"Reincarnation of an Old Cat"

 

REINCARNATION OF AN OLD CAT

MARCH 2011

David Thornton stood in the widow’s yard in Moose Pass and examined the ancient tractor she no longer wanted any part of.

Vegetation had woven into and around the base of the machine—a 1928 Caterpillar tractor—and now, on a cold February day in 2000, the dead blades of grass poked up through the snow or curled limply over the metal tracks. In the eyes of most, the tractor was a ruin, a rusty vestige of its former self, and even to the nearly 70-year-old Thornton, who hoped to restore it, the Cat was in sorry shape.

“It was a seething pile of rust, full of crud and gunk,” he said. “The engine was froze and busted. It was a mess because it’d been sitting down there for years with the stack uncovered and water running in it.”

The incoming water had frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, and the inner workings had been demolished by the actions of the seasons.

“The engine, forget about it,” Thornton said, “but the rest of it I could see was workable. It was preserved in grease and oil and yuck, but it was something that was there and was workable. The engine was the primary thing that had to go. It had to be replaced. The cylinders were busted. The jugs were busted. It wouldn’t hold water, and the pistons were seized. It would never run again.”

Beyond the engine, however, Thornton spied hope.

He also spied a piece of Alaska history.

Thornton had become acquainted with long-time Moose Pass resident, Edward Estes, who had told him that the Cat had arrived in the port of Seward in 1928—when it was a new machine, when it was still painted in original Caterpillar battleship grey with red trim, and when the now-world famous Caterpillar name was a trademark less than 20 years old.

The 10,000-pound, 30-horsepower tractor, complete with a specially ordered set of ice tracks, had been purchased by Alaska’s Bureau of Public Roads as the primary machine with which to maintain the main road out of town.

In the 1920s, the former wagon road between Seward and Hope had been upgraded to support automobile traffic; however, until the late 1930s, passage along that road was interrupted at about Mile 18, where the Snow River entered the upper end of Kenai Lake. At that point, until the road bridge was constructed and the 10-mile highway “missing link” completed, vehicles were loaded onto rail cars and hauled down the tracks to Moose Pass (at about Mile 29). From Moose Pass, vehicle owners could drive on to Hope.

Consequently, the 1928 Caterpillar made its road-maintenance debut between Seward and Kenai Lake, and about a decade later expanded its territory to the fuller length of highway between Seward and Moose Pass.

Road maintenance consisted of towing a non-motorized road grader—essentially a large steel blade suspended between two pairs of steel wheels rolling beneath a platform on which sat an operator who made all necessary adjustments to the angle and the bite of the blade. The grader’s long towing tongue connected to the back of the Caterpillar, on which sat a second operator, controlling speed and direction and braking.

Since the top-end speed of the Cat was 2.62 miles per hour—and likely even slower when towing the heavy grader—road maintenance in those days was likely a one-way, all-day affair, with operators starting at one end, overnighting at the other, and then returning home the following day.

Eventually, the ’28 Cat became outmoded or obsolete and was replaced with more modern equipment. The tractor was then sold to a man who used it in some of the mines around the area, such as Crown Point or Falls Creek. It was also used for dragging big logs down out of the mountains for lumber-making in local sawmills.

At some point during all this time, the entire machine was repainted with “Hi-Way Safety Yellow,” which had become the Caterpillar standard in December 1931, when the company began taking on more and more highway construction projects. Today that color is known as “Caterpillar yellow.”

Finally, the Cat wound up in the hands of two mechanics, both of whom lived in Moose Pass and dreamed of one day returning it to like-new condition.

The mechanics were Don Smith and Bob Wood. Smith worked during the week as a diesel mechanic for Bud Dye’s Kenai company, Mukluk Freight Lines, and then returned home on the weekends. Wood, the brother of Kenai’s Betty Ames, had a wrecker and owned an automotive-repair shop in Moose Pass.

David Thornton and the rusting hulk that remains of the old Cat engine.

“I had the impression that (restoring the Cat) was one of them back-burner projects that you keep pushing back to the back burner,” said Thornton, who’d met Smith because Thornton’s wife, Mary, worked as the bookkeeper for Mukluk Freight Lines.

