The first tractor I ran was a 1936 Minneapolis-Moline Model Z. I was 6 years old when my brother (Oscar Haake Jr.) was drafted and left my dad, Oscar Haake Sr., really short of help. Dad showed me how to use the hand clutch on that Z, and steering was just like on my pedal tractor, so it was easy. Dad made a track in the field, and I just went back and forth while he worked a dirt scoop behind (I think he called it a Fresno). That’s how we leveled several spots in fields so irrigation water would flow for row crops. That was 1951.
As I got older, I put in many hours on that Z. Only once did I have to walk home because I killed it and was too small to crank it. My sister Darlene was 8 years older than me, and we cultivated corn with me running the Z and her riding and operating what was a horse-drawn 2-row cultivator, as she was big enough to steer with the foot pedals and work the levers to lift it out at the ends of the field.
A couple years later, Dad bought a mounted front cultivator with a tool bar behind for mounting irrigation ditchers on. Front cultivator and rear were raised by an arrangement built into the PTO unit. You’d step on the pedal once, and an arm made a half-turn, lifting everything up. Step on it again, and everything went down. I’ve never seen another lift like it on any Moline.
The fenders for that Z were resting alongside the barn. Why I do not know, but once when cultivating, I swung that seat too far to the right and soon I was laying over the gas tank. I didn’t get hurt so I just pushed that seat back against the tire and, backing up slow, it went right back. Guess I didn’t consider how badly I could have been hurt. I don’t think I even told Dad about it.
I also raked hay and straw with that Z and a steel-wheel International Harvester rake. I liked taking that rake down the road. I even made a game out of seeing if I could hit the metal beer cans with the steel wheels and get them to wrap around those narrow wheels. Sometimes they would stay on all the way home or to the field.
Once Dad sent me to a farm we rented to rake a small field of dryland wheat straw. It was a dry year and the crop was poor. Our combine was a John Deere 12A. They called that a “straight-through combine,” as it was a 6-feet cut and I think the cylinder and straw walkers and everything was 5 feet wide.
To bale the straw, it had to be raked into windrows. Because the straw was light, Dad said to rake two passes together. This was about 10 acres that was above an irrigation ditch that angled across the farm. Then he said that I should take full swaths on the wide side of the field and about 3-feet short of a full swath on the narrow side, and I could finish without any short rows and hard-to-turn angles in the middle.
I tried, but when I got to the middle, I had a lot of field left on the west side. Dad said no short windrows so I decided to just keep pushing those windrows together until I had no short windrows but boy, did that center windrow get big on one end of the field. Dad went by the field later and when he got home, he kind of laughed about seeing that windrow and then asked me if I thought Mr. Jensen (who baled our straw) could get that through his John Deere 14T baler. As it turned out, he couldn’t, partly because he pulled it with a John Deere Model A without live PTO. Dad went out there and between the two of them, they forked a lot of that windrow into the baler.
My brother passed away last year at age 91 and left me his 1951 Moline ZA from his collection and I sure enjoy it. I still have the International Harvester rake I grew up running and it still works. My wife, Margie, and I farmed a good part of our lives on the farm she grew up on and we also worked many other jobs through the years to make a living while we raised our family. Here 30 miles north of Denver, Colorado, it’s sad to see irrigated farmland dried up as water is sent to the cities and good land is covered by homes and good irrigated river bottom farms being dug up for gravel. Progress, I guess. FC
Ron Haake lives in Fort Lupton, Colorado.
