Starks' Harvesters E-Book

Robert S. White

• Herausgeber: Old Pond Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 228

Beschreibung

For Rob and Charlie this was the start of memorable years driving Massey Ferguson combines the length and breadth of the American wheat belt. This is Rob's story, a vivid account of endless hours of work, rattlesnakes, truck wrecks, summer lightning, tornados, favourite bars and the 'honeys' at the grain elevators. Rob went on to do five years' harvesting with Dale Starks who comes to life in these pages with all his wisdom and cussedness. This is the man who starred in Yellow Trail from Texas, the BBC documentary that first inspired Rob and Charlie to make the trip. In England, Rob was working as an agricultural contractor. For him, machines and harvesting were more than a way of life - they were a passion. This enthusiasm, which brought Rob long-lasting friendships from his American days, illuminates every page of his book.

Leseprobe

Starks’ Harvesters

Robert S White

Old Pond Publishing

Dedication

To my family and friends

Contents

Title PageDedicationAuthor’s Note Acknowledgements Foreword by Tim Slessor Introduction Map Chapter 1  The Great Plains Chapter 2  Dale Starks Chapter 3  Our First Harvest Chapter 4  New Combines Chapter 5  Wrecked Trucks Chapter 6  Long Hours Chapter 7  A Canadian Connection Chapter 8  Seventeen Years Later Postscript PlatesAbout the Author Copyright

Author’s Note

Writing about events that happened more than thirty years ago, I soon find myself submerged in a culture and language that I came to love and adopt. So I talk of truck, not lorry; wrench, not spanner; corn, not maize, and I spell plough as ‘plow’. I have also tried to keep the bad language to a minimum: harvesters are apt to be coarse and profane.

These events are neither invented nor exaggerated – there would be no point. Some names and locations have been altered slightly to respect privacy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people:

Charlie Norman for his excellent photography

Charlie, Terry & Carol Laws and Jeremy Slessor for their help in recalling these events

Tom Kirk for his recollections of harvest: he trod the path that we were to follow

Steven & Kevin Clarke and Delbert & Becky Joyner for having kept these memories alive on the Great Plains

John & Annie Chapman for suggestions and corrections to the manuscript

Tim Slessor for making all this possible

Some of the historical data has been based on material in Custom Combining on the Great Plains, a History by Thomas Isern.

Foreword

By Tim Slessor

ROB WHITE is an enthusiast. Indeed some might go further and say that where ‘harvest’ is concerned, he is almost an obsessive. Certainly, he is one of those people who, once on a course, won’t bloody well let go. Now, let me tell you how I know.

More than thirty years ago I made the film Yellow Trail from Texas for the BBC about the American wheat harvest – probably, at that time, the biggest agricultural operation in the world. Maybe it still is. We began filming in the Texas spring; we finished nearly two thousand miles away, high up on the Canadian prairie in the first October snows. A few months later, after the film went out, I got a small flood of letters, thirty or forty of the things, from young farm lads – and a few girls – from all across Britain; they wanted to ‘go and do harvest’. Please, could I put them in touch with the boss of the gang of cutters and combines that I had featured in my film?

Problem. I had to compose a standard and rather negative letter explaining that Dale Starks was a very busy man, and I doubted that he would be willing to take the risk of employing applicants he had never met and about whom he therefore could know less than nothing. Anyway, the life of a cutter was something rather less than the romantic, happy-go-lucky, sunshine existence they seemed to imagine. It was very hard work and the hours were ridiculous. And, lastly, there was the small matter of US work permits. So, please forgive me, but I’m sorry….

Yes, you are ahead of me. There were two of those lads who just would not give up: Rob White and Charlie Norman. They wrote, they phoned, they wrote again; they were a regular pain. What to do? In the end, I surrendered. I told them that if they got themselves to London, I would give them lunch in a BBC canteen – how generous can one get? This, I thought would give me the chance to suss them out, and judge whether they had what it would take – to stick seven months of hot, dusty, badly paid, monotonous 18-hours-a-day-and-no-weekends, diesel-smelling grind.

Strangely, Rob and Charlie had never met before that lunch, but one could tell from the way they got on together that they were thoroughly Good Sorts. More important, they were under no illusions about what ‘harvest’ really involved. So I took a risk and gave them the address and details they needed. As you will learn from Rob’s story, it took a year or two before they eventually made it to Texas.

