THE PEOPLE'S VOICE: Mead in the Midwest

AMBOY – Tom Mead lost his dad 15 years ago. But he keeps looking for him.

More impressively, he keeps finding him.

From 1963 to 1973, Ed Mead earned a reputation as the grandfather of repowering John Deere tractors. Tom, 67, estimates his pappy doubled the horsepower of about 100 machines, now scattered all over the Midwest and farther, even into Canada.

But four of them are in Tom's workshop, two fully restored in John Deere green, looking more glorious than ever.

Tom's daughter, Jackie Thompson, and her husband, Dave, are the sixth generation of the family to run the 2,000-acre, 165-year-old farm 3 miles west of Amboy.

"The farm runs better now than ever before," said Tom, who still tries to get on a combine once a season or so, in case he's needed in a pinch.

The Thompsons' farming prowess has allowed Tom to travel, focus on family, and recover pieces of his legendary dad.

He could flip each machine for at least $30,000, but that's not what this is about. It's about preserving history, and keeping his father alive.

"That's probably all of the motivation. That's the whole thing," Tom said, a glimmer in his eyes. "I started out just wanting to save a piece of him … of history … something that was such a big part of my life growing up."

Workaholic hardly anonymous

Ed Mead rose before the sun, farmed his land and invented machinery to make his backbreaking line of work easier, then punched a clock for the second shift at Henry Pratt Co. in Dixon.

"We just simply can't raise our grain for the price we're getting and meet expenses," he said in a United Press International article on June 22, 1980. "The way farming is today, there is no slack. You've got to have a job in between."

For instance, the Thompsons own a semitrailer company, and Dave is over the road all winter and on and off throughout the year.

But for Ed Mead, being a journeyman machinist meant more than a living wage. It unlocked his potential – his genius, really. He invented crop sprayers, fertilizer spreaders, irrigation systems and more.

Tom remembers being 17 and working alongside his dad on a particular sprayer designed to blend what Ed considered the best parts of five different sprayers.

"You worked hard around him, because he was so very hard-working," Tom said. "The only thing I'd never seen him do was sleep. He'd go on 5 hours of sleep a night. He loved what he did. And his mind never quit running."

When Ed began the apprentice program at Pratt in 1955, it gave him a resource when he had questions – for instance, how to repower the engine blocks in Deere tractors, with those unique, noncircular adapter plates.

"He was not afraid to ask for help," Tom said. "But it's being able to absorb it, retain it and then use it – turn it around and put it to practical use."

In turn, Ed was eager to help others. And he never forgot a name.

"I do not believe he ever met anyone who didn't become a friend. He just had that dynamic," Tom said. "Anyone would bring him anything, any broken part, and he'd help – as if he didn't have enough on his own plate. But he met a lot of friends who would help him back in time."

And they all remember his name.

'How's your dad?'

That's how most conversations begin when Tom investigates leads during his sleuth-like adventures.

That's how Gary Wright of Princeton greeted Tom when he reached out almost 10 years ago.

Tom explained that his dad died at 75 in 2000 – "he probably worked himself to death," he said – then got down to negotiating. Wright would sell him the John Deere 7520 with the understanding Tom would set him up with another as soon as he came across one.

"It wasn't 2 weeks, and I found one – and it was rough," Tom said of the machine that had spent 15 years in a grove of trees near a farmstead.

Wright is nearly done restoring it.

"It is beautiful," Tom said. "You're just afraid to touch it, it's so beautiful."

It took Tom about 2 years to finish restoring his dad's 7520. He tries to describe the satisfaction he felt when he finished the project about 5 years ago. His failure to find words came across the same way as when he tried to describe what his dad was like after, say, fitting the 320-horsepower engine under the hood of the 7520.

The beauty in John Deeres, Ed would say, is they were built for more power than the 160 HP that the 7520 originally boasted. Ed would alter and substitute clutches, transmissions, shafts, you name it, to increase performance, all without altering the machine's frame.

And when that front pan fit over the engine?

"It was snug, but he got it in there," Tom said, raising his arms toward the rafters of the workshop. "Dad's work never looked crude. It always looked nice."

Tom found Ed's 5020 – now fully restored along the far-east wall of the shop – through a machinery jockey who didn't realize the 903 Cummins engine was from Ed's repower kit.

"I knew that tractor, I knew what it was, but I didn't tell him, knowing the price would've gone up," Tom said, grinning like the cat who ate the canary.

He drove up to Cherry Valley and bought it from a guy who wanted a Bobcat for clearing snow in the yard, but whose wife wouldn't let him get one until he got rid of one of his tractors. Similarly, another repowered 5020 fanatic south of Champaign had too many such machines, in his wife's estimation.

Tom plans to have that one repowered in the next 2 years. It's on the back burner because of the 7520 he found near Decatur a few years back – in parts. It took him four trips to haul it back.

Quite the Mexican standoff ensued.

"It sat around here, and we stared each other down," Tom said.

The engine is in. It runs. All that's left is aesthetics, which you can assume will end up pristine. After all, Tom inherited a bit of his father's perfectionism. That's the only reason he would do what he did under the hood.

"Some of Dad's kit work on the inside, the inner parts, the flywheel and such, I got to make the internal a copy of the adapter plate stuff," Tom said. "I copied everything. I machined everything."

No one would know but him.

Have you seen this tractor?

Tom figures that once those last two tractors, and the little truck he and his dad bought at the Dixon One Stop, are finished, his dad will manifest himself again, in the form of another John Deere aching to be brought back to life.

There's another 7520 out there he's tracking. It was feeling like a cold case until Tom recently learned that that Jay King, another renowned farmer with Sauk Valley Angus and, by association, Sandrock Farms Sauk Valley, was a part owner of the Elizabeth store that once owned that tractor.

Now that harvest season is all but over, Tom says he'll reach out. Or, he said, maybe he'll just drive to Elizabeth, sit down in a coffee shop or greasy spoon and chat up farmers until someone cracks.

Something tells me the sleuth will find his man.