It Was Einar’s and It Was a Hardware Store

Farms were evacuated. A national emergency was declared.

You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Your next stop wasn’t the Twilight Zone. Everyone and their yellow dogs were going to Allis-Chalmers (AC) Day. It was even better than getting the Christmas wish book, a 600-page catalog from Sears, in the mailbox. AC Day had food you could eat. If you ate a Sears catalog, you used a lot of ketchup. If Allis-Chalmers Day had been a book, it would have been a page-turner.

AC Day was a promotional event of the kind commonly held at local dealerships, which were often referred to as implements. It was a social gathering meant to foster customer loyalty.

We didn’t get a trip to Disneyland, Coney Island, Cedar Point or Excelsior Amusement Park, but that was OK. We had Allis-Chalmers Day each year.

It was one of those things kids got to do in a life filled with prohibited activities. No running with scissors. No running with flamethrowers. No jumping on the bed unless you’re in the lower bunk of a bunkbed. No firecrackers in the barn. And no doing anything the knuckle-headed neighbor boy might do. “I suppose if Henry jumped off the barn roof, you would, too?” I heard that even though Henry was so smart, he’d seen three UFOs and waved at two of them.

Attending Allis-Chalmers Day was guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. There were two roadside attractions in the small town I called home. A John Deere implement on one side of the street and an Allis-Chalmers implement on the other.

The Allis-Chalmers implement was known to those in the know as Einar’s Hardware. In 1937, Einar Christianson took delivery of eight Allis-Chalmers tractors. He sold them for $750 each. Starters and lights weren’t included. Einar took horses and mules in trade. In 1938, his business sold its first combine. Originally, the first Allis-Chalmers farm tractors were dark green. That changed in 1929 when the tractor department manager saw bright orange poppies blooming on a California hillside, which inspired him to choose the color “Persian Orange” for the new Allis-Chalmers iron horses. The Model “U” was the first tractor to feature the Persian Orange color scheme. It was called Persian Orange because those flowers were native to ancient Persia, now Iran.

Everything was the same as last year and everything was different on AC Day. Einar’s Hardware was standing room only. I saw old tractors and new tractors for sale. I could see where we’d been and where we were going. More power, fewer people farming. One farmer fed 26 people in those days. Today, one farmer feeds 169 people.

  I listened to my elders complain about the price of everything they produced always being lower than the price of whatever they purchased. That remains a common lament today.

I learned Ole had been injured while ice-fishing. He was run over by a Zamboni.

I was of an age when I had a furious appetite during my Allis-Chalmers Days. I couldn’t face anything on an empty stomach. Einar’s Hardware provided hot dogs, chips and baked beans piled high on a good paper plate that didn’t bend easily. Leftovers were scarcer than a deviled egg after a church potluck.

There were the classic short films. I watched The Three Stooges and/or Laurel and Hardy. Curly rocked. I’d seen them before, but I still rolled on the floor where the spilled mustard and ketchup lived. The movies helped make sense of the world, and I laughed until my sides ached.

Life wasn’t simpler then, but the entertainment was.

I don’t know how many AC Days I attended. Permanent, long-term autobiographical memory typically begins forming around 3 to 3 1/2 years of age and begins to diminish when a driver’s license is acquired.

An AC Day is a good thing to pull from the weeds growing in a memory.

One memorable year, I must have put my name in the raffle box meant for adults instead of the one designated for children, because I won a grease gun. I gave it to my mother for Christmas.

She seemed surprised.