Greenwood County History -
Memories Of Perry Rubart,
Perry Rubart was born in 1931 near Madison, and died in 2023 in Fayetteville, Ark. Starting in the 1970s, Perry started a book titled Dare To Dream, and completed the book in 2011. This series features highlights of that book.
“The family car was a 1931 Whippet (made by Willys) and had a large body, wooden-spoke wheels, wooden steering wheel, and was powered by a slow moving six-cylinder engine. Its favorite act was to suddenly throw the timing chain and the motor would make a dying, fluttering sound before rolling to a stop.
“There was no permanent antifreeze for radiators in that era, so the car was drained after every trip to town in cold weather. To help it start in cold weather, they would heat the water on the cook stove in the house, carry it to the garage, and pour it in quickly so the car would start better. A few gunny sacks or cardboard in front was a help to warm it up faster and to keep it from freezing up while driving or during the time it was parked in town. It had an expandable trunk rack, which would accommodate a homemade wood-slatted chicken coop to haul the old, tired laying hens for their last ride. The Whippet’s lack of power and open-faced brake was no match for muddy roads, as the wheel would pick up gumbo mud and pack it in the wheel and brake drum until it bogged down. You had two choices then. One was to walk the rest of the way home, harness the team of horses and go back and pull the so-called horseless carriage home. The other was to just wait until the weather cleared and the roads dried up, then retrieve it.
“Henry Ford’s Model T Ford could be converted into a grain-grinding machine. John Horst, our neighbor to the north, had one of those cars. Perry’s family would sack up several gunny sacks of grain and haul them to the Horst place to grind. The old Model T, with its wheels off, perched on blocks, minus the body, radiator and anything that looked like accessories. It had a hopper built over the driveline behind the transmission where a set of grinding burrs was installed. A 55-gallon drum served as the cooling system for the bellowing engine, as all signs of the muffler, tailpipe, and exhaust were missing.
“After a barrel was bucketed full of water, “T” was hand-cranked into motion. By the time the several gunny sacks of grain were ground, the water was starting to boil in the barrel and the magnet was then shorted out to shut off the monster.
“Another method to grind a small amount of chicken feed was what they called a coffee grinder, a small handheld grinder with an attached box that would hold less than a gallon of ground grain.
“Another way to prepare animal feed was to soak the grain in a wooden barrel similar to making mash in the whiskey-making process. You always saved back some of the old mash from feeding the hogs or chickens and then added more grain and water to start another batch to brewing. In summertime, their old sows were probably legally intoxicated on this Jack Daniels like mixture at times.
“Perry’s dad purchased a hand-cranked feed chopper once and completely rebuilt it to cut up green shock or dry shock feed. For the children to operate it, they had to crank it furiously until the momentum of the flywheel would help carry it through while a 6-to-7-foot section of stalk would be chopped up. If it qualified as a laborsaving device, Perry was not sure what you could compare it to.
“Most of the livestock feed had to be either hand cut withacornknifeandshocked while green or bound with a binder and shocked into tent-like status, dotted over the field. Later they would haul it to the barn as needed and put it on the hay mow. Perry’s weekend job during the school year was to cut heads of the sorghum with the header knife, shuck the corn out of the fodder, shell the corn with the handcrank McCormick-Deering corn sheller, and bucket the grain to the granary or into storage barrels in the barn, chicken house, or pig pen.
“The once-a-year filling of the upright silo was always an exciting time as a boy. Sorghum and corn were cut and bound into bundles to be picked up off the ground, loaded onto the wagon, hauled to the silo, fed into the silage cutter, which was powered by a tractor and flat belt pullets. The feed was chopped and blown up on the outside of the silo through metal tubes, then allowed to drop into the silo through a series of flexible shoots called elephant trunks. The small folks’ job was to lead the elephant trunks as to distribute the silage evenly into the silo and to take off sections as the silo filled up.
“The small doors of the silo shoot, from which you gained access to the inside and from which you later removed the feed, had to be pulled up the shoot by rope. Then they were cleaned and a bucket full of the slimy mud from the edge of the farm pond was applied to the edges to seal out air. They were then put in place and their hand screws and lugs were tightened as the silo filled from bottom to top.
“When the top of the 30 feet was reached, the boys got to leave and Mr. Miller, owner of the tractor and cutter, would top the silo off. He would stand on the edge of it, tromp the feed down, and build the cone-shaped pile of feed inside the bin before signaling that was all he could possibly get in.
“Later in life Perry worked for Mr. Miller in grain-threshing and hay-bailing crews. One day Perry was poking wires on Mr. Miller’s stationary bailer while his brother Donnie played by the bailer. Donnie’s hand became caught behind the wire as the bale was progressing down the bale chamber, just about the time his hand was about to pass by the bale tension clamps, he screamed. Mr. Miller summed up the situation at once and like a tiger, he threw the flat belt off of the pulley and on a dead run vaulted onto the bale chamber, spun the big tension screws to loosen its grip on Donnie, cut the wire and pulled Donnie’s hand out with the deep red crease in it from the wire. One more nudge from the plunger of the bailer or a moment’s hesitation on his part would have resulted in Donnie’s hand being severed.
“Mr. Miller was gentle in speech and manner, just the opposite of his being a physical giant. While working on his hay crew one summer, Jimmy Hollis and Perry would get to the hay field about 10 in the morning after the other chores. They would play in Harry Miller’s old ’29 Chevy truck until about noon at which time they would all eat their sack lunch and start bailing the hay the menfolk had been mowing, raking and buck-raking up all morning.
“Jimmy and Perry had rummaged through Mr. Miller’s personal effects (pencils, notebooks and records) several times but were always careful to put everything back in place as they found it, they thought. One day Mr. Miller came in about 15 minutes early, greeted the boys, and said, “Let’s sit down and eat our dinner.” After a couple of minutes, Mr. Miller told the boys in a quiet, unemotional voice that, if there was anything that they wanted in his old truck, they could have it as a gift. Perry’s sandwich all of a sudden tasted like the hay they would soon be bailing. The boys sheepishly told him they didn’t want anything from his truck. Visions of him telling the boy’s dads and the punishment following didn’t help them enjoy their lunch at all. But Mr. Miller didn’t say any more to them or their dads and that little display of his wisdom in handling the problem was enough to correct the matter.
“Mr. Miller owned an old, regular Farmall tractor on steel lug wheels to power the Case grain separator, which he towed from farm to farm doing custom work. ‘One year he showed up on our farm with the same tractor but minus the steel wheels, instead sporting a new set of Montgomery Ward knobby, rubber tires on the tractor.’ Perry recalled most of the farmers, in a conversation afar from Mr. Miller, all agreed that those rubber tires were a fad that would soon fade and telling all the reasons they would never work on a farm tractor. Who would’ve ever dreamed, that 40 years later Perry would be selling those rubber tires to make a living and, as a hobby, would be collecting those old tractors with lugs, only to find them very scarce and valuable, as most of them were cut up for scrape iron drives during WWII.”
