D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
Running Like a Deere
Norman Ruebush never met a John Deere tractor he didn't want to tinker with. You can see the results on the 4th of July.
Story and photos by David A. Fryxell
It's not hard to figure out which is Norman Ruebush's place. "Look for the first house with a stone wall," he says, giving directions within the Silver Acres subdivision south of Silver City. He oughta just say to look for the John Deere tractor.
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Norman Ruebush in his tractor yard. |
Make that tractors, plural. Ruebush has restored eight and has another 12 waiting to be worked on. The first one, back in the early 1990s, took him exactly a year; he has before and after photos with his granddaughter sitting atop the tractor, bookending the restoration. These days, tractors like the gleaming green-and-yellow John Deere "G" sitting out front of his workshop — twin exhausts jutting from the front like jade elephant tusks, mammoth rear tires the size of upended wading pools — might take him four months. "It depends on how much I go fishing," he says.
A dozen or more such vintage tractors, restored by Ruebush and a neighbor , Layne Fanning, similarly bitten by the tractor bug, will chug their way through Silver City's 4th of July parade this year. Then they'll be parked at the Silver City Museum, where another trusty John Deere engine will churn ice cream for the museum's 25th annual Ice Cream Social.
"Let me show you this," says Ruebush, tugging on the John Deere green ballcap that tops his gray hair. With a characteristic twinkle behind his eyeglasses, he leads the way past the sentinel "G" tractor into the first of a warren of workshops. Each room boasts its own assortment of tools, tanks, bins, cords, wheels, wrenches, brooms, antique whatchamacallits, parts, motors and cloth-covered works-in-progress. At the front entrance, a pair of cowboy boots, toes curling upward like a jester's footwear, hangs on either side of a pinkish metal pole.
Displaying a strength belying his age, Ruebush muscles a propane tank as tall as he is into position and hooks it up to a Rube Goldberg-ish contraption set on a wagon painted the inevitable green and yellow. The open-sided wagon holds a white freezer chest, twin two-gallon wooden-sided ice-cream makers, and a John Deere motor connected to a pair of metal wheels that in turn crank the ice cream. A sign on the side of the wagon reads, "Sponsored By The Grumpy Old Men With Tractors & Werner Tire."
The contraption debuted at last July 4th's ice-cream social — supplementing the museum's more mundane ice-cream-making machinery, Ruebush explains. Before being employed to make ice cream, an engine like this might have been used to pump water, grind feed or operate a forge in a blacksmith's shop.
"This here is called a 'hit or miss' engine," he adds. "Lemme show you why."
Ruebush begins furiously cranking the engine until it emits a burst of smoke, pauses to tweak something, then resumes cranking. Finally he's rewarded with a more or less steady puffing and burping from the engine. Satisfied, he takes a rag from a nearby bin, sidles over and uses it to briefly create resistance. The motor instantly responds by revving up to a rapid putt-putt-putt.
By "hitting" only when it needs to, this old but surprisingly efficient engine burns a minimum of fuel, Ruebush says. "It can run forever. I'll run it all year on that one tank. After the county fair last year, I went to top off the tank, and couldn't put any more in it!"
He nods in appreciation of the smarts of those long-ago John Deere engineers. "That's what it sounds like when we're making ice cream," he adds, as the engine resumes its previous rhythm and, as it warms up, spaces its bursts more than a second apart. "It can turn out a freezer of ice cream in seven minutes."
Last year, however, when the machine made its debut, Ruebush and the "grumpy old men" lost a "good-natured competition" with the museum board to see who could sell the most ice cream. That dependable Deere engine inexplicably conked out midway through. Sandy Hicks, president of the museum board, could be heard giving out a triumphant "yippee!"
Ruebush gives a thoughtful tug on his ballcap as he relates this, as if to say, "Not this year."
But it's not ice cream that interests Norman Ruebush — it's the tinkering. Especially on tractors. John Deere tractors.
