Day 44: As the search continues for the information required to obtain a Purple Heart for my father, I am digging through old albums and pulling out photos to check for dates and locations. As I browsed through one album, I noticed an image I'd glossed over a thousand times: my Dad riding his FarmAll tractor through the cornfield on our "ranch" (as my folks called our family farm). How could I have missed this all the times I've looked for pictures of that tractor? It's a small image, blown up here and tonemapped to bring out the faded colors, and according to my mom's inscription on the page where it appears with half a dozen others, it was taken in June of 1947.
My Dad, working the soil...that's how I remember him best. He grew up on a farm, and after he came back from the War, he returned to farming to supplement the family income. Even after he was moved to an office job for the military, he maintained a large vegetable garden, and I will always associate him with the sweet scent of rich soil and the feel of the air in harvest season. My love of FarmAll tractors stems from his insistence that they were the best machines money could buy. "Knee-high by the Fourth of July," he'd say of his corn crop, and this Father's Day photo shows the silage corn well on its way to fulfilling that requirement.
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