Rob will tell you that his five seasons of harvest (yes, five!) are, for him, quite indelible – the best thing he has ever done. He will talk for hours, even days, about the farms he has cut, the highways travelled, the breakdowns and the accidents, the repairs and the lash-ups, the long nights and the longer days, the people met and the good friends made. It is all here in this book. He will tell you about the summer heat of Kansas and the first chills of Montana, about the mind-blowing distances and the vastness of those western skies. You will learn more about the innards and intricacies of combines than you will ever need to know. (Rob, what the hell is a ‘shaker-shoe shaft’?)

Above all, he will tell you about the boss: Dale Starks. Not an easy man to know; a man of very few words – the quintessential sardonic westerner. Sadly, he and his wonderful wife, Margie, are gone now. But in all our memories they are still ‘on harvest’, still cutting. Margie, always quietly supportive, could drive a combine as well as – probably better than – any man. And Dale knew as much about working the things as anyone alive. He had started as a young man in 1948 with a wife, a bank loan and one rather clapped-out combine; by the time I met him he had nine combines and all the associated trucks and pick-ups that made up his circus.

As you may have gathered, starting with that lunch break back in 1976, Rob and I have become firm friends. He knows far more about my film than I do; he is familiar with every scene, cut and detail; he can quote long chunks of the commentary and hum along with the various songs. Amazingly, he is even now planning some kind of reunion somewhere in deepest Oklahoma with his American harvesting friends.

Another thing: when my son was in his late teens and could not make up his mind what next, I suggested that he should go off and join Rob – and Dale Starks. I remember a rather reluctant Jeremy, the proverbial callow youth, flying out from Heathrow; he returned six months later as a confident young man. He went back for a second year, from Texas to Saskatchewan. It made him. So thank you, Dale and Rob.

I hope you enjoy what Rob has written. You should. But don’t ask me to enlighten you on some of the more esoteric terms and jargon that are evidently part of the harvesters’ everyday patois. What is the difference between a Massey 860 and 850? And does it matter? How do you know when the distance between your cylinder bars and the concave is correct? Come again? What do you do when the feeder beater starts making a funny noise?

What else to say? Well, I have been lucky in that I have travelled a good deal of the world making documentaries for the BBC. But none of those films – and I would think that there have been a hundred or so – has had as long a life or has had as many echoes as ‘Yellow Trail’. Who would have thought – certainly not me – that one day, more than thirty years on, it would play a part in inspiring a book. Maybe I can be forgiven for being both flattered and a little proud.

Right, Rob, get her dieseled-up and let’s go!

TIM SLESSORLondon 2009

Introduction

BACK in the 1960s when I was around fourteen years old I read an article about the North American wheat harvest. It captivated and enthralled me. Driving a combine harvester across the Great Plains, two thousand miles from Texas to Canada, gripped my very being. I was desperate to do it, but having no contacts either in Britain or abroad that could help me, the chances were very slim. This was of course pre-internet days and the world seemed a much bigger place.

In January 1976 I went to work one morning and throughout the day met several people who asked me if I had seen the programme Yellow Trail from Texas on BBC television the previous evening. Apparently it was a documentary on the very subject, featuring a husband-and-wife team, Dale and Margie Starks, custom cutters from Oklahoma.

I had not seen it and was beside myself with grief.

So, on the strength of a programme I had not seen, I wrote to the BBC asking to be put in touch with Dale and Margie Starks.

July 1982 – The pressure was on.

The wheat in Leoti, western Kansas was ready for harvesting and we were 250 miles away in Oklahoma trying to complete our current contract. My combine was loaded behind the Jimmy Diesel truck and left mid-afternoon for Kansas. Jeremy was driving and had instructions to get as far as he possibly could in daylight, phone in on his progress and bed down for the night in the truck.

I stayed back to load the rest of the machines when we had finished that night. Then with pick-up and travel trailer I left Oklahoma some time after midnight and drove all night. I caught up with Jeremy in Dighton, Kansas, woke him up and we got the hell to Leoti. We unloaded the combine, put the header on and I started cutting wheat. I didn’t quit until 11 o’clock that night. By that time I had worked forty hours without a break.

It was several days before I caught up with the boss, Dale Starks. What would he say? I had, after all, put in a superhuman effort; we had secured that job, our reputation in that area and had saved the day. Surely praise would be heaped upon me, but how would he word it?

‘You made it, then,’ was his only comment; but by then I should have known him well enough to expect no more. This was the Dale who had taught me about combines, harvest and, dare I say it, life itself.

So to some extent you can blame him for this book.

