Western Producer readers have moulded the farms, villages, towns and cities throughout the West into the rich, vibrant communities we see today.
We’ve enjoyed being there alongside for the past 90 years.
As part of 90th anniversary celebrations, our Tell Us Your Story project invites readers to share their memories and connections.
The five day storm of February 1979 would break snowfall records for years to come. On that particular day however, I was quite happy to be at home on the farm watching the three TV channels we had and reading recent issues of The Western Producer. Then the phone rang. The caller was answering our ad in The Producer. The ad we displayed was for a circa 1940 Allis-Chalmers model WC tractor.
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The caller wanted to know if the Allis was a distillate, kerosene or a gasoline model. I had overlooked the small one gallon tank that served to start the tractor before it was switched over to kerosene, or distillate. I would eventually have to shovel my way through a six foot drift just to open the shed door and find out that it was indeed a kerosene tractor.
My work yielded fruitful rewards. The buyer, a gentleman from British Columbia, informed me that he would buy it unseen, for the asking price, and that he would pay me an extra $100 for storage until July of that year when he could get away from the sawmill where he was working. I didn’t need storage fees, however he insisted. After the storm cleared, the cheque arrived in the mail, the amount was exactly what we had agreed upon, plus $100 for storage.
In July of that year, he and his wife arrived in our farm yard near Palmer, Sask. Their rig consisted of a one ton Ford truck, a flat deck trailer and a camper mounted on the truck. They informed me that they had intentions of driving around the area between Assiniboia and Gravelbourg, and purchasing as many Jacobs wind powered generators as they could get their hands on. Most of the Jacobs I knew of were standing in abandoned yards and had been out of commission since the early 1950s when rural Saskatchewan became centrally electrified. They camped in our yard.
A couple of weeks later, they left for B.C. with the tractor, along with the dismantled towers, generators and a couple of gasoline powered generator sets that they had purchased. They informed me that they would phone when they got home, and they did. I remember being amazed at the short time it had taken for them to travel the 1,000 mile distance from our farm to theirs.
That year, days before Christmas, I stopped at the post office in Gravelbourg. A note in my mail box informed me that I had a parcel. The neatly wrapped package displayed a return address from B.C. The contents later revealed a large toy model of Allis Chalmers’ latest model of their most powerful four-wheel drive tractor. A toy that our son cherished for many years after that. The couple from B.C. were two of many friends and acquaintances I have made from the pages of The Western Producer.
