For a couple of years in the early 1970s, I shared a small two-story house on Warner Rd., a dirt road a few miles east of Saline. At that time this was a typical rural area, with metal mailboxes providing a tempting target for neighborhood juveniles, especially around Halloween.
The property immediately to the south belonged to a middle-aged couple, Murray and Mary Ellen Sanders. Murray had a small farm there and also worked fields in the surrounding area that he rented from other landowners. Most of what he raised went to feed his pigs and cattle.
Murray operated on a shoestring-and-baling-wire budget. Some of his equipment must have been as old as he was. I got the impression that he subsidized the farm with money from his day job at the Peninsular Paper mill in Ypsilanti.
Over time I struck up a friendship with Murray and Mary Ellen and offered to help with some of the chores on the farm. What I really wanted was to learn how to run his tractor. Murray welcomed my help, though he may have had second thoughts when I got the tractor stuck in a muddy field behind the barn.
Among the crops Murray raised for his livestock were field corn and sorghum. Come fall, he would attach the appropriate piece of harvesting equipment to the power takeoff on the back of the tractor, then hitch a large wagon behind that. As he drove the tractor down the rows, the harvester would blow the crop into the trailing wagon.
One day Murray enlisted my help to run the tractor, harvesting corn in a field he was renting about a mile up the road from his house. After I had filled one wagon, we would switch it with an empty one. Then, while I was filling the second wagon, he would hitch the full one to his old flatbed truck, drive back to his farm, and empty it.
To empty the corn, Murray would drop a ramp that was attached to the right side of the wagon. When he finished, he would raise the ramp of the empty wagon and drive back up the road to meet me at the field.
For a while everything went smoothly. I was having a great time playing farmer and Murray seemed grateful to have my help.
Then something went wrong. I had filled a wagon with corn and was waiting for Murray to return with the empty one. I waited. And I waited. And I waited.
After I don’t know how long, Murray finally showed up, looking chagrined. It turned out that, during his return trip with the empty wagon, the ramp had come loose and dropped down. As Murray drove along the right side of the road, the protruding ramp had, unbeknownst to him, demolished every mailbox within reach.
I don’t remember how many mailboxes Murray decapitated that day, but it may have made him a legend among the neighborhood kids.
