Another Sepia Saturday, and another great match for the prompt! I had posted this about a month ago on Google+ just for kicks because I liked the photo. In the photo is my grandpa, Leon Kitko riding a piece of machinery, a Clark CA1 Airborne Tractor. If I have my facts straight, this tractor is still hanging around albeit in a state of disrepair. The neat part about the tractor is that it was built during World War II for the purpose of being light and small enough to be able to be flown in by glider or even dropped by parachute to the ground to help clear land for landing strips for larger aircraft. It’s a pretty neat machine! I’m not sure how my grandpa came to own one though, but it was in working condition at some point as the photo shows. Grandpa wasn’t a farmer and I don’t think he had any real need for a bulldozer, but he was a tinkerer and mechanic who could fix just about anything, so I’m sure when the opportunity came along, he was more than happy to add this machine to his collection. The back of the polaroid is labelled, “Aug 1969, Leon and his bulldozer,” and was likely taken by his wife, Romayne. It’s a bit of a newer photo than the prompt photo and probably one of the most recent I’ve used for a Sepia Saturday, but I couldn’t resist since it was such a good fit. There are SO many in this series (more recent photos from grandpa’s collection) that I really ought to delve into them more, but we’ll bulldoze through them soon enough!
Another piece of war material I knew nothing about. Imagine flying tractors in by glider. My farming relatives too knew a lot about motors and all the machines on the farm. I guess they had to….you couldn’t just call and get somebody out of repair things. Very nice match to the prompt.
Perfect! And I want one too! I think these mini-bulldozers, along with surplus military jeeps, boats, etc. used to be advertised by mail order companies in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine. They always seemed ridiculously cheap since they likely needed some (or a lot) of assembly and\or repair.
That photo is a real treasure. A small size tractor. One thing about those old machines is that it was possible to see how they worked and tinker with them and repair them. Not so now with all the computerized engines.
What a great little machine.I wonder if many were actually ‘in service’ in WW2.
From what I can find online, the army ordered somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 of them. This link (http://amcmuseum.org/exhibits_and_planes/ca-1.php) tells a story about them being flown into Burma to clear the jungle for a landing strip. I can imagine that a small, easily transportable piece of equipment like this was pretty invaluable when it was needed!
How cool! A tracked vehicle. My Dad was interested in vintage tractors and eventually landed up with a huge tracked vehicle that he called “the Crawler”. I can see that Leon’s machine would have had a lot of uses and been fun to operate – you seem similar machines on building sites now.
At first I thought from the name that the tractor might be able to fly by itself.
I’m trying to picture that machine being flown by a glider?!! Dropped by parachute I can imagine, but the other? Your grandpa seems to have found a pretty good use for it. Nice post.