1-23-2012-the man in this pic is my grandpa , cecil yockey. to me , he was my mentor, a stoic individual who i can only aspire to do half the good this man did over his lifetime. but i know im partial to him. he was my dad for awhile filling in for a lack of an old man. he only swatted me once and one time when i had done bad i remember him chasing me under the porch of our house and just simply sitting down on the same porch and saying" well kevin you might as well come out. you have no where to go and neither do i but to wait on you."
     i spent time working with him at his job and he became the dad i never had before or after. he was one of a kind man. a pretty happy ma and content in his life as such. his life was taken early and i lost a friend , a father , and a grandparent. i still have a lot of his stuff. stop watches no doubt that hung on those walls in picture. they were measuring the amount of rainwater that would runoff a forest floor when artificially irrigated. he would be measuring the amount of water collected in a minute period and then over an hour. pumps would pump water through a network of hoses to the top of the hill and onto stringers running through the trees creating an unnatural shower in the sun streming through the dense foliage. dinner would be taken at the picnic table except when bad weather forced the men inside their trucks. later on a building was built to house the workers. grandpa ran the crews pumping water cutting trails , and what ever labor intensive job they might have. even back then it was necessary to reduce your footprint to achieve the scientific purpose of study.  so roads and trails were kept to  minimum.
    grandpa also worked on the farm . he had 165 acres of land above dover dam we still own today. in fact he was becoming a little bit of a land baron at the time , as he owned another 40acres he and his wife ines , my grandma , had already bought and paid for in stark county about 20 miles north of the tuscarwas farm. grandpa had just started the new job with the forestry department and was in the process of trying to make hay after working all day in the woods. i was constantly following him all over the farm and the woods at that time. i walked up the hill and watched him grease the baler and the tractor and check things out on the baler. he handed me the grease gun and sent me back to the house.
     the day was hot and humid and i remember as well as yesterday . i was playing with my sister sherry and  looked up the hill toward the barn and saw my grandpa limping down from the barn and he yelled for me to run and get mom . i did and he collapsed onto the grass of the lawn breathing heavily. mom and i returned and then i learned he had been run over by the tractor.
     after i left him on the hill field and went down to the barn and then the house, he had baled maybe 50 feet and had a problem  with the baler . stopping the tractor and setting the brakes he gets off to walk back past the end of the ac rotobaler 60, and was working on unlocking the dogs holding the bales in, when he felt the baler move as he was on a hill;.he ran around the end of the baler and headed for the old 8n ford and started to climb on tractor to apply the brakes , and slipped with his foot and it propelled him under the bottom of the tractor and still holding on , the tractor tire just misses his head and rolls across his chest cross-ways, breaking thirteen ribs in the process. the tractor and the baler roll another ten feet and rolls to a stop on its own and before the baler ran over him again. hurting real bad he manages to get to his feet and has to walk almost a half mile to get help in the way of me. if i had just stayed. and if i did it may never have happened.
   after getting double pneumonia and battling the pain he recovers and one day we were taking a shower in bottom of his house and i looked at his bare chest after he was out of the hospital , i knew this was one lucky man who had something else he had to do first . if it was me i would have been dead. the tractor tread was visible as the tire left black and blue marks diagonally from the left side of his neck to his right waist, indicating the pressure pushing on his chest as the tire just rolled by his head. just wasn't his time.

   well need something to share with you on humorous side . farming is a dangerous busieness. and its mainly because of  farmers. stuff happens . anyhow saw this little joke about manufacturing process evolves. how you enjoy. 

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