Vintage tractors make neat work of field for Plow Day

BUTTE — Based solely on pure enthusiasm, you’d think Jim Redding, not his grandson Owen, was the 5-year-old.

That’s because Redding, of Anchorage, spent the better part of Saturday playing with some of his big boy toys — a pair of 1949 John Deere tractors, models R and G.

“My first words were ‘John Deere’ — so they tell me,” Redding said. “I’ve got four of them. I plow snow with two of them and this one and the other one are just for playing and working and whatever.”

That Redding isn’t a farmer and lives in the city doesn’t deter his love of vintage tractors. It’s that love that brought him and about a baker’s dozen fellow members of the Antique Power Club of Alaska to the Butte for the group’s 15th annual Plow Day. The antique iron enthusiasts spent the day smiling, sweating and even doing a little tinkering to keep their old tractors running to plow about 40 acres of land on John Hett’s farm.

“It’s a tension-reliever,” Redding said of driving one of his restored tractors. “You get it all built up all year, and this is when you get to relieve it putting back and forth in the field.”

You don’t have to twist Dick Sloan’s arm to get him out in the field.

“I was raised on the farm,” he said before taking his fire-engine-red 1953 Farmall Super C out into the field. (We’ll keep it on the down low that he came trudging back about 10 minutes later. “I ran out of gas.”)

“The biggest thing about our club is we like to preserve this old iron and keep it from going to the scrapyard,” he said. The Super C he got “about four years ago. It was up in Willow. It looked pretty ratty then, and I cleaned ’er up.”

Even after growing up on a farm, Sloan said he loves getting out in the field.

“I love to get out and play in the dirt,” he said. “This is the one day a year we get to come and work them.”’

Seeing the old green John Deeres, red Farmalls and even a bright orange 1942 Allis-Chalmers — that’s Wasilla resident George Greeno’s rig — “takes me back about 40 to 50 years ago,” said Hett, who was planning to plant grain after the power club was finished. “I was born and raised on a farm, and I grew up on ’em.”

Asked what’s more fun, restoring old, dilapidated tractors or driving them, Bob Jeffries of Wasilla answered a succinct, “Yes.”

“I love this old, vintage stuff,” he said while getting ready to go out into the field with his 1952 Ford 8n.

“The farmer calls this work,” chimed in Dean Adams of Anchorage. “It’s fun for us.”

Farming’s a hard life and the machines growers depend on have to be just as tough as they are.

“Probably the tractor is tougher,” Sloan said. “They don’t make them nearly as well today as the older ones.”

But Hett countered that “the tractors wouldn’t be doing anything if it weren’t for the farmers.”

Contact Greg Johnson at 352-2269 or greg.johnson@frontiersman.com.