"It's what I grew up with," he says, adding with that twinkle in his eye again, "I grew up in Deming, so I'm a long way from home. My family had a farm east of Deming, then my wife and I farmed for 11 years."
He took to tinkering at the age of 13, when he bought an old Model A Ford. "I was in the garage there, tearing everything loose, throwing everything out onto the floor," Ruebush recalls. "A Mr. Heard, who bought milk from us, came up to me and said, 'Son, do you realize you have to put those parts back in the same place they came out of?'"
After he'd had enough of farming, Ruebush moved to Grant County and worked as a welder at the Tyrone mine for 17 years, then operated a slaughterhouse for another 17 years before he "got tired of working." The former slaughterhouse — which he tried to sell, but couldn't find any takers — now helps house his tinkering.
His tractor obsession was already in full bloom by the time he shut down the slaughterhouse in 2001. When he bought and restored that first John Deere tractor, did he have any idea how consuming a passion this would prove to be?
"I had a stinkin' feeling," Ruebush confesses.
Soon he was "picking up stuff" everywhere he went — this old engine in Hatch, that tractor in Gainesville, Texas, this one still with the original tires down in Mexico. He says, "It gets to where you need to keep your eyes closed when you travel."
Happily for the Ruebushes' marriage, his wife Deleen supports his hobby and even helps spot tractors in need of TLC. "My wife found the last few I bought," he says. "I'll be driving along and she'll say, 'Honey, there's a tractor!' She was raised on a farm, too, in north Texas."
Bargains in old tractors are harder to find these days, however. "It used to be you could go to Mexico and pick up a tractor that still runs for $200 to $500," Ruebush goes on. "Now it's maybe $1,800." Collectors — many of whom have never even gotten grease on their hands — have discovered antique tractors, he explains. Given the number of die-hard devotees of every old brand, it'd be hard not to make money by buying and restoring antique tractors.
Not that Ruebush actually sells his tractors. "That's the only thing that gripes Deleen," he allows. "If somebody wanted one worse than I did, yeah, I might sell it, but they'd have to want it. I did sell one into California." His tone suggests that, in retrospect, this may have been something he regrets.
The rising interest in tractor collecting has even spawned several shows. His neighbor, Layne Fanning, who collects and restores Farmall tractors — red to John Deere's green — recently went all the way to Missouri for a "Red Power" exhibition. Deere sponsors two such shows a year, holding the summer event in its headquarters town of Moline, Ill.
Ruebush has several "expo" quality tractors, meeting the high standards of such shows. "They have to approve your tractor before you can bring it in," he explains. But he's never made the trek to the Deere show. "That's never appealed to me. Nobody in their right mind who lives in Silver City would want to go to Moline, Ill., in the summertime."
Nonetheless, Ruebush is a John Deere man, heart and soul. "I was raised on John Deere tractors, and my family never owned anything but," he says. "My neighbor down the road has all red tractors. I just tell everybody that he's misguided."
Truth be told, Ruebush actually owns two "red tractors" — Farmall brand, manufactured by International Harvester — himself. One was a gift and the other was, well, just too good a deal to pass up. He'd rather that word about this deviation from Deere not get out, however.
"There's something about those old two-cylinder John Deere tractors," he says. "Those engineers who built the first John Deeres knew what they were doing." The classic John Deere "D" tractors first rolled off the assembly line in 1923 — Ruebush has one dating to 1929 — and continued in production for 30 years, even as the company introduced new models up and down the alphabet.
"The principles were all there; they didn't change much," Ruebush says. Probably the most dramatic change in the John Deere line came in 1939, he adds, when the front of the tractors went from "unstyled" to "styled" — basically, adding a slotted grill to the front.
"They're very simple machines. If you work on one letter tractor — this one here's a 'B' — " He indicates a comparatively diminutive machine. " — they're all similar. The big difference between the models is the size of the parts. There's not a part on this that a man can't lift by himself. The 'A' parts are a bit bigger. With the 'G,' you'd need some help.
