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W
e e k l y F
e a t u r e P a g e
Links to archived past pages on lower left
The contents of the “Weekly Feature” page are provided
to you for your entertainment, amusement, and perhaps information.
Here you may find articles of interest, pictures, historical information
on the Club, or whatever shuffles to the top of the pile on our
desk. The only defined characteristic of this space is that we
will make every effort to change/replace it around the middle of
each week. Thank you for visiting, and please stop by again. Click
on any photo to see it larger in a separate window. |
What Fun
What fun, indeed! Or is it, “What fun?” Sometimes it takes
a week or so to realize just how much fun it was when you get to the
end of a big enterprise like the 2008 MMOGTA show. The first week or
so you tend to be either too busy or too tired to make an accurate
assessment of what just happened. But then as the healing quietly takes
place, you begin to be more objective about the whole ordeal and develop
a little better perspective on it all. OK, we’re there now, and
it was great. The gods of meteorology smiled on us this year, and we
were ready with our end. What resulted was a spectacular show, with
great attendance, and a lot of hard work and fun to go along with it.
We hope you had a chance to attend, as we featured
Baker tractors and equipment, one of the more obscure and little known
brands from our
past. We think old Abner Baker would have been proud to see his great
grandson at the controls of the very first Steam Traction Engine produced
by his factory 110 years ago. To see the aged engine back in action
on the threshing machine after all this time was truly an exercise
in history, surrounded as it was by a nice collection of the few remaining
Baker gas tractors and associated displays.
As always, the featured brand area is just the spotlighted
portion of our show, it’s a lot bigger than Baker. In fact, our
display field was lined with about 5 times more tractors than Baker
ever produced
in all his years of operation. That should give you a little idea how
busy we were on the 3rd weekend of August. And that should give you
an idea how grateful we are to all of our exhibitors (the real stars
of our show) who shouldered the burden of historically high fuel costs
in the process of bringing their own individual shows to us. Thank
you all!
How big was it? Well, the numbers aren’t all in yet, and the
beans are still being counted in the various departments, but it quite
certainly was the biggest 3 day show in our 34 year history. So big
in fact that the demand on our electrical system caused the failure
of one of our main electrical transformers on Sunday afternoon. Hats
off to the guys from Consumer’s Energy who came to our rescue
on very short notice, locating and installing a new, larger transformer
right in the middle of a very busy show, leaving us with very little
disruption in the activities. Nice work by all who were involved in
handling this temporary situation. Generators were located to keep
key systems up and running, and it was “On with the Show”.
Seemed like the guys in the bucket truck were just a part of the entertainment.
The bottom line is this; we had an outstanding show,
and while all of us put in an endless amount of man hours in the process,
we all
realize that such an enterprise is very much a community effort. We
are profoundly grateful to our local community of businesses, neighbors,
and workers, right along with the greater community of exhibitors,
spectators and visitors who must all be in place for our show to be
the success it was.
We’ll leave you with a couple of random photos of the big weekend,
but be sure to visit the “08 Show photo gallery” page for
a much broader look at this year’s show. Photos will continue
to be added there as the material comes in.
(click individual photos to enlarge)
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