PUXICO, Mo. -- The pan seat was taller than its 7-year-old driver.
It had a crank start that needed adult hands.
There was no power steering, and not even a pair of rubber tires to cover the bare steel wheels.
"That's what I started out on. That there is rough riding," 68-year-old Allen Parsley said on a rainy March afternoon, as he ducked under the cover of a shed sitting off a series of gravel roads near Puxico.
The old green 1937 John Deere had already spent a few decades in the fields by the time Parsley's parents first let him climb behind the wheel.
"If you did five acres a day, you did great," said Parsley, who grew up nearby on farmland his grandparents settled in the late 1800s. "They just told me what field to go to and what to do and that's what I did."
Parsley is a member of the Mingo Tractor Club, a group of enthusiasts dedicated to preserving a way of life modern farmers may have trouble picturing.
It's a time before hydropneumatic self-leveling systems, satellite guided driving and air conditioned cabs.
While the Parsleys' 25 horsepower Model A may have been replaced in the fields with a 130 horsepower combine, the original workhorses of America's heartland are still loved.
Club members search fence rows for the abandoned Allis-Chalmers, Farmalls and John Deere tractors of their youth, breathing new life into machinery that had been overworked or outpaced.
"If we don't, it's just going to be lost. The younger kids, they have no idea what it was like," said Parsley. "They can't believe you get on one of these old tractors and you work all day and you get very little done.
"Compared to now, you get in one of those vehicles and in an hour, you can do more than what you used to do in one day."
Parsley's younger brother, Edward, is president of the tractor club, and many of his other family and friends are members.
The 1937 John Deere is owned by his brother-in-law, Bruce Campbell. It is a duplicate of the one on which Parsley first learned to farm.
"When we got the size bigger, I thought, well, we'll be farming the whole country," Parsley recalled.
Campbell worked for John Deere and has many of the familiar green and yellow farm machinery scattered around his property.
Edward Parsley, meanwhile, has a pair of tractors that are about 70 years old, offering an almost perfect before and after picture of the typical club member's find.
One is a mixture of rust and faded paint. The other has been restored to a color Krylon dubs the Allis-Chalmers orange, after a company that stopped producing equipment more than 30 years ago.
Paint is the last step in the restoration process.
Parsley has his own Allis-Chalmers, now with a fresh-off-the-lot shine. It had sprouts growing through it and no paint whatsoever, when he found it.
"I rebuilt all of if," Parsley explained during a visit to his farm, where it stood in a line with a red Farmall Cub and a gray Ford tractor, both from the 1950s.
They are part of a history he hopes to pass down to his children.
"You've got something left then. That's what I'd like to do," said Parsley, who carries an oxygen container and uses a walker. "My son, he's got one that my dad had, that needs some work on it. I told him I'd help him, whenever he got ready. Just pass down that connection."
The tractors also carry memories of a different time and stories of a childhood growing up in rural communities.
The Parsleys grew, raised and harvested most of what they needed to live. Trips to town for the eldest and his three younger siblings were for Saturday evenings, when they would watch television through a store window on the sidewalks of Puxico, or spend two or three cents on candy.
Rest came at least one day a week.
"We'd work to midnight Saturday and we may start again at midnight Sunday, but we didn't work on Sundays," Parsley said, adding later, "I remember the moonshine was bright. You could see at night. We always drove at night. Had to."
Hard work aside, the children gained something more important than store bought clothes, or the newest technology, Parsley believes.
"Everybody knows everybody, and they help," he said, traveling more dirt roads between the homes of friends and family, to look at a few more old tractors. "I guess I'm prejudiced, but I think Puxico is about as good a place to live as anywhere.
"I guarantee if somebody needs something, in just a few minutes I can get on the phone and I can find somebody that would help anybody do it. It's just kind of the way people are."
Among those people is a childhood friend of Parsley's and club member, David Magill.
Magill has a John Deere tractor built for orchard work, one of less than 300 made in the 1950s that runs on straight gas.
His farm sits on a hilltop south of Puxico that has been in his family for decades.
"When I got it, basically all that was there was the cast iron," said Magill. "The parts were there, but I had to put it back together."
The friends also recall an old John Deere from the 1950s that took both of them to drive as children.
Both laugh loudly when asked if they ever imagined that repairing the same tractors would one day be a hobby.
"That was the last thing I thought back then," Parsley said.
Finding these relics is half the fun, according to Magill. The rest is putting it back together.
"I get enjoyment out of bringing stuff back to life," Magill said. "If I've got a problem, I enjoy solving the problem."
And yes, it can be frustrating.
"That's not the word for it sometimes," Parsley adds, laughing again.
Magill has worked on some for a decade. Some had pistons in such bad shape, a sledge hammer wouldn't drive them out. Others had oil leaks that dated back to the factory floor. And some parts can be almost impossible to find.
But it's still all about community.
"I've met so many people over this, the tractor club and all that stuff, I'd have never met. You learn a lot," said Parsley. "It's just kind of a neat group I think."