Farmall Promenade: Square Dancing Tractors.

That’s great. via BoingBoing.

My mother’s family that stayed in Mizoo, near Kansas City, when her family upped stakes for Washington during the Depression – my like third cousins once removed or something – had a Farmall that I was allowed to drive the one time we visited. I was maybe eight.

It was exciting becasue I had a killer cast-iron Farmall toy – with rack and pinion steering and hard rubber tires, really excellent – when I was a wee lad. I clearly inherited it from someone, damfino who.

It was something like this one, but less elaborate. I don’t think was a licensed model but it may have been an Ertl. It was pretty old, with some paint worn off. Maybe like this? Or this, but a bit larger.

Sure wish I’d kept it. I had a really nice International Harvester cab-model, too, that was a gift from our next door neighors in Bloomington who had an IH dealership.

Interestingly, after my grandpa died, we found a stack of publicity photos from the turn of the century which were from his dad’s combine business in the Palouse – harvest equipment was too expensive for individual farms to afford, so service companies sprung up that owned and brokered access to the equipment, kept the mule teams, and paid the hands that ran the machines.

The machines were usually hauled around by mules but ran on steam, so my grandpa was both a mule skinner and a steam engineer by the time he was in his teens. One of the pictures shows both the Columbia and a locomotive and train in the far distance along the banks of the great river, on what is undoubtedly the same railbed I passed over when I moved out here on the train in 1990.

Anne Zender hipped me to a B-ton-based pub, The Pin-up, which provides arts and entertainment info in addition to running regular bits of history journalism such as Carol Krause’s recounting of attending a Dancing Cigarettes concert which also featured readings by John Giorno and William S. Burroughs in 1981 (my sometime partner in crime Bill Weaver is featured in a cameo appearance as a 21-year-old, I think); or the history of the East Asian or Indian woman who has gazed down on Kirkwood in my hometown since I can recall.

Authentic Bloomington character John Barge issued an update alert for his Wacky Hoosiers clip-o-rama celebration of the oddities that heavy corn farming can bring to the world (at Angelfire, so batten down). John notes:

“This month’s postings include:

• Libertarian Wins Office
• Hoosier Pagans
• Tex Terry, Cowboy B-Movie Star
• Soldier Patton Slapped Was From Indiana
• Cunning Hoosier Crimminal, The Midget
• Punk Rockers For Jesus

and many others!”

Uh, what else?

Carrol also has a fine reminisence of what I long thought my first riot experience, the NCAA riot in near downtown Bloomington. (This one features a cameo by my favorite boss of all time, one Paul Smedberg.)

Lessee now, I would have been, um, 15. I spent some of ’81-’82 in Switzerland. It seems unlikely my memory is reliable in this instance. I suppose I could have grafted tales from friends onto my recollection – I have memories of watching a kid climb up a fish in the Showalter Fountain and aslo seeing a scuffle behind some nearby bushes.

Krause mentions that the riot happened the same day that Reagan was shot; I think I was in town for that, since I have a clear recollection of hoping the wrinkled bastard was dead.

My friend Stacey becomes a fully-qualified adult today. I wonder if she’ll get into a kick-fight with her hubby Greg.