To the Editor:

I enjoy your “Back In Time … 100 Years Ago” column, getting close to when I was running around. [From Jan. 2, 1925 Village Notes: Millard Frink met with a painful accident Monday morning. While endeavoring to start his car he engine backfired and the crank flew back, breaking one of the bones in his right arm. He went to the Albany hospital for X-ray examination and treatment.]

This is just a stupid story that jogged my memory with the report about the fellow breaking his arm cranking an engine.

At that time, this was not rare; in fact, it was very common. On the farm, we went from horses to our first tractor, which was a spade steel wheeled Fordson. Not a big tractor but a brute to start and it had to be cranked.

The general process when one of the kids was to use it was to have me at the wheel adjusting gas and spark. My brother Art would crank. We both were taught how to crank it correctly so we would not get hurt.

One day, the beast decided to kick back and it hurt Art's hand, not bad but it ticked him off. We decided to do something about it.

My dad saved everything because we might need it some day; both Art and I developed this same habit. We found an old washing machine motor with the pulley still on it; we took another pulley we found and welded it to the shaft that protruded from the engine where it was cranked from.

Then we found an old v belt, mounted the motor to a board and that to a post in the machinery shed with mismatched hinges. The next step was to park the tractor in the same spot every time so we could line up the pulleys.

Now to start that fussy pile of metal all Art had to do was put the v belt (which really didn’t match either pulley but it worked) around the pulleys, plug in the motor, pull down on the blank to tighten the belt while I still fiddled with the gas and spark, and — bingo — the old Fordson would fire up and was ready to go.

There were two things that might cause a problem. One, it had to be parked in the same spot and, two, if it stalled somewhere away from our little set-up, it had to be cranked (after waiting two or three hours because it wouldn’t start if it was hot).

We probably had the first electric-start, steel-wheeled Fordson on the planet.

All that came to mind from reading 100 Years Ago today.

John Williams

Guilderland