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WEAVER — He looks a lot like Santa Claus and his favorite "toy" turned 73 this year.

Huh?

OK, try this ...

His name is Elmer Bailey and if he doesn't look like Santa Claus, well, Santa Claus sure looks like Elmer Bailey.

The toy?

It's a 1935 Allis-Chalmers, hand-cranker, and looks as if it has just rolled off the assembly line ... thanks to the hands of Mr. Elmer Bailey who, a few years back, found it rusting away in a Missouri junkyard.

"I was up there visiting friends," says Bailey. "It was a pile of junk, but I gave $500 for it. I thought that was too much ... I still bought it."

But when Bailey flips the hand crank three times before the motor catches in a low mumble and then carefully backs out of the shed, you see pride in his eyes and a noticeable puff-up of the chest. It is obvious that Bailey got himself a bargain.

He also got a lot of work, grease to the elbows, and more than a few doses of frustration before the restoration was complete.

Two other "toys" are parked in the shed, too. One is a gleaming green John Deere H and a fire-truck red 1950 Farmall A.

Those, like the 73-year-old Allis- Chalmers, are bona-fide, blue-ribbon, seat of the pants farm tractors, kings of row-cropping in the years men and their boys were making the transition from mule-cussing to sitting up in the air like, well, like ... a mere step or two below heaven's back forty.

Thing is, I was there and did that, and the joy of having all that power in your hands instead of stumbling around a rocky hillside behind a deaf and dumb animal is something you can't put in words.

That it's wonderful is an understatement and to anyone who has been there and done that, guys such as Elmer Bailey are to be regarded with great respect and awe. What they do is keep us in touch with what we remember as a better time and place ... even if it were not a better time nor place.

Bailey's partner in this form of decidedly missionary work is — or was — a good friend by the name of Travis Crow who "lives up in Oak Grove."

Fact is, says Bailey, it was Crow who got him into the tractor restoration gig.

"He mentioned he'd like to have a Cockshutt tractor," says Elmer.

This is where it gets a bit embarrassing in that as a graduate of John Deere U, I thought I knew everything there was to know about tractors, including the fact a 1950 John Deere M could plow circles around a Farmall A.

Turns out that Mr. Elmer Bailey's degree in all things tractors is an MBA, I'm still in the first grade.

So, for the record, a Cockshutt tractor was really an Oliver (I think), was manufactured in Canada (I think), and was put to rest (the Cockshutt name) in 1977 (I'm sure of that).

Now in his 71st year, Bailey first crawled atop a tractor on his dad's Missouri farm.

"I had a childhood attraction to tractors," he says. "The first one I plowed — I was 10 or 11 — was a regular Farmall (made by International Harvester), one of the first row crop tractors to ever come out. I loved driving that tractor.

"I just like old tractors, but I don't have a favorite."

Crow also had more than a passing interest in "hit-and-miss" engines and, of past vintage, such actually existed. And I know that's a fact because I looked it up ... and have no inclination to get into details there.

"He (Crow) had some hit-and-miss engines and I had one that was run able," says Bailey. "They were used for pulling grist mills and sawmills. Fairbanks and Morris made 'em, so did International Harvester and John Deere."

But the love is for the old tractors.

"First one I ever did was a little yellow Farmall Industrial Cub," says Bailey. "Best I can remember, I've restored six so far, me and Travis. I did a '47 8N Ford, took me about six months. That was the first big one I did."

He came to the "hobby" with some background.

In 41 years of government work (Army and Anniston Army Depot), he was in maintenance, building tanks, transmissions, engines, whatever.

"I did have a working knowledge," says Bailey, "and it's just something I like to do.

"You see an end product, you can see what you've accomplished, but the reason I like the old farm equipment, it's something we had before that people don't know about."

Elmer Bailey can show 'em.