BJ defeats mud as tractors roll on
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Jim Dow and his 5-year-old son Brody were among the volunteers who helped clear a 300-foot track of mud Friday so that the 37th annual BJ Kiwanis Club Truck and Tractor Pull could proceed as scheduled. The Dows are shown at the wheel of a “sheepsfoot” compacter that was used to tamp down soil returned to the track after being scraped off, spread in the sun and allowed to dry.
Before the skies finally cleared a few days ago, seemingly endless rain turned the low-lying Burlington Junction City Park into a muddy mess. But there just wasn’t enough mud on the ground to keep the small north-county community from going ahead Friday evening with the 37th annual BJ Kiwanis Club Truck and Tractor Pull.
Three other pulls popular with members of the Northwest Missouri Tractor Pullers’ Association had already been scrubbed this year, but with a break in the weather and a lot of hard work, folks in Burlington were determined to “hook up, blow smoke and hammer down” — the slogan on the 2015 event’s T-shirt.
Early Friday, a small platoon of local volunteers driving an assortment of road graders, compactors, skid loaders and rollers arrived at the park and went to work digging, blading and mashing the soggy 300-foot pulling track into shape.
Jim Dow, who spent part of the day at the controls of a knob-wheeled “sheepsfoot” compactor, said the crew scooped at least a foot of mud off the track, spread it out so it could dry, and then put it back, packing the brown soil down into a suitably firm surface over which souped-up tractors weighing thousands of pounds dragged a massive Bungart Motorsports sled.
“Everybody just worked hard to make it happen,” Dow said.
Puller Tom Chambers, of Agency, who also brought his International 560 rig to last year’s pull, said he wasn’t surprised by the “whatever it takes” attitude.
“The promoters, the track crew, the sponsors — everybody is just so nice up here,” Chambers said. “They’re very accommodating.”
Like other farmers across northwest Missouri, Chambers is trying to play catch-up after this year’s heavy rains, and admitted, a little ruefully, that he really should have spent Friday in the field instead of watching his 15-year-old grandson pull competitively for the first time.
“I ought to be out cultivating, but we just don’t want to miss this one,” he said.
Chambers’ passion for pulling — or rather his passion for tearing old tractors down to the ground and building them back up again so he can watch sons and grandsons take the wheel — is a common denominator in this most rural and family-oriented of motorsports.
Blood may be thicker than water, but for real grandfather-father-son bonding nothing seems to glue the ties that bind quite like oil, gasoline and a good set of tools.
Brian Thompson, of Cameron, a truck driver who hauls cars for a living, showed up at the Burlington Junction park with his 1941 Massey-Harris 101 and son Wyatt, age 9, whose own tractor is still a work-in-progress back in the family shop.
Thompson said he put the gleaming red Massey-Harris together with the help of his other two sons, now aged 19 and 15, and that the project started “with a greasy spot on the floor and a lot of rust.”
Having grown up on a farm, Thompson was introduced to the sport by his father and began working on tractors with his brother as a teenager.
“We started turning wrenches on these things as soon as we could get into Dad’s toolbox,” he said. “Once you get started, it’s kind of a fever.”
Passing his mechanic’s skills on to his sons, Thompson said, has proved a good way to teach them about the importance of living in the real world while avoiding, at least to an extent, the temptations of virtual reality.
“We didn’t have HDTV,” he said. “We were under a shade tree working on the tractor. My boys can watch cartoons 24 hours a day. If it wasn’t for this, they wouldn’t understand the basics of how an engine works.”
While the elder Thompson took the wheel of the Massey-Harris on Friday, Wyatt was waiting anxiously in the wings, itching to get his hands on all that horsepower in order to continue the family tradition.
When does he plan to start pulling a sled down that wide dirt track?
“As soon as I can get my tractor running,” he said.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Brian Thompson, of Cameron, competes in the Burlington Junction Kiwanis Club Truck and Tractor Pull on Friday pulling the sled with his 1941 Massey-Harris 101.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Corey, Haylee and Kellee Dawson, pictured from left, were all smiles during a family night out Friday at the Burlington Junction tractor pull.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
The Burlington Junction City Park proved too muddy for parking on Friday, so tractor pull spectators were shuttled to the bleachers on flatbed trailers pulled by — what else — vintage tractors.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Rod Schottel, a construction worker from Savannah, sits in the cockpit of his Case 970 just before competing Friday in the 8,500-pound Pro Farm class at the Burlington Junction tractor pull. Asked how much he’s invested in his rig, “Lil’ Bita Magic,” Schottel said, “I don’t know. You don’t want to keep track of those things.”
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Ed Brown, left, Robert Davison, center and Kevin Davison stand beside Brown’s International 1456 pulling tractor Friday in Burlington Junction. Brown, who said he pulls, in part, to promote his Clarinda, Iowa, garage, took up the sport in high school when he souped up garden tractors and tricked out toy farm implements with model airplane engines.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Volunteers scrape and compact the track between runs during Friday’s Kiwanis Club Truck and Tractor Pull in Burlington Junction. Crews worked for about 12 hours on Friday to prepare the mud-laden track for competition.
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Red, green and Allis-Chalmers orange tractors of all shapes and sizes rolled into the Burlington Junction city park Friday for the 37th annual tractor pull hosted by the north-county community’s Kiwanis Club. The event was the first Northwest Missouri Tractor Pullers’ Association competition of 2015 in a season delayed by weeks of persistent rainfall.
