By CINDY LADAGE
Illinois Correspondent

LEBANON, Ind. — Robert Dunbar was at the Farm World Expo Sept. 4-6 as part of the Boone County Antique Tractor and Machinery Club, with his restored 1949 Montgomery Ward tractor.

It is rare, and one of the most interesting things about it is that it could be bought right out of the Mont-gomery Ward catalog 50 years ago.

Dunbar said this is not a well-known fact. “Everyone is always surprised. They didn’t know that it was sold through the catalog,” he explained.

“A fellow in the club had it 10 years ago. He wanted to sell it and I bought it.”

While Wards did sell the tractor, it has a Chrysler automobile engine in it, and a fluid drive. “This was something they put into both trucks and tractors,” Dunbar said. “They were made in Shelbyville, Indiana, by the Custom Tractor Company. They built the Wards Junior, the Big Boy and Lehr models. They made about 2,500 of them.

This little tractor is a show tractor; Dunbar has taken it to the state fair and parades it in about six or seven parades every summer. Dunbar, who just turned 82, keeps busy with his tractors and his farming. He grew up on a farm, too.

“When I was 10 years old, I started helping Dad,” he said. “The horses died and Dad needed to cut the tongues off the equipment for the tractors; I helped.”

This was when the Dunbar farm went completely from horse to tractor. He loves them, and Ford was the brand with which he grew up. At the Expo, he had a 1953 Jubilee tractor his friend Becky Boots often drives in shows; it is like one of the models that his family had back in the 1950s.

The Jubilee came from a neighbor’s farm. “My neighbor had this when he was in the lawn business,” Dunbar said. “He is retired now. It came just two miles from the farm. It is nice for shows, and antiquing.”

Sometime after his wife died about eight years ago, he and Boots enjoy going to shows together and driving the tractors in parades. “I started farming in 1946 and farmed with Ford tractors. Now I farm with big blue ones,” Dunbar added.

He was once away from the farm, for the military. “I had an 18-month vacation during the 1950s,” he quipped. “I was sent to Korea; I was drafted at 26. I served two years and took typing school for the Signal Corps.

“I gained weight because unlike farming, I had regular hours! In the Army, I gained 30 pounds.”

The weight came off immediately when he returned home and began working on the farm again. “I’m just one size bigger now than in high school,” he noted.

Looking back on the changes in the farm, Dunbar reflected, “Farming is easier now than it used to be. I used to have hogs; I quit them during the middle ’90s.”