"old 79" is a "Dain" John Deere (1918) found in Minnesota, the owners weren't aware of it's historic significance

Images found on http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/viewtopic.php?t=851953

The Dain, which pre-dates John Deere’s first 2-cylinder tractor (the 1923 Model D), was put on permanent display at the John Deere Collectors Center in Moline, Ill., March 13, 2004.

Joseph Dain – a company vice president, board member and head of the patent and experimental department – began work on an “efficient, small-plow tractor” in 1914. Building on the failed attempt by C.H. Melvin, and later Max Slovsky, to develop a 3-bottom motor plow a few years before, Dain set to work on his own model.

Unfortunately, Dain died of pneumonia on Halloween 1917 after spending a wet, cold week field-testing the tractor, just before the Dain’s production began. Even as the first 100 Dain tractors were built, Deere Co. bought the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co., which manufactured both stationary engines and tractors. Deere  Co. suddenly had no reason to continue developing the Dain, and quickly fell in love with the Waterloo Boy kerosene-burning tractor, which was more affordable, equally advanced and already successfully in production.

The Dain was well-advanced, sporting features that John Deere tractors didn’t utilize until the 1960s and some not even until the 1980s. Many of those features include a gear-driven water pump, key ignition, on-the-go shifting, shiftless speed changing and positive traction. These features, however, made the Dain too expensive for most farmers to afford its $1,500 price tag.

This particular Dain tractor’s history started like any other. Emil Obitz of Stockton, Minn., bought the tractor from a John Deere dealer in Winona, Minn., in 1918. He used it for about a decade until he traded it for a Model D in 1928. The receiving dealership’s owner, in turn, loaned the Dain to his brother, who used it for a year then parked it in the trees because of an engine malfunction.

In 1930, Morris and Erwin Timm, who lived in rural Minnesota, purchased the Dain. The Timms bought it for the tractor’s chains, with which they wanted to repair a feed mill. Evidently, the brothers never got around to using the chains, and the Dain languished outdoors until 1962 when Frank Hansen purchased it for $1,000.

Hansen had known about the tractor’s whereabouts as a boy, and after he returned from military service, he researched and confirmed the special nature of the Dain. Hansen then restored the neglected Dain tractor from pure rust and displayed it at antique tractor shows until he died about a year ago.

text from  http://www.farmcollector.com/company-history/slipping-through-the-cracks-of-history.aspx#axzz37kDHjYwx

The John Deere company has an event every even numbered year in Moline, called the Gathering of the Green

book review, The Arsenal Of Democracy by A J Baime

In a word, terrific.

291 pages, 21 photos, and took about 8 hours to read

the story of Edsel Ford is the thread wound through this incredibly deep thoroughly researched history of how the Ford motor company began and was a success in the assembly line method of building cars even in the depression, and then when Hitler attacked other countries for conquest, and England implored the US for military assistance, events progressed to where President Roosevelt changed the course of American history from it's trend to neutrality and drawing down it's military to less than that of an ability to defend itself from hostile military takeover (Germany and Hitler) because of it's safe zones of the oceans to either side, and friendly neighbors to the North and South.

The sheer amount of history I learned from reading about the military status of the USA in the late 1930s was shocking. You'll probably find that to be true for you as well, as the high school history education in the 1980s I had in Michigan was useless in most aspects, and certainly about the years and events between the great depression and the onset of the USA's involvement in WW2. You might like reading this book just for that. But that is only a couple chapters.

You might value it for the extraordinary education about Henry, Edsel, Henry II and the way that family operated the Ford Motor Company before WW2, and how Edsel as president of the company had to fight his dad Henry, who never did loose the reins of the business, who was a pacifist and didn't want the company to make machines for war to kill an army that wasn't attacking the USA.

You'll likely never before have considered how the Ford family had to deal with their factories in Germany, France, etc that they had friends and business colleagues managing, were getting into a no win situation in enemy territory, and forced to build and sell Ford trucks and vehicles to the Nazi army, and communicating with those managers now making producing for, and collaborating with the Nazis.

Once the determination was made to stop making cars, and shift into production of B24s, they had to create an assembly line production for making airplanes... and no one was doing that. B24s were being made individually, and not very well... and for those of you that have ever worked in a factory, with engineering drawings, you will probably grasp the difficulty of starting to build a 4 engine bomber. I believe the book said the number of drawings for individual parts, and some of you will know that you have to make every single nut, bolt, rivet, and washer to the drawing spec, and the number of drawings was something like 5.9 million individual drawings. That's just for one plane.

The plant to make the bombers, Willow Run, was so enormous, it took 156000 lights in the ceiling to make it lit well enough to work, and keep in mind it was a dark out building so it wouldn't be seen at night in case of a bombing run by the Nazis. No windows. There are a couple chapters on how they had to design the factory to make so many different machines, foundry processes for a half dozen metals, chemical processes to treat the metals, x ray machines to check for bad forgings and castings, and the list just keeps growing of all the many things under that one roof it took to make the B24s. It's fascinating. And that's just the machinery, consider the people, the workers, and all the variety of things to make it a place that thousands of people could work together. Hospital beds, nurses, doctors and operating rooms for the workers injured on the job. Cafeterias for eating, bathrooms, break rooms, and all the rest. Training rooms for riverters, welders, mechanics, and the other specialist jobs.

Throughout the book are stats, facts and figures that I just found incredible, but a couple in particular are amazing. Like the way the author explained the interior size of Willow Run to be so large, every major league baseball team could have played 8 games simultaneously, with a crowd of 30,000 spectators for each game, and there would still be enough room left over for a football stadium and another 30,000 spectators. Ponder that.