"If you send the serial number in to John Deere," he continues, "they'll send you all the information they have on that particular tractor — what branch it was sent to, what dealer. That 'G' out there went through the Dallas branch, to Deming, 'destination Silver City, NM.' Well, there was never a John Deere dealer in Silver City!"
After some asking around, Ruebush discovered that a store called Cosgrove's — formerly on Bullard Street, near the present Buffalo Bar — sold John Deere equipment, though it didn't have room for a tractor showroom per se.
Swinging wide one heavy metal door after another, Ruebush winds through his slaughterhouse-turned-workshop. A couple of turns past the one-time abattoir, he points to a tractor that's obviously seen better days, with at least one of its tires flat. "I'll take every nut and bolt loose on that one. It'll be completely disassembled. I believe that's a '41. It came out of Hatch."
After being reassembled — a lesson Ruebush learned from that long-ago experience with the Model A Ford — each tractor gets decorated with authentic John Deere paint. "Dupont has this expo-quality paint," he says, "but it's not original John Deere."
He arrives at yet another engine, restored but not yet reattached to the rest of the tractor, and decides it's time for another demonstration. But despite a bout of energetic cranking in which Ruebush's arm seems to turn into rubber, the motor at first refuses to turn over. "I flood that thing every time," he says, bending down to make some adjustments. "Every tractor develops a mind of its own."
At last the engine kicks and coughs to life. "But it does run," Ruebush points out.
Besides Ruebush's collection of tractors, this sprawling workshop area down the hill from his house is also home to various other projects — like a meat smoker he and his son are making out of an old water heater — and bits and pieces of vintage farm equipment. There's an old hay baler (a "hay press," it used to be called) he brought out of Mexico, a drill press from maybe the 1890s ("I dunno — it's old"), and a 1935 ringer-washer that looks like it was made yesterday.
That washer was an unexpected dividend of a trip to see an old manure spreader, which, sure, he also came home with. "Even the tubs were still there, in perfect shape. I just ran a head sander over them," Ruebush says. "I had the ringer-washer at the fair, and everybody who came along had a story to tell about getting an arm or hair caught in a ringer."
For the museum's ice-cream social and tractor exhibit, he plans to assemble a corn sheller, seed cleaner and grist mill from his collection to show how fresh corn gets processed into masa for tortillas. Ears of corn will go in one end and fresh corn tortillas will be on the other.
Back in the front workshop, Ruebush begins rummaging through the piles atop a long table for another educational display. "I don't know where it's at, but it's somewhere on that table," he says, busily excavating. At last he extracts a pegboard holding vintage ice-cream equipment: two ice picks, an ice shaver, five ice cream scoops. He gives the mechanism of each scoop a try.
"I bought this one in Durango," he says. Testing another scoop, he adds, "I'm so proud of this one because I got it for just a dollar. An antique!" He pauses, reads the fine print on the reverse of the handle: "'Taiwan.' Huh. I didn't see that."
Nonetheless, he hopes the display will add another educational element to the museum's ice-cream social. Someday, too, he'd like to take the exhibit of corn-processing equipment around to schools.
"I don't know if I'll ever do it," he allows, gazing around the workshop with its array of mechanical things to do. "I'd have to live to 120 to get all this stuff done."
Which would be just fine by Norman Ruebush. "You know," he adds, "sometimes I can't wait to get to bed at night so I can get up in the morning and get back down here."
The Silver City Museum's 25th annual Ice Cream Social and Tractor Show will be held Friday, July 4, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. The free event (refreshments and game tickets sold) features ice cream, floats, cold drinks, musical entertainment, children's games, a cakewalk and a vintage tractor show. 312 W. Broadway, 538-5921, www.silvercitymuseum.org
Prior to the museum event, vintage tractors will be driven in the annual 4th of July Parade, which begins at 10 a.m. Food, arts and crafts and vendor booths will be at Gough Park on July 4, 7 a.m.-6 p.m., as well as on July 5, 7 a.m.-4 p.m. For information, contact the Silver City-Grant County Chamber of Commerce, 538-3785, or see www.silvercity.org