Our Intrepid Columnist Braves a Tractor Parade
Bill Schubart takes the opportunity to drive his 53-year-old John Deere tractor in the East Charlotte Tractor Parade and shares his memorable experience.
By Bill Schubart
Pop quiz: What’s free, fun for all ages and brings neighbors and friends together for a half-day of loud, smoky excitement? Answer? The East Charlotte Tractor Parade.
As a veteran of many East Charlotte Tractor Parades, I fired up my 53-year-old John Deere 2240 diesel, disconnected the brush hog and checked the fluids. My stepdaughter, Phoebe, had lettered a sign with the tractor’s year and model. I wrestled the beast into 8th gear to wobble off at its top-speed of 12 MPH towards East Charlotte.
As I chugged into the Green Mountain Hay Farm on Spear Street, I entered a long line of tractors gathering in a back field to be lined up by size and age. I could smell food and hear music coming from near the barn. I grabbed a coffee and more doughnuts than a man of girth should eat. Music pulsed from a local band, Remember Baker. After listening for a bit, I grabbed a free hotdog and greeted neighbors as they lined up.
I was admiring a Model A that had been made into a doodlebug tractor. It looked like it had come right off the Ford assembly line. Its 86-year-old maker regaled me with tales of the many Model As and Ts he’d bought as junk and restored. The ones he couldn’t, he’d made into Doodlebugs. (A Doodlebug being a tractor handmade during World War II when production tractors were in short supply.) I tried a few times to share my experience with a neighbor’s Doodlebug growing up in Morrisville but realized after 20 minutes of free-flowing monologue that my new friend was deaf, so I just listened.
The one Doodlebug I remember was built on the frame of a 1952 Oldsmobile Super 88. The entire body had rusted away and all that was left was the steel frame and floor, the steering column, the engine and the drive chain. Our neighbor, Cliff, had cut a steel drum in two and welded the ends together to make a snowplow which hung in the front from a long steel pipe going back to the rear of the car where two cinder blocks created a counter-weight such that Cliff could raise and lower the plow as a fulcrum from the wooden kitchen chair that was the driver’s seat. For two-years, Cliff kept our driveway plowed with his Doodlebug.
At one o’clock, some 50 drivers fired up gas and diesel engines ranging from 8 to 270 horsepower and the tractors lurched forward in their drivers’ chosen gear. They ranged in size from a massive New Holland with a cab that looked more like a studio apartment and tires taller than me to venerable ride-on lawnmowers driven by kids and geezers preferring tractors to bicycles or wheelchairs. The image of some 50 tractors winding slowly through a two-track dirt farm road on a clear, warm fall day resplendent with color was unforgettable.
Before hundreds of cheering fans of all ages, the parade advanced several hundred yards through downtown East Charlotte. Kids signaled drivers to sound their horns. Several tractors pulled wagons or gussied-up manure spreaders where families perched on hay bales or rockers. The Halloween theme was evident in yards and among participants.
The parade route left the hay farm headed North on Spear Street and took a right on Hinesburg/Charlotte Road, then a right on Bean Road, another right on Prindle Road and a final right back onto Spear Street where it ended at the hay farm where families wandered among the collection of Deeres, Olivers, Fords, Farmalls, McCormicks, New Hollands, Case, Internationals, Kubotas or the rare Cockshutt, some taking pictures of their kids astride the machines.
Driving home, listening to a radio program in which members of Congress were compared to spoiled children, I thought to myself, “what a terrible disservice to the children I’d seen at the East Charlotte Tractor Parade.”
Bill Schubart lives, writes and works with his wife Kate, two cats, 16 chickens and his 53-year-old tractor in Hinesburg.
This captures something really importnt about rural culture that gets lost in all the precision ag talk. A 53 year old John Deere 2240 still runing strong says more about the brand than any marketing could. That deaf Model A builder sounds like the kind of person who actualy knows how things work, which is getting rarer these days. The contrast between the simplicity of a tractor parade and the political nonsense on the radio is perfect. Those kids at the parade probably learned more about community in one afternoon than most politicians learn in a career.