DiarDaoin Am Màrt / Déardaoin Márta 28, 2019

“ARCHIE’S TRACTORS”

      One of Archie's weaknesses was old tractors which he took in, as some people do stray animals. Two of his menagerie are captured here under a mantle of fresh snow.

     Archie Olson was a lifelong bachelor who worked for area farmers in the spring, summer and fall, then worked in the big woods during the winter, cutting pulp wood, as did so many other men in the Wannaska community.

     Never one to rest on his laurels too long, Archie worked various part time jobs including driving a beer truck into the more remote communities of northwestern Minnesota. One afternoon, my father, Guy Reynolds, over five hundred miles from his home in Des Moines, Iowa, stopped for a bit of refreshment in a tiny little gathering place called ‘Fourtown,’ on the edge of Beltrami Island State Forest, when the beer truck pulled in to this unlikely log cabin oasis in the middle of nowhere.

     Dad sat alone at a table as the beer truck driver walked by him with a stack of beer on his two-wheeled cart that he was trucking to the big walk-in cooler in the back.

“Guy Reynolds,” Archie said aloud, for he never forgot a face.

     Dad was shocked for he had, and thought surely no one knew him within sixty miles from his destination of Wannaska and nearly six hundred from his home in Iowa.

     On his return trip from the cooler, the two got reacquainted.

     Archie grew up with the Palms, my mother' Violet Palm's family, in Palmville Township, Roseau County, Minnesota. He had spent many nights under their roof, ate many meals at their table, went to school and church with them, and helped with chores for Archie’s family were very poor and couldn’t always afford to keep him clothed and fed, so I guess my grandma did. But that’s just the way it was back in the 1930s, neighbors helping neighbors.

     So Archie knew Violet and Guy.

     I always thought this a good story.