Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association Website (MMOGTA)

Archived Past Pages:

W e e k l y F e a t u r e P a g e
Links to archived past pages on lower left

The contents of the “Weekly Feature” page are provided to you for your entertainment, amusement, and perhaps information. Here you may find articles of interest, pictures, historical information on the Club, or whatever shuffles to the top of the pile on our desk. The only defined characteristic of this space is that we will make every effort to change/replace it around the middle of each week. Thank you for visiting, and please stop by again. Click on any photo to see it larger in a separate window.

What Fun

What fun, indeed! Or is it, “What fun?” Sometimes it takes a week or so to realize just how much fun it was when you get to the end of a big enterprise like the 2008 MMOGTA show. The first week or so you tend to be either too busy or too tired to make an accurate assessment of what just happened. But then as the healing quietly takes place, you begin to be more objective about the whole ordeal and develop a little better perspective on it all. OK, we’re there now, and it was great. The gods of meteorology smiled on us this year, and we were ready with our end. What resulted was a spectacular show, with great attendance, and a lot of hard work and fun to go along with it.

We hope you had a chance to attend, as we featured Baker tractors and equipment, one of the more obscure and little known brands from our past. We think old Abner Baker would have been proud to see his great grandson at the controls of the very first Steam Traction Engine produced by his factory 110 years ago. To see the aged engine back in action on the threshing machine after all this time was truly an exercise in history, surrounded as it was by a nice collection of the few remaining Baker gas tractors and associated displays.

As always, the featured brand area is just the spotlighted portion of our show, it’s a lot bigger than Baker. In fact, our display field was lined with about 5 times more tractors than Baker ever produced in all his years of operation. That should give you a little idea how busy we were on the 3rd weekend of August. And that should give you an idea how grateful we are to all of our exhibitors (the real stars of our show) who shouldered the burden of historically high fuel costs in the process of bringing their own individual shows to us. Thank you all!

How big was it? Well, the numbers aren’t all in yet, and the beans are still being counted in the various departments, but it quite certainly was the biggest 3 day show in our 34 year history. So big in fact that the demand on our electrical system caused the failure of one of our main electrical transformers on Sunday afternoon. Hats off to the guys from Consumer’s Energy who came to our rescue on very short notice, locating and installing a new, larger transformer right in the middle of a very busy show, leaving us with very little disruption in the activities. Nice work by all who were involved in handling this temporary situation. Generators were located to keep key systems up and running, and it was “On with the Show”. Seemed like the guys in the bucket truck were just a part of the entertainment.

The bottom line is this; we had an outstanding show, and while all of us put in an endless amount of man hours in the process, we all realize that such an enterprise is very much a community effort. We are profoundly grateful to our local community of businesses, neighbors, and workers, right along with the greater community of exhibitors, spectators and visitors who must all be in place for our show to be the success it was.

We’ll leave you with a couple of random photos of the big weekend, but be sure to visit the “08 Show photo gallery” page for a much broader look at this year’s show. Photos will continue to be added there as the material comes in.

(click individual photos to enlarge)

For information or questions regarding our website or any components of it, please contact webmaster.

©2007-2008 Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA). The contents of all materials available on this Internet site are copyrighted by Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA) unless otherwise indicated. All rights are reserved by Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA), and content may not be reproduced, downloaded, disseminated, published, or transferred in any form or by any means, except with the prior written permission of Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA). Any unauthorized usage on newsgroups, or other internet sites, or unauthorized reproduction, printing or sales of these images is prohibited under existing Federal Copyright laws of the United States. We will actively prosecute those that duplicate, distribute or otherwise use our images without express written authorization or release. Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA) maintains this website to enhance public access to information about its functions and policies in general. Our goal is to keep this information timely and accurate. If errors are brought to our attention, we will try to correct them as soon as possible. Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA), however, accepts no responsibility or liability whatsoever with regard to the material on this site.

This site designed and maintained by Eric Schuman