Handy Herbert Jack Of All Trades

I did a lot of township work in 1944 and 1945. There was a scracity of machinery, so I bought up used equipment from the Dust Bowl of the Dakotas. I sold the John Deere agency and building in 1947. I did road work on the They were to deliver the machine in ten days and it took them forty five days. I sued the Railroad Company as I had to pay out $6,000 rent for another machine. We had to walk the machine twenty miles to the job. The bridge was not safe so we had to walk the machine through six feet of water in the Roseau River. We chained matts to the tracks to pull them under the water to get them under the tracks. Some of my sons were in the water helping to move the matts around. When the machine got on the other bank, the operator walked off the matts and got about a hundred feet from the river bank. The machine dropped into the swamp with the boom sticking straight up and the rear counter weights about eight feet in the mud. There was only about two feet of the twenty foot long tracks sticking up. I was on my way around and over the bridge to tell him to stay on the matts, but did not get there in time. I did not sleep a wink that night -- I was just sick! We had been waiting six weeks for the machine and now it seemed hopelessly stuck.

The next morning I had timbers and a Cat hauled out. We put down a timber dead man and put a fifty foot cable to boom point hoist cable. Then we put another cable from Cat wench to boom point and chained a matt to front of the tracks sticking out of the ground. We then started the big 200 hp. Murphey Diesel, but it just killed every time we tried to start it. The machine was really sucked down in the muck. Then I had cables pulled as tight as possible and held the governor on the engine. I moved a few inches and started to pull the matts under. Finally, after several more reefs we had it on the matts. 1 was afraid of breaking something, pulling it so hard. It sure was a nice feeling to see the machine moving again. It was a two year job, but we finished the excavations from June 13 to January 3. We ran two shifts day and night, right through. When the ground started freezing we ran three eight hour shifts. Finally we were breaking a foot of frost the last couple of days. It got down to 30° below when we were moving the machines back across the river and the ice was thick enough to carry the machines. The lakes now have fine fishing and lots of ducks and geese. It is a game refuge now where several hundred ducks and geese winter there and raise their young. In 1954 and 1955 I bid in over a million dollars of State Highway work in Minnesota. I had five jobs and was employing over two hundred men. I had #59 from Lancaster to the border, High-way #2 from Grand Forks to Crookston and Highway #53 at International Falls, south. Another job was Highway #1 at Red Lake and also a job from Roosevelt to the Lake of the Woods. From 1954 to 1956 we got heavy rain. on all these jobs, which washed out many culverts and heavy fills. On the hit solid granite. The cut was over fifteen feet deep in that hill which was about two hundred feet wide and fifteen hundred feet long. In drilling and blasting the rock, several homes nearby were damaged, costing me several thousands of dollars. The rock cost me five dollars a yard to move. Over the three years 1 paid out approximately two hundred and fifty thousand more than I took in. 1 had to mortgage my machinery and borrow money in order to get the jobs completed. With the rising costs in labor and materials, I was unable to meet all my bills and had to turn everything over to a receiver.