A man and his machines
Antique collection will be on display next weekend
"I grew up in Minnesota. I grew up around a lot of farm equipment," he says, and he especially liked tractors.
He still does. He likes their looks. He likes their power. He likes what they do. He also looks at tractors and sees the shifting story of American agriculture.
"There was a farm on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota that was huge. They used 160 horses to pull their wagons, working in 80-horse shifts. Feeding the workers required a pig a day and a steer a week. They bought one of these," he says, referring to a 1918 Rumley OilPull tractor, "and it practically eliminated all those workers, all those horses." That's what power can do.
Erickson's tractor-collecting days started sometime back in the 1950s when he came across a 1918 Fordson tractor, which was sort of the Model-T of tractors: a small, economical machine that many farmers could afford.
Now Erickson has too many tractors to count, housed in buildings and scattered across the fields of his Wallsburg farm. John Deere, Waterloo Boy, Caterpillar, Harris, Titan — he has them all, in endless variations. He even has a 1908 Hart Parr, a behemoth tractor that is extremely rare these days. "I got it in Arizona, but it came out of Haver, Mont." It's easy to tell he likes that Hart Parr.
His collections will be on display at his annual Antique Power Show, which will be held this year on June 8-10 at his farm.
The show will include not only a lot of his machines, but also working demonstrations of such things as hay-baling, plowing, lath millwork, shingle millwork, blacksmithing and more. There will be parades of vintage cars and trucks, tractor pulls, fly-bys of vintage aircraft and stagecoach rides. There will be live musical entertainment (Erickson also plays the guitar) and food. There will be a swap meet, and other collectors are invited to bring things to display. You can even camp on the grounds.
Members of antique-car clubs, antique-tractor clubs and other machine clubs will be on hand to help and to answer questions. "It's the best antique show, by far, in the state," says Erickson proudly.
"It's awesome," adds Lain Sidwell, one of Erickson's employees. "We work all year toward this weekend. But what's fun to see is the camaraderie that exists among all the friends in the clubs. And Dick has such a wealth of knowledge, and he's not afraid to share it. If you ask him something he doesn't know, which doesn't happen very often, he'll say, 'Let's go look it up together.' He's really something."
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