BETTIE — Edsel Green parked his tractor beside the only traffic light in town and polished his beauty for the ride to come.
Rebuilt from hood to hitch, every bearing and seal, the red International was not pulling a disk plow or baler. Instead, Green’s haul on that autumn day was an old bench seat from a GMC van.
He had welded the seat, still covered in factory blue cloth, to a homemade mount that he raised and lowered with a hydraulic hitch. It felt pretty sturdy.
“We’re fixing to go look at the leaves change colors,” he said.
Green, 61, had dressed for the day in creased overalls and a camouflage baseball cap. Tall and burly, and a little stooped by age, the Bettie native restores antique tractors for a living. He had taken off work on a weekday in November to lead a few buddies in a country caravan through Bettie, Ewell and other Upshur County communities that don’t appear on a lot of maps.
“We’re diehards,” Green said. “We’ll ride till dark.”
From Green’s workshop beside the blinking light on U.S. Highway 271, the three tractors headed northeast on Bluebonnet Road. They rumbled down the cracked blacktop, stirring up leaves of crimson and gold, past green pastures and young hardwoods.
“It was all farmland out here at one time,” Green said. “This here 100 acres was all in a cotton patch when I was a little bitty boy.”
‘NOBODY GIVES A HOOT’
At around noon, Green braked and flagged down the others. “This is as good a place as any if y’all want to stop and eat,” Green said. “We ain’t on no kind of timetable. Nobody gives a hoot.”
For the picnic, the men had loaded a cooler with drinks and sandwich fixings and strapped it to the back of a Ford tractor steered by Richard Williams. Williams, 65, had driven in from Alba for the occasion and brought a retired buddy, John Dudley, to ride with him.
Williams said he uses his tractor on land where he grows corn, maize and oats, mostly to remind himself of the way things used to be when he was growing up in rural Rockwall, which is now a teeming suburb of Dallas.
“It’s something to play around with,” he said. “When you get old you get to thinking about old stuff more than new stuff because it’s connected to a lot of good memories.”
A third tractor owner, Neil Somerville, 60, had come over from Longview with his 1947 Farmall A. Somerville has known Green since they were both students at Kilgore College, and they got back in touch while fooling with tractors.
“It’s in the blood,” he said. “I was born in Michigan on a dairy farm. Left when I was 14. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to farm. I just want to play with tractors.’ ”
SERIOUS COMPETITION
Green was practically born on a tractor, he said. He was a fussy baby, and the only way his parents could have any peace was to put him on the family’s Super A.
“I was rode around and around in the yard to be put to sleep,” he said.
When he wasn’t quite 4, he drove his grandfather’s Farmall off a bridge on Chipmunk Road. Young Edsel had been distracted, he said, because he kept turning around in his seat to look at his grandfather, who was following closely behind in a pickup truck.
“I like to killed myself,” he said.
When he grew up he became a welder but continued to work on tractors. Green has won competitions at tractor shows from Texas to California, and he’s restored more than 20 of them in the past decade or so. “Anybody in the tractor business knows I’m serious competition,” he said.
The shop is open by appointment only.
“It’s a way to make a living,” he said. “I’m old. I still like to weld, but I can’t hold up to the hours seven days a week, so I found a way I could work.” And he works at his own pace. “If I wake up at 2 o’clock in the morning hurting, I get up and go work on the carburetor until 6 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I’ll go have coffee with the boys, then maybe go back to sleep.”
UPSHUR COUNTY SIGHTSEEING
After eating their sandwiches, the men cut north then west on FM 593 in Ewell, population 20. “Used to be a good pea patch right there,” Green said, pointing to a cow pasture.
The caravan crossed U.S. 271 to Muledeer Road, and Williams challenged Green to a race. “When you think you’re ready to try to outrun that little old Ford, we’ll put up some money and we’ll see about it,” Williams said.
Green knew his buddy’s tractor could book it. He declined the offer. The tractors rattled and purred as they passed an old lake whose dam had burst decades earlier, draining everything but the winding channel. They went by a couple of dead hogs and the biggest copperhead that Williams had ever seen, then the old farm place that Green’s grandfather had operated when Green was a little boy.
They crossed the creek where young Edsel had driven the tractor off the bridge so many years ago, and they arrived home in Bettie. Back at the shop, the friends had to admit they were pooped.
Green tried anyway — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to keep the caravan rolling to Lake Gilmer.
“I’m ready to keep riding,” he said. “I could do this all day.”
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