Chapter One

The Great Plains

BY their geographical location and sheer scale the Great Plains of North America have lent themselves to some form of contract or ‘custom’ harvesting since grain crops were first grown there. Wheat is ready to cut in Texas in mid-May; crops ripen further north as summer progresses and it is October before the wheat on the prairies of Canada is finally ready to harvest. Other crops such as corn (maize), milo (grain sorghum) and soybean extend the harvest into December.

An area approximately two thousand miles long by six hundred miles wide is host to a vast quantity of grain.

In the days of the binder and threshing machine large amounts of unskilled labour – the men were known as ‘Bindlestiffs’ – were required for the laborious tasks of handling the sheaves from field to stack and from stack to thresher. Enterprising men bought their own threshing outfit and contracted their services to other farmers. Most worked locally but a few would thresh in winter wheat areas of Oklahoma and Kansas, then load their threshing machines onto rail cars and head for the spring wheat regions further north. Custom threshing was well established by the First World War and into the 1920s.

Combine harvesters are so called because they combine the cutting and the threshing into one operation. Early combine harvesters were large, cumbersome machines. By the 1890s machines with headers as wide as twenty feet were pulled by teams of thirty-two or more horses on the large wheat ranches of California, but it would take the effects of the First World War to see combines gain a foothold further east on the Great Plains. As wheat prices rose and labour began to get scarce a few farmers bought prairie models of twelve- to sixteen-feet cut. These were pulled by horses, mules or tractors and had engines to drive the threshing mechanism to replace earlier ground-wheel driven designs.

It was a natural progression for the owner of a threshing outfit to buy a combine to cut his own wheat – if he had any – then to hire his services to neighbouring farms. A study in 1926 by the United States Department of Agriculture found that over half the combine owners on the plains did custom work. By the 1930s some pull-type combines had rubber tyres, enabling machines to be hauled by road behind grain trucks, thus making it easier for a few enterprising operators to follow the harvest north, rather than just work locally for their neighbours.

The industry was still relatively small in 1940, but by 1942 there were enough operators for the US Bureau of Agricultural Economics to commission a study in Nebraska. They recorded the number of combines coming through the ports of entry on the southern border of that state. In 1942 they recorded 515 combines; just five years later the number had grown to 5,117.

It was the effects of the Second World War that caused the custom harvesting industry to really take off. Food was needed but manpower and resources had been diverted to the forces and to producing items such as planes, tanks and munitions. No longer were there large numbers of men available to pitch sheaves from binders. Early pull-type combines required two men, one to drive the tractor and another to ride on and operate the combine. Most pull-types had their own engine to drive the threshing mechanism and it was calculated that the average tractor/combine engine outfit used 1¼ gallons of fuel per acre harvested.

The introduction of the self-propelled combine was a big step forward: one man, one engine, using only three-quarters of a gallon of fuel per acre, and no crop run down opening up the field on the first run. In 1938 Massey-Harris introduced their first self-propelled combine, the model 20 designed by their chief engineer Tom Carroll. His improved design, the model 21, followed two years later – this was the combine that would revolutionise the custom harvesting industry.

The 21 soon became a proven product that was ripe for mass production, were it not for the restrictions on the raw materials to build it.

Joe Tucker, vice-president of sales for Massey-Harris, a man of great drive and vision, approached the War Production Board and persuaded them to allocate him enough steel to build five hundred number 21s above their normal quota for the 1944 harvest. These combines were sold to farmers and custom cutters who would pledge to cut a minimum of two thousand acres with each machine. This was to be known as the Massey-Harris Harvest Brigade and would be run as though it were a military operation.

There was no stipulation in the contract of what they would charge the farmer for cutting his wheat, but the going rate at that time was three dollars an acre. The cost of these machines was about $2,500 each. It is said that half a million bushels of grain were saved just by the advanced technology of these combines which also saved half a million gallons of fuel and made tractors and men free for other work.

The plan was to deliver the new combines by rail from the factory in Toronto, Canada to four main areas in the United States. Some went to California and the Pacific Northwest – Washington, Oregon and Idaho. About seventy machines were earmarked for southern Texas where they would begin harvesting flax and oats in April, before heading north and west to harvest wheat. The bulk of the production, about 330 machines, was to be delivered to Altus and Enid, Oklahoma and Hutchinson, Kansas: a Plains State Brigade that would be joined by the Texas Brigade and cut its way north to Canada.

