[AT] The old Case comes home!

dean at vinsonfarm.net dean at vinsonfarm.net
Tue Jul 25 08:54:41 PDT 2006


This past weekend my son and I visited my folks on the farm, and had a great time.  Jordan has always loved helping his granddad with the chores and such, and this year he turned 14 so is pretty well able to do some real work.  After we'd finished hauling some firewood into storage I gave him a short lesson on operating Dad's Allis D-19, which was a lot of fun.  I'm glad these things are important to him.

And in one of those nice alignments of the planets, my brother happened to call with the news that a family friend had decided to sell the 1948 Case VAH which my dad had sold him about 20 years ago, and he wanted to see if I still wanted it.

Dad originally bought the Case in the late sixties, when I was about 8, and for the next ten or fifteen years it was simply "the tractor."  Dad eventually moved up to newer and bigger tractors, but the Case was a constant and reliable friend.  My brothers and I had learned to drive on it, spent countless hours working with it, or loading pumpkins or corn or hay or firewood or manure into the wagon behind it, or being pulled by it on our sleds at the start of each winter, the frozen gravel driveway doing a great job of cleaning rust off the bottom of the runners.  We didn't know the tractor was a high-crop; it was just the tractor.

Dad sold it to one of my brother's pals maybe 20 years ago, and he's used it on his little place all this time, kept it inside, taken good care of it.  But he now has a "new" tractor (Massey TO-30, I think) and needs the space.  Maybe 8 or 10 years ago I'd told him to let me know if he ever decided to sell it.  Saturday was the day.

So Dad and I drove over to look at it, and it looks pretty good, started up easy and sounded good.  I asked for a few days to think about it, since all the practical and financial reasons make it clear that I have no business buying a tractor right now.  But this is too good an opportunity to pass up, so this morning I closed the deal and the VAH is back in the family.  Life is good.

Dean Vinson
Dayton Ohio
www.vinsonfarm.net



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