“Big Hammer,” an original acrylic painting, copyright artist Susan A. Walton, S. A. Walton Studio Fine Art, Hudson, Florida.

This is a painting I began to honor my father- all good fathers, really - and it features an old Allis Chalmers tractor on a little family farm in southeast Missouri that I fondly remember because it was involved in so many family stories, most of them hilarious.

My father wasn’t a farmer, but he longed to be one. Due to circumstances beyond his control, he didn’t have a father in his life and wasn’t raised on a farm, but was raised in a dirty old industrial town near railroad tracks and had the run of St Louis on occasion.

It wasn’t a very natural world; back alleys, bare dirt, streets, clapboard and brick. I guess he compared his life in less than optimal conditions to the lush countryside he would get to visit now and then, when an uncle needed an extra hand cutting and baling hay using a horse or mule powered baler, or when he would be invited along on a raccoon or rabbit hunt. So when he at last had a family of his own, and a peculiar set of circumstances allowed him to indulge in a little dream, he and my Mom, who also very much loved gardening, started looking for a farm. He wanted to try a little row cropping to give us kids a taste of the country he knew and loved, I suppose. He wanted us to have the experience of hunting and fishing that we simply weren’t getting in suburbia.

My folks didn’t just live for themselves. They could have parked us in front of TVs and let the advertisers and Hollywood raise us, and go out by themselves a lot to socialize with adults their age, but that lifestyle really didn’t suit them. They tried to have a social life, as was expected back then, going out and bowling on a team for a while, but by the time I came along, they a little wiser, were focused on family, and a night out on the town meant a night out WITH kids, not without. They took us ice skating on local ponds, with bonfires and hot chocolate. They took us to the St. Louis Zoo, to Art Hill, to the Planetarium and science museum, Lincoln’s home, to the Missouri Botanical Garden, to the Muny to see musicals, to Grant’s Farm, to the Goldenrod Showboat to see melodramatic plays, to airshows at Scott Air Force Base. But best of all, for me, was their buying of a farm.

Dad wanted cows and a Mom wanted a big garden like her parents had grown. They just weren’t quite sure of how to go about it, and that is a story in itself.

It wasn’t much of a farm, but it was quite an experience.

Anyway, they managed to buy the little farm and it came with an old Allis Chalmers tractor. It was not a new tractor, and had long ago lost its showroom looks. But it was a good, solid tractor and fairly easy to repair and work with.

The headlights were shot, and one looked like it had been knocked asunder by a tree limb. It had no muffler to tone down the snorting, chugging noise it made when Dad or one of the boys was operating it, and when parked, a Campbell’s Soup can was dropped over the exhaust to keep water and mud dauber wasps from entering. It also had a pedal that always seemed to stick.

Dad had a solution for that pedal, and it was to tell whatever kid was nearby to go get the hammer that was stored in a little tool box on board. He would give that pedal a good whack or two with the hammer to free it, and then have a kid start the tractor. Sometimes there was work to do with it, but sometimes he would let my brothers go joy riding on it, and that is another story or two.

As we grew up doing various projects with him, we encountered different problems as we worked together, and he was a good mentor, more patient than most men with children. I have seen a lot of people just shove the curious children aside in order to get work done more efficiently or quickly, or fail to even try to motivate their unmotivated kids to work. My folks were not like that.

When parents tell kids to help, it isn’t always in the expectation that their help will make a job easier- sometimes it is just the opposite. There is always the likelihood, especially when they are very young, and again when they are teens, that the kids are going to complicate the work needing done or make the process as frustrating as can be. But good parenting requires patience and a high tolerance for pain.

With many tough problems, the call from Dad was for his sledge hammer, and we were expected to know just where it was and not be long about retrieving it. I still have it, along with a few of his tools, and use them from time to time. That sledge hammer has been through Hell over the years. It was probably old when he first laid hands on it, and as a young man he had taken different jobs in construction where he used it on concrete forms, framing structures, beating fence posts into submission, and such. Of course there are many jobs on farms where a sledge hammer comes in handy as well. It became a running joke to call any unusual sticking point in a job with him “time to get the Big Hammer.” No matter what, he always got jobs done, even if it took all the force he could muster, even if it wasn’t pretty, or easy; even if it took the “Big Hammer.”

When my parents moved from the Midwest to Florida, he didn’t leave that hammer behind. We used it when we tore down and rebuilt a boat/greenhouse/chicken shed together. We turned the structure Into a beautiful art studio, all while being heckled by wild turkeys, and mother-hemmed by my worried Mom.

The Big Hammer was often called on during that rebuild to knock down walls and studs, but eventually was set aside while we finished the interior. At one point we realized we had accidentally lost it in a wall while we installed the sheet rock. To get it back we had to undo our work until we were able to rescue the thing, even though we could have easily found him a new one to replace it and saved a lot of labor.

I am glad I agreed to go in and get it; I could tell by the look on his face that he actually cared about that hammer. and it would be like leaving a piece of him in that wall.

There are times to finesse things and such, but there are also times in life when finesse, or doing things too timidly, or too gently, just doesn’t get the job done in time.

Fatherhood is about teaching the young how to approach not just easy challenges or problems but also how to handle yourself when life hands you impossible problems for which there are no good, nice, or civilized solutions, or when there us no time to dither.

Is there more to this story? Yes. I will be adding the more detailed story behind this work of art in time.

#AllisChalmers #FamilyFarm

#Fatherhood #TractorArt #BigHammer #Hobbyfarm #Missouri #FarmPaintings #SusanAWalton #SAWaltonStudio