Government officials and Massey-Harris dealers worked hard to bring farmers with wheat to cut into contact with custom cutters looking for work. Truckloads of parts, fuel and tyres were shipped into the area alongside Massey-Harris technicians who would ensure combines were correctly set and maintained.

It was a tremendous success: great publicity for Massey-Harris, and a favourable outcome for the War Production Board. It had been a wet, difficult harvest but the cutters had averaged 2,039 acres per machine. Massey-Harris had promised a prize for the harvester who had cut the most crop, based on dollar receipts. A $500 war bond was awarded to Wilford Phelps of Chandler, Arizona who had harvested 3,438 acres with his 14-foot-cut gasoline-powered machine.

Other manufacturers soon had their own designs of self-propelled combines into volume production. Gleaner, John Deere and International were the main contenders.

For a time there was plenty of work for everybody. In 1948 the price of wheat dropped due to over-supply. Some farmers were reluctant to hire custom cutters in these less affluent circumstances, preferring to manage with the machines they already had or to get help from neighbours. There followed a period of fluctuation while supply of combines available and wheat to cut got into some sort of balance. Some operators drawn by the profits of the good times fell away when times were hard. But by now there were a substantial number of professional operators who were economically and emotionally tied to their jobs, just as the farmers were tied to their land. Did a farmer not plant his crop even though prices at harvest were predicted to be low? Some cutters made the run, come what may.

The 1960s saw more stability in the industry. There was always the risk of crops being lost to hail or drought, but cutters modified their routes to suit conditions and demand.

From 1973 to 1976 high yields combined with high prices ensured good profits for both cutters and farmers. Wheat was being cut for about eight dollars an acre at this time and established operators invested in more sophisticated and expensive machinery. When the price of wheat dropped in the middle of 1976 some cutters found they had borrowed too much money to finance machinery, but the weather in 1977 again played its part and heavy rains in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas kept cutting rates about the same as the previous year.

An outfit might consist of one combine and one grain truck or up to ten or more combines, each with a grain truck. It was a male-dominated industry in the early days, but wives began to accompany their husbands on harvest to drive truck and cook the meals. Children too came along during their long summer school vacation. Lasting friendships would become established between harvesters and their farming customers. Wives would meet up and children play together which, as well as doing a good job, ensured continuity of work in future years.

Living accommodation improved as families came along. In the early days men would sleep in tents, barns or granaries. Travel trailers became popular, the boss and his family living in relative comfort with facilities for the wives to produce those all-important meals for a hard-working crew. The crew’s accommodation would be more basic; a trailer house with bunk beds might have looked grim inside, but it was a welcome sanctuary after a long, hard, hot day on the combine. Old school buses were another favourite. Bought second-hand they were cheap and easy to convert to mobile bunkhouse accommodation, their yellow hue a sharp contrast with the combines and trucks they accompanied.

Chapter Two

Dale Starks

DALE STARKS was born on 17 January 1924 to Wallace and Ethel May Starks. The Starks farmed in northern Oklahoma, close to the homestead that would eventually become Dale’s farm. Dale was one of seven children: three girls and four boys.

In 1943 William Dale Starks, aged nineteen, married Margie Fearn Witters aged sixteen, daughter of a construction worker. The Witters lived a few miles south of the farm. Margie had one brother, their mother having died when Margie was seven years old. The newlyweds lived in half of Dale’s grandmother’s house and they began farming the 160 acres of land which, like the house, was rented.

In 1948, with the aid of a bank loan, Dale began custom harvesting. The previous winter Dale had bought and worked on his first combine. It was a used pull-type Gleaner, 12-foot cut with a 6-cylinder Hercules engine. This he pulled with a Case D tractor. When moving between jobs the tractor was loaded onto the grain truck with the combine towed behind the truck. The header was loaded onto a trailer and hitched behind the combine. He employed one man to drive the grain truck, and that first year they harvested in Hobart, Oklahoma; Manchester, Oklahoma, and Ellinwood, Kansas.

1949 saw the same outfit harvesting in Frederick, Oklahoma; Manchester, Oklahoma; Harper, Kansas; Scott City, Kansas, and Sterling, Colorado. In Sterling, Dale was cutting sunflower-infested wheat alongside another cutter who was using a self-propelled Massey-Harris 21 combine. Dale’s Gleaner was having a lot of trouble harvesting the crop, but he was very impressed with the Massey’s engineering and performance in those adverse conditions. Dale hated his Gleaner with a passion. He claimed to have had only two happy days in his life, the first being when he sold that combine. When pressed for information on the second, he said it was the day he sold the tractor that pulled the ‘son-of-a-bitch’!

