WASHTA, Iowa | Eugene Ferris tips his hat and tells a visitor his named is spelled just like the big wheel you'd ride in a carnival.
One finds he's nearly as big a "wheel" at the Grand Meadow Heritage Festival each September. The two-day gala is a tip of the hat to agriculture and the way of life decades ago when Grand Meadow High School was a bustling center of education. In a way, that's what this festival remains: A center of education.
"Grab that grease gun," Ferris says to three young men attempting to get a threshing machine in working order. "That came from Bomgaars. It should work."
Autumn is a special time of year for Ferris, a farmer whose energy belies his age, 85. "He's been 85 for the past three years," one of the young men quips.
Ferris walks among the four antique tractors he has on display and talks about the condition of the 2016 soybean crop.
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"You look around this year and everything is green," Ferris says. "The river bottom (around the Little Sioux River that cuts and just through Cherokee County), it's all green. You look to the horizon and it'll be green until the trees yellow and the shumach turns red."
And then you know it's about time to dig into the fields, both corn and beans, for another harvest.
"The government has this year's corn crop pegged at 185 bushels," he says. "I farm on what's a reclaimed sandpit and we only have beans. We got 1-inch rains about every week this year. The beans look wonderful. It might set up to be our best bean crop ever."
Ferris ran across a patch of oats not too long ago and, with the Grand Meadow Heritage Festival in mind, he stopped to negotiate with the landowner. He found a willing participant and soon returned to shock the oat crop. After a short period, he returned to pick up the shocks and stored them on the festival grounds that surround the 1922 Grand Meadow School.
"I'll help set up the threshing machine and we'll show folks here how it works," he says.
Ferris has worked around these parts for much of his life, save for a one-year tour of duty with the military in Korea and a three-year stint on a farm south of Lawton, Iowa.
"Otherwise, I've been in Cherokee County my entire life," he says.
Ferris, who raised cattle and hogs for years, is known by most as "Pee Wee," a nickname given to him by a cousin who visited and spent time with his family eight decades ago. He couldn't remember Ferris' given name, Eugene, and kept mixing him up among his six siblings. So, the boy settled on "Pee Wee" and it stuck, as did this Washta resident's love for the farm.
"I remember one year picking corn by hand and my dad ran me up and down the rows for a time to warm me up," says Ferris, a proud resident of the community whose claim to fame is for being "The Coldest Spot in Iowa" thanks to its recording of 47 degrees below zero on Jan. 12, 1912.
There were other bad weather years.
"We picked corn until Christmas in 1941, I think, because of the Armistice Day blizzard that year," he says. "The land I farmed was dried out by drought in 1955, so we changed farms. Turns out 1956 was even drier!"
Through the years, Ferris has filled the end of each growing season with a harvest of oats, corn and soybeans. He also spent three summers on various wheat farms that stretched from Canada to Oklahoma working the wheat harvest.Â
"I remember running a John Deere 7720 on the wheat harvest," Ferris says, indicating that might have been the biggest combine he ever piloted.
"I've still got a 1969 John Deere combine that we still ran two years ago," he notes.
He also has a number of other Allis-Chalmers and John Deere classics, including a 1928 Deere whose history contradicts a serial number. Farris has the year 1928 painted on the front of the unit. The serial number, however, suggests it is a 1930 vintage.
Whatever the case, the oddity presents a talking point, a detail this lifelong farmer and farm lover is happy to share, standing in the shadow of an old school where he studied in the late 1940s.
"There were 11 of us in our class of 1948 at Grand Meadow," Ferris says. "Seven of us are left."
The one they call "Pee Wee," in his bib overalls and matching cap, like the antique John Deere, is still running strong.
