Repair Man: Tractors never pull up lame for Hartselle man
By Jean Cole | Living 50 Plus
Whenever Larry Lemmond’s wife asks about his growing collection of antique tractors and engines, he tells her, “Blame your daddy — he got me started.”
He still recalls the day he fell in love with them.
“That was 30-something years ago, but I remember exactly,” said Lemmond, 78.
“There was an antique engine and tractor show about 40 miles from where I live. My daddy-in-law told me about it. He said, ‘Let’s go up there and see it.’ We got up there, and I was hooked on those old engines. I’ve told my wife several times, ‘Now don’t you blame me for this.’”
Lemmond has what his friends consider the Midas touch. Give him an old tractor, tractor engine or some other piece of farm equipment — something assigned to history’s scrap heap — and watch him restore it. One of his current projects is trying to restore a 1920s cordwood saw that looks like its best friend is rust. Experience tells him he can bring it back to life and if you doubt him, he takes it as a challenge.
“One of my favorite things to do is fix things that can’t be fixed,” he said. “I figure it worked at one time, so why can it be done again?”
Larry and Johnnie Lemmond have been married 48 years. The secret to their marriage is spending time together, he said. The couple do nearly everything together, though they spend time apart on occasion, he said.
“She recently went to Orange Beach with family,” he said. “All the women went, and I stayed home, but for the most part we are together.”
Johnnie isn’t opposed to tractors and engines at all. She often goes along with him when he goes to shows and she has been the secretary/treasurer of the Southland Flywheelers Club antique engine and tractor club. Lemmond is one of the founding members.
The club
The club is for people interested in antique farm and industrial machinery and related items, according to the website southlandflywheelers.org. Membership is open to anyone interested in the preservation of old agricultural and industrial machinery and the education of the public about them. This includes a wide range of items from engines to tractors and corn grinders to hacksaws. Some members even have steam engines.
Lemmond said the club puts on three shows a year in north Alabama — at the Alabama Jubilee in Decatur at Point Mallard Park on the Saturday before Memorial Day, at the Spring Swap Meet and Show on the third Saturday in March and at the Fall Festival and Harvest Exhibits the fourth Saturday in October. Both the spring and fall shows are at the new Southland Flywheelers Farm in Hartselle.
The Flywheelers club gets its name from flywheel engines, which have two flywheels to keep the momentum going once the engine starts to run, Lemmond said.
He and his wife go to about 20 shows a year, he said. He’s been all over the United State doing that over the years — Arizona, California, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Iowa and Nebraska to name a few.
He is also a member of the International Harvester Collectors, Chapter 23. He’s been in it so long he is one of the first on the roster when it started in Alabama decades ago. There are now 300 members, according to the chapter website.
Farm favorites
Lemmond has all manner of farming equipment, including 30 tractors and one reaper.
“A little bit of everything,” he said. “I have a horse-drawn reaper that I converted to a tractor-pull machine. None of us is young enough to keep up with six mules; we can’t walk that good anymore,” he joked.
He seems too young to have remembered mule-drawn tractor equipment, but he insists.
“Oh, yes, I do remember,” he said. “I used to follow my daddy and he didn’t have a tractor back then. He had a team of Morgan horses. He used them for everything he needed to do in the field from plow to harvest. He farmed 40 acres that way then eventually traded up to a 75-acre farm because our family was growing.”
There were seven kids in his family; he was the eldest. They were raised in the Gum Springs community east of Hartselle.
“I still live there, on the same place,” he said. “I don’t have all of it. but I have part of it. I got 20-something acres at the house, and I got 40 acres over on Highway 36. Got some cows.”
The farmland is used mainly for the Southern Flywheelers Club, he said. He grows various crops, which they use in showing how their restored equipment was once used. He plants cotton, corn, peanuts, sugarcane and broom corn, which is just like sugarcane only it has a head on it that can be cut off and used to make brooms for floor sweeping, he said.
“I just do a little bit of that (farming) to show people in our fall show how we used to grow when I was growing up,” he said.
Adding to the mix are some old square stationary hay balers.
“You use a pitchfork to put in the hay and then tie the bales by hand with wire,” he said.
Collections
He has his favorites in his large collection.
“My favorite is the old hit-and-miss engine — a one cylinder — they were for pumping oil fields.”
He has a square tub Maytag washing machine with a gasoline engine.
“That’s the way they made them,” he said.
He has an impressive collection of yard sticks — 300 or so last time he counted.
He collects 1/16th-scale toy tractors and equipment.
He also has a few pocketknives.
“I don’t really collect them but if I see one I like, I get it; if not, I don’t buy it.” He is partial to the 8-to-10-inch scabbard his wife bought him that was made from a railroad spike by a man in South Carolina.
He also likes trains. He built a train that can pull about six people — kids or adults. It all fits in the back of his pickup truck. He used to take it to shows.
Over the years, Lemmond has built a helpful network of friends and co-collectors and repairers of old machinery.
“If I need a part and can’t find it, I reach out to someone else.”
He’s building a 1955 TD-9 crawler/dresser, a type of tractor like a Caterpillar, that is made by International Harvester.
“I needed a diesel injector part and found some parts in New York. A friend of mine up there, he found it,” he said.
Bill Friday, 79, retired rocket scientist and farm machinery restorer, has known Lemmond for decades now and says he is all you’d want in a friend.
“I met him when I retired and brought my old tractor home and started working on it. I got it running and took it to a tractor show in 2005 and that’s where I met Larry,” Friday said. “I always had a huge respect for him, his knowledge and his value system. He’s pretty well self-taught and he understands how things work. If he doesn’t know, he figures it out. He’s done some incredible work in restoring old equipment. I’ve been impressed with him all these years.”
He said Lemmond is the kind of man who knows how to dust himself off and move on. He shared a story about how the Lemmonds have an elevator in their home.
“The cable snapped one day and dropped Larry three floors and he broke his foot,” Friday said. “He rebuilt the elevator, put a new cable in it and got over all of that. Then, he was out mowing with his old tractor and the tractor ran through a deep hole, threw him off and the tractor ran over his shoulder. The mower was aimed right at him, but he rolled out of the way. Now, there was a third thing that happened to him, but I can’t remember it. Anyway, he just gets up and gets over it. He’s pretty amazing and he gets right back to work.”
When the Flywheelers club needed a president, Lemmond stepped up and did it and has been doing it ever since, Friday said.
“If somebody needs help, he’s right there,” he said. “He’s the kind of fella you want as a friend, and I’m proud to have him as one.”
Sherman Roberts, a retired educator from Jasper, has been a “tractor buddy” of Lemmond since the late 1990s.
“I would say that he is very decent, honest, trustworthy and he’s easy-going and doesn’t get upset. If you see him today or next week, he’ll treat you the same. He’s always Larry. Stable. Respectful.”
He said their goal is to try to collect, restore and preserve antique tractors, engines and other equipment used on the farm so future generations will have an understanding of history and the progress to modern equipment.
“I’ve got old mule-drawn equipment — old antique plows and things like that — and Larry’s got a lot of that kind of stuff too but he’s mainly an antique engine man,” said Roberts, who has close to 100 Farmall tractors.
He said he enjoys his friendship with Lemmond because they both have the same interest.
“We just share a love of restoring and showing these antiques that we were able to save from the smelter and preserve them so people can see them,” he said.
If Lemmond ever becomes unable to repair engines and other equipment he decided he will auction it all off.
“When I can’t take care of it anymore, I’ll get rid of it and hopefully spend the money before we die,” he said.
