor big enough to plow, pulverize and drill with only one pass over the field.”

The ad said:

“Better than a couple extra hands!” say farmers who have purchased the Model X Oil-Pull Tractor. This tractor is big enough to pull a 4-gang plow, the necessary pulverizing equipment and a drill – all at the same time. For Advance-Rumely engineers have again crammed additional power – more capacity for work into a light weight tractor. More power – less dead weight – more work on belt or draw-bar from each gallon of fuel used.

“Advance-Rumely again places in the hands of farmers a tractor that further reduces the cost of farming. Now you can put in a crop in one operation – go over your ground once and you’re through until harvest. It’s better farming, too. Freshly plowed ground is in better condition to be pulverized and seeded.

“And it’s remarkable how reasonably you can secure a Model X! One of the many OilPull dealers will be glad to demonstrate and tell you how comparatively little expenditure is required to make a huge saving. Plan for a more profitable season now! Use the couple to secure full information.”

Granted, Chet didn’t own the famous oil-pull of LaPorte, but he made do with that old 15-30 Behemoth, which could have dragged Grandma’s new hip-roofed barn all the way to Jackson County.