The book is the best education you'll probably get on what it took to win the war from the standpoint of raw materials made into war machines. Of all the nations iron, 1/2 went to Detroit, as well as 3/4s of the plate glass, the leather, rubber, etc etc

A chapter or two go into the difficult problems they had with hiring thousands of people and not having anywhere to house them. Tent cities with no water, laundry, showers, or sewage systems. Once getting people to Detroit, training them and then little by little finding them leaving due to being drafted, injured, or moving on, they had to search farther out for workers, and went through the south on hiring trips to keep up the number of workers. It was the twelfth year of the great depression and 17 million people left home to find work in a war factory int he first half of the 40's, and Detroit grew to be the 4th largest city in the USA. The book also goes into the race riots, brought on by the racist southerners, the strikers, and the antagonists that wanted it all to fail. Ever hear about the Battle of the Overpass? You're going to get an astonishing amount of history in this book.

You'll be amazed at the pivotal moments that the Henry and Edsels wife made in keeping Henry in check. Blown away. You're likely already aware that Henry Ford is credited by most of  history as having changed the world. He was stubborn enough to accomplish about anything, and there were times when he had to have his mind changed about a couple of things. I'll leave it a mystery you can get to when you read the book.

Throughout the book the author has brilliantly placed excerpts or condensed versions of the diaries of people that kept a journal of their arrival at the factory, how they coped with the complete change of civilization, from normal life to ration stamps for food and gas.

It's one of the most amazing books I've read.... and you regular readers probably recall the other book reviews I've done, and you have no idea how many books I've read... before becoming a blogger I was an avid reader.

You can read a far briefer review at http://travelforaircraft.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/the-arsenal-of-democracy-write/ though it seems far more professional than my own way of writing and describing the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Arsenal-Democracy-Detroit-Quest-America/dp/0547719280/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404917634&sr=1-1&keywords=arsenal+of+democracy

National Historic Vehicle Registry

The first was the 1964 Shelby Daytona Coupe, specifically CSX 2287 which won the FIA championship for Shelby / American racing team for the first time.

The Meyers Manx  prototype, 1964

And the 1938 Maserati 8CTF Boyle Special that won Indy in 1939 and 1940

the short list of cars on the list to be next include the 1907 Thomas Flyer that won the 1908 New York to Paris race, a 1919 Pierce Arrow owned by President Wilson, and a 1952 Hudson Hornet

https://www.historicvehicle.org/nationalregister

Draft Criteria for Historic Significance
Criterion A: Associative Value – Event
A vehicle associated with an event or events that are important in automotive or American history.
 1903 Packard “Old Pacific” – early transcontinental traveler
 1953 Ferrari 375 MM – President’s Cup winner Andrews AFB race

Criterion B: Associative Value – Person
A vehicle associated with the lives of significant persons in automotive or American history.
 1932 Duesenberg SJ – Fred Duesenberg’s personal car
1909 White Steam Car – first US Presidential automobile

Criterion C: Design or Construction Value
 A vehicle that is distinctive based on design, engineering, craftsmanship or aesthetic value.
 1948 Tucker (design/engineering)
1925 Doble (engineering – steam)

Criterion D: Informational Value
 A vehicle of a particular type that was the first or last produced, has an element of rarity as a survivor of its type, or is among the most well-preserved or thoughtfully restored surviving examples. 1953 Corvette EX122 (prototype)
1899 Packard (first Packard built)

colorized 100 year old photos.. I love it

The top image is one in a book of colorized civil war era photos, very easily seen in Time Lightbox at http://lightbox.time.com/2012/10/25/a-vibrant-past-colorizing-the-archives-of-history/#1 and complimented and featured on Time magazine online, or see a couple stills (remarkable!) at http://www.redbubble.com/people/sannadullaway

there is a Gilmore gas station in the middle of LA, here's why... Gilmore started out with dairy farms in Compton, La Brea, and the Fairfax districts, then discovered oil under it and in 1905 had a oil rig farm

An amazing story, excerpted in Automobile Magazine, reminded me how damn good sports writers are

Black Noon: The Year They Stopped the Indy 500, by Art Garner

http://www.automobilemag.com/features/magazine/1406-black-noon-year-they-stopped-the-indy-500/

the great variety of early automobiles was astonishing

All found on http://rcforum.ru/showthread.php?t=6626

farm labor saving device... before tractors came along with external flywheel belt drives

Found on https://www.facebook.com/marc.tudeau?fref=photo 

WW2 mileage ration sticker and info

you received stamps and other various paperwork that had to be filled out in order to get your fuel. An “A” sticker was issued to the general public. The “B” my was if your job was considered vital to the war effort. This meant you would be allotted up to eight gallons a week.

There were six different window stickers and even a “R” one for farm vehicles. These were a part of everyday life. So much so they became part of popular culture, like at the end of this classic Bugs Bunny when his crashing plane doesn’t crash because it runs out of gas. Why, because he only had an “A” sticker.

 An interesting yet lesser known fact is that the rationing wasn’t really created to control fuel consumption, but was there to help save on tires. Gasoline could be made domestically, but rubber trees don’t grow here (at least not in mass quantity). That raw material came from Asia, which of course was controlled by Japan at the time. That’s why if you look closely at the paperwork you’ll see a lot of references to mileage and tire inspections. There was even a national speed limit of 35 MPH put in place to help curb tire wear.

 Found on http://familyephemera.tumblr.com/post/73744494852/rationing-was-a-way-of-life-during-wwii-from

I didn't realize that Petrolicious was also posting about the rationing, but they focused on Canadian and European

found on
http://www.petrolicious.com/wwii-era-gas-ration-coupons-remind-us-how-lucky-we-are

my friend Tris has her parents WW2 ration book, and let me take photos of it: