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Show ADVENTURERS' CLUB j HEADLINES FROM THE LIVES JV OF PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELFI ZJ "Into the Whirling Knives" HELLO, EVERYBODY: Here's a tale of the wheat fields of Canada, an exciting excit-ing account of how a man, trying to yank loose a sheaf of wheat that was plugging the blades of a threshing rig, suddenly sud-denly found himself being carried along toward them by the machinery he had succeeded in freeing. It was a frightful experience, and Howard C. Flanders of Rutland, Vermont, won't forget it till the day he dies. Incidentally, Inci-dentally, I'm flattered and a bit curious to learn that my column in the New York Journal is read way up in Rutland, Vermont. Howard's story begins back in 1924, when he was a youth of 16 living in the town of Sherbrooke, Quebec. In those days, during the fall of the year they would import men from the East and even from Great Britain to work in the harvest fields of western Canada. As Howard puts it succinctly: "The dough was good, the hours long, etc., so I decided I would try it." A week later Howard left Sherbrooke on the Harvesters' Special. A week later he arrived in Calgary, Alberta. A train that ran only three times a week took him on to Granger, Alberta, and thence he went by bus to Carbon. Here he got a job in the wheat fields and worked three weeks. "So far, so good," Howard says. "I then went to work for a threshing thresh-ing outfit where I came near losing my neck or feet would be mora like it." Howard Jumped on the Carrier to Free the Knives. Then he says: "I don't know if you understand a threshing rig, but I'll explain as best I can. The only part that concerns me is the . The carrier moved slowly but inevitably toward the floating knives rear of the outfit There is a carrier something of the endless belt variety. You pull up alongside this carrier with your team and rack, grab your pitchfork and get going." As you threw your wheat sheaves en the carrier, Howard explains, it took them to the mouth of the machine where a series of knives work up and down so fast the eye could not follow them. These knives, as Howard puts it, "do a job on the wheat," and also cuts the cord that holds the bundle together. "We would work like mules," Howard goes on, "unloading so as to get through and catch up a few minutes on the other fellow and take it easy. Sometimes we would plug the rig and the carrier would stop, and that's all." This certain day September 29, 1924, to be exact the rig plugged on them, and not thinking, Howard jumped on the carrier and grabbed a sheaf that was plugging the knives and started to pull and yank. "All of a sudden," Howard says, "it let go and there I was riding along to those knives and destruction." Picture the scene for yourself the carrier, with Howard on board, moving slowly but inevitably toward the flashing knives that, freed now of their obstruction, were slashing at a speed that made them invisible to the eye. To make matters worse, Howard, because he had been obliged to go close to the knives in order to free them, was new practically prac-tically on top of them, being carried closer every second by the speeding carrier, as it picked up momentum it had lost when the sheaf had blocked it. Howard heard a yell. It may have been that yell that broke the spell that his startled senses were under. At any rate, he was galvanized gal-vanized into action. Just as the greedy knives were reaching for his clothes to drag him in and shred him to death, he swung, jumped on to the bundle rack of his wagon! Breathless, his heart pounding, his limbs so weak he could hardly hold himself together, Howard climbed down to the ground. And then, suddenly, he remembered the yell, and the strange quality that made it somehow more than just a cry of warning. He looked about. The Mystery of the Machine Owner. On the opposite side of the machine he found one of the owners of the outfit with his right hand all mangled and bleeding at his side! "In his hurry," Howard explains, "he said he had been pulling pull-ing a chain on the outside of the carrier, trying to help the bundles through, and when she started he looked up, and there I was riding merrily along. His story was that the only thing to do was to plug those gears some way and slow up that carrier r stop it and give me a chance to get oft, and not having anything any-thing to use he slaps his hand between the gears and it slowed it up and gave me the chance to save myself." To this day, Howard says, he can't remember whether that platform slacked up in its speed or not. He does know he got himself clear. "I have often wondered," Howard goes on to say, "if the man in his hurry to get the thing going, had taken hold of one of the cross-pieces cross-pieces of the gear and yanked on it, and when she .started, slipped and went into the gear himself or whether he was the means of saving my life or limbs. I don't know. The least I could do was thank him, which I did. "A week later he gave me the gate and I have been wondering ever since just what did happen." Howard finally got home broke but happy. I hope he stays happy, but just in case he ever goes broke again, here's ten bucks he can put aside for an ace-in-the-holel Copyright. WNU Service. |
