Threshing Day

Typically the day had the potential of being a hot one, in the nineties or possibly the hundreds.  Even during the morning chores there was a sense of excitement looking to the south and watching between tasks.  It was thrashing day and Uncle Karl, actually Dad's uncle, was going to come from his place a mile south of our farm through the pastures with his low-slung metal codded tires Minneapolis Moline and this thrashing machine.

Once he was in the yard he would walk around the thrasher, checking each gear and chain making certain that everything was probably greased and oiled.  The slow running exposed chain spit the oil that came from the long-nosed oilcan as they quickly turned over the gears.  Each bearing in which the staffs turned was lubricated with grease forced down a small pipe by the tightening of a grease-cap.  After the cap hit it limit, the cap was removed, refilled and replaced on its home ready to force more grease into the bearings.

I was quite young and there was no task for me other than to bring water and sandwiches to the workers so I wasn't on site to be fully involved.  Dad scooped up the bundles of oats, typically, and dumped them into the wagon from which someone pitch-forked them into the throat of the thrasher.  Uncle Karl's tractor sat in front of the thrasher with a very long belt to run the thrasher.  The straw blew out the back through a large pipe which could be manually adjusted to carefully create a stack of straw. The grain itself came out another pipe on the side of the thrasher into awaiting pickups.  Oats was not fun to stand in so I seldom would climb into the pickup to play in the grain.

Besides the work of thrashing, many stories are told about the meals that the farmer wives put together for the thrashing crews.  I can't say that I remember any significant events surrounding those meals which in our case only included Karl, Dad, grandpa and my uncle Heinie.  While the same crew worked all three farms I was allowed only to visit the fields when they thrashed on our farm.