THRESHING DAY
August 13, 14 and 15, 1999

My name is Clayton Bush. I am 77 years old. I farmed 240 acres of corn, oats and hogs in east central Iowa until 1988, when I rented the ground out. My wife Martha and I still live on the home place. Since I quit farming I have been fixing up old tractors, and I belong to the Prairie Iron Antique Power Club. Every August the club puts on a show and threshing bee at our grounds. This year my son Ray brought his computer camera that puts the pictures on a floppy disk, and he says I should put them on the Internet. So here they are. I am typing this with two fingers so you will have to excuse me if it is short.

FRIDAY. Setting up. By suppertime there were about 70 tractors lined up on the grass under the trees. Red, green, orange, gray, yellow. Some on rubber, a couple on steel wheels. Every one of them was somebody's winter.

SATURDAY MORNING. THE THRESHING. This is the steam engine, built about 1919, belonged to one of our members. He fires it up at 6 in the morning and has steam by 8. It is belted up to a wooden separator from about the same time, which is what we called the threshing machine. The long belt has a half twist in it so the machine turns the right way and the belt stays on. The oats were cut with a binder and shocked in July and saved for the show. When the straw pile starts growing out the back, you know it is working.

That is me in the striped overalls and Willard Rodriquez in the straw hat working the bundle rack, and up on the machine is the fellow who owns it, who won't let anybody else up there. You pitch the bundles in heads first, one at a time, so you don't choke the machine. All of us on the crew were in our seventies or eighties. We all did it for real when we were boys. I will say it was a lot easier at fourteen.

THRESHING RINGS. For the young people. In the thirties, when I was a boy, nobody had his own threshing machine. A dozen farms or so went together in a ring, and one man, the thresherman, owned the steam engine and the separator and pulled them from farm to farm in July. Every farm sent men and teams, and you went to every neighbor's place until all the oats in the ring were threshed. I started as the water boy when I was 9. At 14 I was hauling bundles with a team. The women of the ring cooked dinner at noon for 20 men, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet corn, sliced tomatoes and three kinds of pie, and every farm wife tried to beat the last one. It was the best meal of the summer. After the war the combines came in, and my dad bought one in 1948, and that was the end of our ring. I don't miss the work. I miss the dinners and I miss those men.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON. Plow day. A dozen old tractors pulling two bottom plows across a hayfield, one behind the other. I didn't plow this year. Martha said I had done enough for one day.

THE PIE STAND. The ladies from one of the Lutheran churches in town run the pie stand every year, and this is where you will find me if I am not on a tractor. Rhubarb, gooseberry, sour cream raisin and apple, $1.25 a slice. From the left, Donald Blankenship, who is 82, me, Willard, and Charles Stansell, who is the baby at 74 and laughs at everything. We call ourselves the Bench Committee. We have not decided anything yet.

SUNDAY. Church service on the grounds in the morning, then the tractor parade in the afternoon. That is me in front on my Farmall.

MY TRACTOR. It is a 1948 Farmall H, the same model my dad bought new after the war. I bought this one at a neighbor's farm sale in 1991 for $650. It had been sitting in his shed since the early seventies and the mice had been farming it. It took me three winters. I rebuilt the engine with new sleeves and pistons, put on new rear tires, had it sandblasted, painted it red and put on new decals. It was done in the spring of 1994. It is a four cylinder gas engine with five speeds, and fifth gear is faster than a man my age needs to go on a tractor. It starts every time. Martha says I talk about it more than I talk about her. That is not true but it is close.

Thank you to Ray for the pictures and for showing me how to do this. If you have an old tractor or remember threshing, I would like to hear from you. Write me at [email protected]

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Last updated September 4, 1999