Thornton, now 80, had been mechanically inclined as far back as he could remember, and he had a natural affinity for others who were talented with machines. He also had seen the old Cat years earlier when it had been sitting in another yard near Ptarmigan Creek by the community of Crown Point. Even then, he had wondered about buying it, had dreamed of the possibilities of renovation.

When he later connected the Cat to Smith, he enquired about purchasing it, but Smith and Wood were uninterested.

Later, the Cat was moved to Smith’s yard, where it sat, ravaged by weather and the passage of time, awaiting a reincarnation that would never arrive.

Instead, Smith suffered a heart attack and died, while Wood suffered ailments of his own. Smith’s widow, Shirley, looked out of her window into the yard and saw beyond the rusting metal. She saw a reminder that her husband was gone. “It brings anguish to my heart,” Thornton said Smith once told him.

So Shirley Smith “put the bite on Bob Wood,” Thornton said. She told Wood: “If you want that old tractor, get it out of my yard.” He told her that, since he had retired, he no longer owned a truck big enough to haul it away, and besides, he lacked the energy to do the work.

Wood talked to Thornton: It was time to let the tractor go. If Thornton still wanted the Cat, he was ready to strike a deal.

Thornton paused. He asked whether Wood was absolutely certain that he didn’t want to attempt the restoration himself. “No, David, I’m too old,” he said.

Thornton paid Wood $250 and promised to find a way to remove the Cat from Shirley Smith’s yard. A piece of Alaska history was about to get a facelift.

A New Life

When 80-year-old David Thornton climbs—with some difficulty these days—onto the seat of his restored Caterpillar tractor, he rests his backside on the seat of a machine born two years before he was. And yet this former Moose Pass rust pile owes its renewed life to the skilled hands and patience of a man who loves a challenge, knows history when he sees it, and, in this case, found a way to give this particular history a few more chapters.

Diminutive by today’s standards, the 1928 Cat was built only three years after the creation of Caterpillar Inc., now the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial turbines.

Caterpillar Inc. began as the result of a 1925 merger between the Holt Manufacturing Company, which had invented the “crawler tractor,” and the C.L. Best Tractor Company. But the origin of track vehicles dates back to the late 1890s when competitors Daniel Best and Benjamin Holt were experimenting in the orchards of central California.

The problem was traction. The steam tractors in the San Joaquin Valley tore up the ground because their great weight caused their wheels to sink deep into the soft soil. After many attempts to solve the problem—wider wheels, the laying of temporary plank roads—Holt had a breakthrough, replacing the tractor wheels in the early 1900s with a set of wooden tracks held together with chains. The crawling motion of this tractor was termed “caterpillar-like,” and its name arose from that observation.

Holt trademarked the name Caterpillar in 1910, and in the next few years hundreds of crawler tractors were sent to work in the agricultural regions of England, France and Russia. When World War I erupted, however, the tractors were sent to the front and employed in hauling artillery and supplies. Their power and usefulness was one of the direct inspirations for the development of the military tank.

During the war, Holt vastly increased his production, but the end of the war left his company in dire financial straits—with too many large machines unsuitable for the agricultural uses of peacetime. Best, however, had spent the war using government money to forge impressive inroads into the production of hiw own crawler tractors specifically for U.S. farming.

After numerous lawsuits and about $1.5 million in combined legal fees, Holt and Best ended the battle with a union of the two companies and almost immediate success.

So when the grey-and-red 1928 Caterpillar came off the assembly line and was sold and shipped to the Bureau of Public Roads in Alaska, it was the culmination of three decades of acrimonious sparring.

The tractor’s life in Seward was arduous—road grading, and then mining and logging—and eventually neglect and decay. “It was just a piece of junk,” said Thornton. Despite its sorry condition, though, Thornton—whose innate mechanical aptitude had landed him a company mechanic’s job in the Army, had helped him run cranes for Amoco for nearly 20 years, and had led him to a hobby of restoring old engines and vehicles over his lifetime—saw promise.



Thornton examines the bell housing of the old Cat.

