The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

I come from a farming background, having grown up in NE Iowa in the Fifties. One of the things I have more than a passing familiarity with is baling wire.

You don’t hear or see that term much anymore, much less find many people with a working knowledge of it, or from where it came. Yet, for me, a lot of my growing up–and even my current use of the term–came from back there.

Dad, along with a neighbor Gene, purchased a Case wire-tie baler in about 1955, at a time when putting up loose hay had become old fashioned. Balers were everywhere. All major manufacturers were producing them. But unlike the Case mentioned above, they all used twine string.

One downside to twine? That would be the knotters on these balers, which were famous for “not knotting.” Clever? You bet. Watching that mechanical knotter was like watching magic. Farmers everywhere adjusted bale tension. (Which was how much hay you squeezed into one bale.) They adjusted knotters. They tried different string. Knotters were, when they missed a bale and you had to dump it off to the side in the field, like demons possessed when they refused to tie.

Along comes Case with a wire-tie baler, which involved long, straight hunks of wire with a loop in one end. Two people rode the baler, just back of the pickup, on both sides of the bale chute. One person “stuck,” which meant poking a guide through the hay just coming through, through which the ends of the wire was fed through, and one person “tied,” which meant pulled the ends of the wire together and twisted them.

The person sticking sat right where the plunger, a large square piston, puffed a blast of dust right in their place. It was hellish, to say the least.

The trick was that the person tying had to leave the correct amount of wire slack, other wise the wire might break. The “poker,’ or “sticker,” had control of how big the bale was. (Within a couple of inches, so if one of Gene’s kids–who did a lot of the “sticking,”–wanted to get even with one of Dad’s kids–my brother and me–, he’d make a bigger bale.

And these bales were huge to begin with.

Even worse, the person “tying could under-hook two bale wires. The result of that was two bales wired together. Remember: These were 80-to-a-hundred-pound bales. Two together? That produced a lot of hollering and cussing by whoever was loading the bales as they came back onto the rack.

Even at best, with dry hay, these bales were heavy! That Case wire-tie baler became generally known about the neighborhood–as dad and Gene did some custom work for them–as that “God-D@#@*-ed baler!” As did we kids of dad and Gene.

Wire was expensive. But dad figured out how to re-use that wire by constructing a kind of over-center lever device which pulled the wire straight. This heinous little device was mounted to a solid partition in front of the milking cows, and any kids not busy or up to any mischief was put to straightening wire.

Baling wire for the first time was everywhere on those farms that had one of those Case wire-tie balers. I grew up thinking that all wire was called baling wire. It’s still baling wire to me.

All our tractors had hunks of wire hanging off it, handy for those times when something fell apart and a little wire saved the day.

Dad was plowing one fall day, and for some reason I was riding along. I suppose I was about nine or ten, when, after plowing one land complete, dad stopped, got a pair of pliers, held a long piece of baling wire with the pliers and rapidly bent it back and forth at one spot.

After about a dozen quick flexes, the wire broke at that flex.

You can tell a farm kid even today, because that’s how he breaks off a piece of any wire, by bending it back and forth.

Anyway, dad took that piece of wire, held it in his pliers, and shorted across the tractor battery. There were sparks of course, which got my attention. Then, when the wire was red hot, dad lit his cigarette with it.

I’m retired now, but a great dial of my education and career involved electricity, thanks to dad lighting that cigarette. To him, at that time, when there was still a couple of work horses around the farm, that battery was pure magic, you know?

I still think electricity and everything that runs on it is pretty magic.

And so is baling wire.