Living with an Allis-Chalmers Fanatic

My husband has a drawer full of orange short-sleeve shirts. He wears them everyday. The back of the drawer contains a white shirt with the Allis-Chalmers logo on it and something blue that I’ve never seem him wear.

He bought an Oliver, fixed it up, and is now selling it because it isn’t orange.

Had our first-born been a daughter, her name would have been Alice (I insisted on the spelling of the name). We have a handsome son, named Edward. Did you know Edward P. Allis is the founder of Allis-Chalmers? His wife’s name was Margaret. There may be a Margaret in our family someday.

Eddie, not yet five months old, owns an orange shirt. Proud Daddy nicknamed his boy Mister Allis until disgruntled Mommy complained about her boy being called a girlish name. Now he is Mister Ed, which is fine with both parents. Later in life, if Eddie asks who Mister Ed was, Mommy can tell him about the talking horse, and Daddy can transition into an animated explanation of the horsepower in the Allis he uses to plant corn.

In case you are wondering, there will never be a John in our family. Green tractors are ugly unless they are obviously broken-down, and then they are a joy to point at and comment upon. The orange Allis-Chalmers parked in front of our barn, no matter how splattered it might be with manure, will always be worthy of stopping to admire before pulling the car into the garage.

I fix orange Jell-O more frequently than any other flavor. I buy him orange Gojo soap to get the tractor grease off his hands (surprisingly, the grease itself is not orange). He carries an orange calculator in his pickup.

We plan to home school our children, and I am confident my husband will be a dedicated teacher of Allis-Chalmers 101, giving the kids lots of hands-on experience. There will be horsepower equations to figure out, story problems involving a John Deere going one direction and an Allis going the other direction, fuel economy lessons, “and, hey kids,” I can hear him saying, “make your mom happy and count the number of stones you throw into the bucket, okay? It’ll be like math class.”