Getting traction

HARRISBURG — “Right here in beautiful, downtown Harrisburg.”

That’s how Ray Jackman put it Saturday, as he stood in the middle of a dirt track off Peoria Road, wearing a headset and calling the truck and tractor pull at the resurrected Harrisburg Harvest Festival.

A contestant had just used his tractor to pull a huge sled with a box filled with enough weight to crush an elephant.

The truck and tractor pull, which continues today with shows at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. during the festival’s second day, was by far the most popular thing going on Saturday at the festival that reappeared early last fall after disappearing back in the ’90s.

City Administrator Brian Latta said the farming community came to him last year, wanting to re-create the festival that celebrates the end of the crop-growing season in this Linn County town.

“It was just an upswell from the community,” Latta said Saturday. “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, when this was going strong, they would do this at the high school.”

Besides the sight of folks pulling weight on their trucks, tractors and even lawn mowers, there was a horseshoe tournament, a kids’ area with a Bounce Obstacle Course and vendors selling everything from shaved ice to fried Twinkies and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

And there was Bob Biswell, of the Harrisburg Area Museum, driving a 1916 Case 50-horsepower steam tractor and giving anyone who wanted one a ride.

“We run this ol’ girl at the (Harrisburg) Fourth of July parade and at the Junction City (Christmas) lights parades,” said Biswell, who lives in Junction City and pulled a whistle on the tractor that made a booming choo-choo!

The steam-powered tractor was donated to the museum, Biswell said. A nearby sign said it was made by the Case Threshing Machine Co. in Racine, Wis., and once was used “as a backup power source” in a Pendleton flour mill.

Despite Saturday’s less-than-stellar late-August weather, with whipping winds and dark, early-afternoon skies that looked like something out of “The Wizard of Oz,” hundreds of people sat on hay bales watching the truck and tractor pull.

It’s a competitive sport in rural areas, in which modified farm tractors and trucks drag a metal sled containing a weight-filled box that’s mechanically winched forward as the sled progresses along the course.

“There he goes, past the 152 (foot mark)!” Jackman hollered into his headset as 14-year-old Zach Cooper of Eugene, one of the early competitors, pulled weight with his 2000 Yard-Man lawn mower.

Zach’s father, Brad Cooper, had gone before him, pulling his sled 152 feet with his 1999 Ranch King lawn mower. But Zach, wearing a motorcycle helmet, went 211 feet.

“He’s makin’ it,” Jackman said. “Lean back, Zach! Give ’er more weight!”

A first-timer at this, Zach said afterward: “It was just slowing me down a lot.”

His father, who remembers going to truck and tractor pulls in Grants Pass, where his grandparents lived, back in the ’80s, said “he wanted to do it, so we just decided, ‘If he’s gonna to do it, I’m gonna do it, too.’ ”

But they couldn’t pull as far as Marvin Wing of Crawfordsville. He took his 1949 tractor, labeled “WTF” on the back, and pulled weight 245 feet, almost as far as when he got first place here last year.

“My granddaddy built this out of old, spare parts in 1949 to spray his (filberts),” said Wing, 66, after he hopped off.

“I’ve been in this sport about eight years and love the heck out of it,” said Wing, a delivery truck driver for Cascade Timber Consulting in Sweet Home. “You get the little kids involved, and it teaches them how to work with parts and tractors, and they can graduate to pulling trucks. It’s a good, clean family sport.”