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CAPON BRIDGE, W.Va. — For two years, Steve Slonaker didn’t move his father Bill’s favorite tractor, a 1950s Oliver Super 77, from the spot where Bill parked it shortly before he died.
“He drove it in there and parked it and I’ve never touched it,” Slonaker said, standing next to a machine shed on the Hampshire County farm that’s been in his family since at least the Civil War. “That’s where he left it the last day he used it.”
Slonaker said he didn’t have the heart to move the Oliver. Eventually it became unmovable, as neglect left the antique machine unable to start.
All that changed last week, when Slonaker called on the expertise of traveling mechanic Ted Kalvitis.
Kalvitis, of Augusta, W.Va., drives from farm to farm in an old black pickup, repairing broken-down tractors like a doctor making house calls. He began working as a tractor mechanic full time in the 1980s.
“At that time if you were working on tractors, you were working on antiques,” Kalvitis said. And he continues to spend much of his time repairing antique equipment, specializing, as he explained in one article, in machines that “can’t be moved.”
Machines like the Oliver, which Kalvitis was eventually able to fire up and back out of the shed, for the first time in years.
The Slonakers’ Oliver and Kalvitis’ work to resurrect it will be featured in a West Virginia public broadcasting production scheduled to be released in mid-2011. A crew filmed Kalvitis’ visit to the Slonaker farm and the story behind the Oliver as one segment of a documentary about farm tractors and why people treasure them.
Producer Chuck Klein found the perfect guide for the documentary in Kalvitis, who years ago began writing about his visits to clients and his observations about life as a traveling mechanic.
“I started keeping a journal,” Kalvitis said. “More for the sake of remembering what I did to the individual machines than anything.”
But the writing developed into articles and regular columns published in places like Antique Power magazine, Farm & Ranch Living magazine, the Winchester Star, and the now-defunct Capon Valley Chronicle. He’s also written a book soon to be published, titled “Of Grease and Chaff: The Three Seasons of a Country Mechanic.”
Klein said the concept for the documentary came to him when a friend mentioned one day that he was “looking for an excuse” just to get out on his tractor.
“It’s the idea of getting on a tractor and taking yourself to a little bit of peacefulness and away time,” Klein said. The film will tell the stories of several farmers from very different walks of life who value their time spent on the farm, and their tractors, for their own particular reasons.
In Slonaker’s case, it’s due largely to the memory of his father’s fondness for the Oliver. It was the second tractor Bill Slonaker ever purchased new when he brought it home in 1955.
“When he grew up as a young man on the farm they worked using horses,” Slonaker said. “The first tractor my granddad bought was an Oliver. I guess that’s why it was special to him, something about that transition from farming with horses to tractors.”
Contact Megan Miller at mmiller@times-news.com.
Local News
Related Photos
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Hampshire County, W.Va., farmer Steve Slonaker talks about his late father’s tractor, a 1950s Oliver Super 77, a segment about which will be part of a West Virginia public broadcasting documentary scheduled to be released in mid-2011. Megan Miller/Times-News
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Traveling mechanic Ted Kalvitis of Augusta, W.Va., gets a good look at the vintage machinery. Megan Miller/Times-News
Tractor mechanic makes house calls
Parked for years, late farmer’s favorite rig runs once again
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