By Joel Thurtell
Okay, I have to admit: I had a lot of fun those last couple years working at the Detroit Free Press.
When managers weren’t trying to fire me for giving $$ to the Dems, they pretty much left me alone.
I was parked in a niche, now extinct, called the Community Free Press.
I learned when I first came to the Free Press back in ’84 that bosses seldom paid attention to the work of reporters covering the burbs.
If you were on a fast-track career trajectory, that was not good.
But if you were looking to have a lot of fun doing journalism, the lack of managerial scrutiny was a godsend.
When the cat’s asleep, reporters can stay busy doing what pleases them.
Why am I having these thoughts nearly four years after I retired from that spiraling-downward rag?
Well, I just bought an iMac computer, and I was transferring my Free Press stories to its hard drive when I decided to assemble a collection of stories about a subject that interested me back in the day.
Outhouses.
You, know, biffies, privies, the necessary, that four-by-four-foot square wooden frame structure people used before they got plumbing.
I was searching vainly for a story I wrote about the Governor Warner mansion in Farmington and its historian’s quest for the site of the governor’s privy.
In the lead to my story, I called it “a crappy idea.”
So far, I have not found that story. Did the Free Press librarians forget to file it?
Doggone!
But I did bump into one of those first-person stories I wrote for the Community Free Press.
It ran in September 2007 a couple months before I retired from the Free Press. It was one of those times when working on a newspaper gave me a chance to re-live a wacky thing I’d done many years before. The opportunity came about by chance. I’d written a story about vintage tractors in Canton Township, Michigan. I worked on farms when I was young and drove tractors. For the Canton story, I ran an old International tractor and in my story I mentioned how once upon a time I drove a friend’s 1940s Friday Tractor Co. orchard tractor 55 mph down a country road. Fifty-five is pretty fast for a tractor.
I never expected my yarn to ring a bell. Not many Friday tractors were made, and I figured nobody outside southwestern Michigan would know what I was writing about.
Lo and behold, soon after the story ran, I got a call from a guy in Brownstown Township south of Detroit. He knew a lot more than I did. He collects Friday tractors.
Here’s the story, run with permission of the Detroit Free Press:
WHO NEEDS CEDAR POINT? WHAT A THRILL!
BY JOEL THURTELL
Pub-Date: 9/30/2007
DOWNRIVER
I’ll never forget the experience – driving down a wooded country road at freeway speed.
On a tractor. It wasn’t just any tractor.
It was a Friday orchard tractor.
Might as well call it a racing tractor. With a Chrysler truck engine and transmission, I had that baby rolling at 55 m.p.h., which in the gas-short early 1970s was indeed the freeway speed limit.
So when Tim Mentzert of Flat Rock told me he had two operational Friday tractors, I blurted out, “Hey, can I drive one?”
“Oh, yeah, you can take it out.”
Then he told me some things I didn’t know when I drove that Friday way back when. On one of his Fridays, the universal rotates between the driver’s ankles.
“Better not have shoelaces,” Mentzert quipped. “That’s dangerous.”
Mentzert says that one Friday Tractor Co. product was nicknamed “widow-maker.” It’s a three-wheeled cherry picker, and “10 or 12 feet off the ground, if you got off-balance, you’d fall and be dead,” he said.
A power hoe manufactured at Dave Friday’s Hartford plant “could take your leg off. It’s really crude, just like everything else he had. He was a cobbler. I have stuff I know is stock, and I wonder why is there such crappy welds all over it? I heard that the company went under because so many people got killed on them,” he said about Friday orchard tractors
like the one I drove. “Kids would race them, and the braking system just don’t work.”
I learned from another Friday aficionado, George Randall of Springfield, Mass., that safety, or lack thereof, didn’t run Friday out of the tractor biz. His handmade tractors simply couldn’t compete with mass-produced John Deeres and Internationals.
Still, what Mentzert said was sobering. But I didn’t drive down to Brownstown to be scared off by poor safety features. My recollection of that wild ride down Paw Paw Road aboard a bouncing Friday is fading. I wanted to renew it. Mentzert was game.
He had me ride the bright red Friday, the one with the exposed universal. He started the engine and I watched that universal spinning between my feet. My shoes had laces, too. Mentzert shifted the Friday into low gear and I drove it around the yard a few times. Then he fired up another Friday, a rusty old relic that belched blue smoke as he raced it up
and down Arsenal. Then it was my turn.
There was a cover over this one’s U-joint, I was happy to see. Mentzert warned me to let the engine do the braking because the actual brakes were, well, not too actual. He shifted it into highway gear, and in that high gear it took a lot of revs and an easy touch on the clutch to get it moving.
Once moving, that tractor wanted to go. I was thankful for that elementary school next door to the Mentzert place. There were three paved lanes in front of the school – a great place for decelerating and turning a tractor. My main problem was cars. For some reason, traffic kept wanting to use the street that I was turning into a drag strip for agricultural
vehicles. I was constantly swiveling my neck on the lookout for cars.
In the office earlier, a colleague who as a teen had raised her grandfather’s ire by racing tractors on his dairy farm warned me not to hit anything on the road. Tractors don’t have springs or shock absorbers, so if they hit something at high speed, they might become, well, slightly unstable, my friend said.
I thought about this as Tim’s dad, Butch Mentzert, mused about the Friday’s habit of bucking when its tires get out of balance. I managed to screw up a turnaround, killing the engine with my clumsy clutch work just as a car came (slowly and watchfully) toward me. I learned to gun the engine hard to build up speed and keep the engine running.
The tractor would have gone much faster than I wanted to go. I could picture hitting something or having a car turn out of a subdivision in front of me.
If I’d had to stop fast, it wouldn’t have happened. I tried the brakes. I pushed hard. There was a rasping sound, but not much happened until the tractor coasted nearly to a stop. Then the brakes held it fast.
But for a few seconds on each run, I had it really sailing along. It didn’t buck. I didn’t hit anything. The engine roared, I smelled something hot (the clutch) and blue smoke shot out the muffler. Who needs Cedar Point? What a thrill!
We guessed 30 m.p.h. was as fast as I had it going. Not as fast as the 55 m.p.h. I hit in my youth, but fast enough to refresh my memory.
The next day, George Randall told me a story that took the edge off that thrill: “It’s not hard to go 55. There’s a story about how David Friday sold a tractor to a local farmer who came up with his hired hand and bought the tractor, and the hired hand was driving it home and lost control and flipped the tractor into the ditch, and the hired hand got killed.”
Hmmm. Maybe even 30 m.p.h. is a mite fast for a tractor.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