The Gleaner had a slatted conveyor to take the straw away from the concave area. In heavy crop conditions the slats would break and it was an awkward and time-consuming operation to replace them. The combine had only one slip clutch to drive the whole mechanism. If it was backed off enough to avoid breaking slats it wouldn’t run the machine, if it was tightened up enough to run the machine it would break slats. Dale was not impressed, but he must have made some money that year because he bought a new pick-up.

In 1950 Dale bought a brand-new Massey-Harris 27 combine, successor to the 21. He had a Ford truck. The combine, with 14-foot header still attached, was driven onto the truck for moving between jobs. With the header over the cab roof, the truck must have been top heavy and presented a fearful sight to oncoming motorists. That year they cut in Hobart, Oklahoma; Manchester, Oklahoma; Scott City, Kansas, and in Sidney, Nebraska for a man by the name of Harry Sparks, a job Dale was to do for the next twenty-seven years.

Then for the first time they made the epic journey to northern Montana, to what is known as the Hi-Line, so-called because it is the most northerly highway running east–west. He cut near the town of Kremlin, west of Havre. Dale was hired to harvest part of 1,200 acres of wheat belonging to Lenny Milner. Milner did not actually farm himself but had a man and his wife living on the farm who could be relied on to run the place unsupervised. That couple were Wade and Edna Reese, eventually to become life-long friends of the Starks.

Wade, who had migrated from Missouri at the age of seventeen, acquired some land of his own over the years and wooed and married Edna. He worked for Milner for twenty years, running the place as though it were his own. Indeed the plan was to buy Milner out eventually, but fate intervened. Milner’s wife had a stroke, rendering her bedridden for twenty-six years and unable to speak or feed herself.

This obviously had an emotional and financial effect on Lenny. A local realtor and farmer who already owned thousands of acres talked Milner into selling him the farm, thus depriving Wade and Edna of their chance. They left their beloved farm, north-west of Kremlin, and bought a house in nearby Gildford. Wade got a job with the county driving a road grader for the next seven years. Wade became a great help to Dale in securing work for him in that area.

1951 saw Margie’s first harvest. Until then she had stayed at home to run the farm. It was Margie’s job to mouldboard plow and when their son Larry was quite young – born, I think, in 1950 – he was pulled alongside the tractor in a wagon as she worked the land. This arrangement was necessary, as there was not enough room for Larry to be on the tractor. Larry was named after Dale’s brother, Lawrence, who was killed in a car accident when he was seventeen. The driver of the car was drunk, they ran off the road, overturned in a ditch and Lawrence was drowned.

Dale’s farm came up for auction that year. At that time he was cutting in Sidney, Nebraska for Harry Sparks. He cut all day, hired someone to drive him the 450 miles back to Manchester, Oklahoma overnight while he slept, bought the farm and was driven straight back to resume cutting. He paid $29,500 for the house and 160 acres.

They did not make it to Kremlin that year as they got rained out further south. By now he was running two machines.

In 1952 Dale traded for a new Massey-Harris 27. It was either this year or 1953 that he worked with a man by the name of Ben Steinmetz. Ben and his wife Sadie owned their own 27 and cut alongside Dale for two or three years.

By 1954 Dale was running four machines and this was the first year he cut for the Goetze brothers of Iowa Park, Texas. He would cut for the Goetzes for the next thirty-seven years. Since Margie had started to come along they had lived in trailers, but after a day on the combines they were still taking their bath in the ponds used for watering cattle. Dale said that in the early days he slept in the granaries along with his truck driver – if the mosquitoes got too bad they would cover their face and arms with diesel oil.

By 1956 Dale was running six machines. The Massey-Harris 90 was now in production, costing $5,000 each. Cutting and hauling in Montana brought in five dollars an acre. Good money was made out of custom harvesting in those years.

Dale had become well established in Montana. Along with Milner’s wheat he was also cutting 1,300 acres at Kremlin for Vernie Hill. Vernie had arrived in Montana in 1911, full of hopes and with just fifty dollars in his pocket. At the age of twenty-three he left North Dakota to seek a better life. Those early years were tough. He built a little homestead shack on his ‘free’ 160 acres and that first winter he trapped badgers to survive.

By working for other people in the winter and doing some taxidermy he survived where others failed. Being shrewd and smart, Vernie bought up surrounding homesteads as they became vacant, eventually farming about 3,000 acres.