He hired “Wild Bill” Richardson for about $400 to pluck the old machine from the Moose Pass lawn and haul it over to Kenai, where Thornton planned to work on it out behind his Brown Bear Gun Shop and Museum. Once he had the Cat in place, however, an unexpected problem emerged.

The early Caterpillar tractors were outfitted with heavy steel fenders that prevented operators from being splattered with mud and kept the churning tracks away orchard trees and other objects. But because those fenders often ran into large objects, they tended to bend into the tracks; consequently, most operators took a cutting torch to the back flap of the fenders—thereby removing the brass plate on the left fender that contained the Cat’s serial number and other manufacturer information.

Without the fender flap, Thornton could not be certain what he had. As he called around the country for replacement parts, he was continually confronted by parts dealers who were perturbed by his lack of knowledge. To combat his ignorance, he performed considerable research in books and catalogs and manuals, and he finally determined the date of origin. Still, he took some flak.

“I called up big outfits in Anchorage and California, some big ones in Oregon and Washington, to tell ‘em I needed some parts for a 30-horsepower gasoline Cat,” Thornton said. “’Well, what model is it?’ ‘Well, it was made, sir, in 1928.’ ‘Well, what’s the serial number on it?’ ‘Well, sir, I’m sorry. I don’t know the serial number.’ It seemed like you could just feel a feeling over the telephone: ‘Hey, Joe, this dumbshit wants to order some parts and he don’t even know the serial number of the tractor.’

“One guy was utterly stumped. First off, you got an 80-year-old tractor and you got a 30-year-old parts man. He has no touch of reality about what you’re really talking about—other than it’s made by Caterpillar and it’s painted yellow. A lot of that I had to learn by talking to other old men on the telephone and picking their brains a little bit. And so it was an ongoing process.”

Thornton began the restoration project by removing the engine. To lift it from the chassis, he had to bolt a large I-beam into the ceiling in the backroom of his gun shop and hoist the engine with a heavy pulley-and-chain system. He replaced the engine with a used model out of California.

“The man I ordered it from told me he used this engine years ago driving an irrigation pump, and he was five miles from the Pacific Ocean. Any tractor that’s sitting five miles from the Pacific Ocean in California has not ever been froze and busted, so I took a chance, even though it was an old engine.”

He scavenged the best parts from the two engines to construct a single unit and then reconnected it to the transmission.

Thornton required more than a year to track down information and parts, to disassemble and reassemble the engine, to grind and scrape and blast and wire-brush off old grease and paint and rust to get all the other parts of the Cat down to bare metal again.

He replaced the old gas tank—it was “probably full of rust and yucky-poo”—with one he built himself. He rebuilt the air-intake system to accommodate a modern air filter, added angle-iron supports wherever necessary for stability, strengthened and rebuilt the operator’s seat, and repainted everything by hand.

Thornton poses with the completed Cat, which he stores behind his museum.

In 2003, after returning from a trip overseas, Thornton felt lousy enough to go to his doctor, who ran him through a battery of tests and informed him that he needed a pacemaker. After the procedure to install the device, Thornton found hand-cranking the old tractor into life was simply too difficult for him. Not to be deterred, he improvised once again.

He located and measured the spline shaft in the transmission and then incorporated a spline-shaft coupling, a piece of steel shaft, a Chevrolet starter, and the flywheel from an old Chevy V-8 engine to create an electric starter that he could initiate with the push of a black button near the steering levers.

Clearly, rebuilding the Cat was a labor of love.

“My work would’ve been worth about 50 cents an hour,” Thornton said. “You don’t even begin to count the hours. You’re doing a job, and you work at it until you complete it. Time means nothing.”

Since completing the restoration, Thornton has also purchased an old tri-axle house trailer and reconfigured it with descending ramps in order to haul his tractor. Several times, he has ridden atop the tractor, fastened atop the trailer, in Kenai’s Fourth of July parade.

He also has fielded an offer or two for tractor and trailer, but he hasn’t sold yet because he’s holding fast to his asking price of $10,000 for the pair.

He’s still proud of the old machine, but these days he requires a stepstool to even climb into the seat. So he’s ready to let it go, with the knowledge that his hard work has given one old Cat another of its many lives.

 

Thornton rides atop his Cat in the Kenai Fourth of July parade.