BOTKINS — Jack Oakley, of Botkins, isn’t quite sure how his collection of 500 model and toy tractors got started.
It might have been that his son gave him one for Christmas 30 years ago. It might have been that Oakley, as an adult, still had two that he had played with as a child. It might have been that he found a nice one at a tractor festival in West Liberty. Or maybe it was the four that his boys enjoyed when they were growing up.
“It kind of started and grew. It just kind of kept growing,” he said, recently.
Oakley’s tractors range in scale from 64, meaning the model is 1/64th the size of a real tractor, to 16.
“I’m always leaning toward Allis-Chalmers because that’s what I grew up with,” he said. He has a lot of Allis-Chalmers models. There are also miniature Fords, Cases, Olivers, Internationals and John Deeres. One of the latter is an FFA commemorative that has a word misspelled on it. Oakley doesn’t know if that mistake, like a mistake on a coin or a stamp, makes the piece more valuable than the others.
Many of the collector’s models are made of metal; some, of plastic; and a few, he, himself, made from wood.
“I can take a picture, and if I have dimensions, I can scale it all out. On the really fine stuff, you have to go to the metric system. I use maple. It’s a real tight grain. When you sand it down and paint it, it looks just like metal,” he said.
Sometimes, he’ll buy a model or a toy and then change the wheels or something else on it. He buys parts from Dakotah Toys in Madison, South Dakota, or makes them.
A long-time wood-crafter, Oakley works in tiny dimensions. He made four replica Wisconsin V-4 motors that are just 3/4 inch in size.
“You keep working with it and playing with it,” he said. It’s not just the scale models he works on and plays with. Oakley is restoring two full-size tractors in his garage.
He and his wife, Clara, have visited flea markets in several states, including the famous garage sale along U.S. 127 and a market in Branson, Missouri, in search of the little tractors. There is only one that “got away,” as they say: an Allis-Chalmers 16th scale WC.
“I found one years ago, when I was just getting started, and I decided not to buy it,” he said. He has never found another.
His favorite is the replica of the first big tractor he ever drove. He was 9, and it was on his dad’s farm in Logan County. The elder Oakley had been using a WC, and little Jack couldn’t reach the clutch.
“Dad got a WD when I was 9,” Oakley remembered. “It had two clutches. We went out to bale hay. Dad lined up the row. ‘You don’t want to miss any,’ he said. ‘Don’t go too fast and clog the baler, and you don’t want to jerk me off the wagon,’” his dad cautioned.
Oakley recalls the story easily as he looks at the little WD.
Some of the models, especially those made for collectors, can be pricey, but the most Oakley has ever paid for a tractor is $200.
“Typically, they’re $50; the little ones, $8 to $15. Buying (them) for an investment doesn’t work,” he cautioned.
He has never traded something from his collection for something else. And he has sold only one: a model corn picker he had crafted from wood.
“There’s a group of Allis-Chalmers enthusiasts (who meet). They go all over the country. They call it the Gathering of the Orange. Six or seven years ago, they were at Plain City. I took the corn picker down there and a collector from West Virginia bought it,” Oakley said.
One of the best deals he’s had was when he got 18 tractors for $20 from a woman in New Carlisle whose late father had been a collector.
“I cleaned them up,” Oakley said. He dusts his whole collection about twice a year.
“It takes a couple days to do that. I use an awful lot of Q-tips to get into the cracks and crevices,” he said.
When they’re not being cleaned, the tractors are all on display in the Oakley living room. The tiniest of them are lined up on a decorative chair rail that rings the room. Others rest on bookcases, end tables and wall shelves. They are “parked” below window sills and next to easy chairs: 500 of them in orange, green, red and yellow.
There is also a handful of little wooden milk trucks. That’s because driving a milk truck was Oakley’s first job. He was 18 and weighed 135 pounds. He had to manhandle milk cans weighing 110 pounds each.
“It was all I could do to get them up into the truck,” he said, an exercise he did over and over, every day. There were 120 cans on the truck, and he had to load and unload them all twice when they were full and twice when they were empty each day.
There is little chance of the model milk truck numbers overtaking the tractor numbers in the Oakley living room, though. While Jack said he’d like to build more tractors, his 500-piece collection probably won’t grow a lot in the future.
When asked how many more tractors he’d want to have, what number would mean his collection was complete, Clara answered for him with a chuckle from the room around the corner.
“Five hundred,” she said.
