April/May 2009 Spring flower photo by Becky Hart
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Vol 25 No 4
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Donald Green’s antique tools catch the eye and baffle the mind
Gather the Hidden Eggs Just for fun, we have hidden 12 Easter eggs throughout this issue of the Montana Senior News. Can you find them and mail us a list of the page numbers where you found them? We will award a $20 prize to the person who finds all of the eggs. If there are multiple correct entries, the winner will be determined by a drawing. None of the hidden eggs is located within an advertisement. Have fun!
Article & Photo By Craig & Liz Larcom You might not have thought of wrenches as art, but that is only because you have not seen the antique tools collected by Donald Green, Sr., a retired Malta farmer. Sure, many of the wrenches have a familiar look, if heftier, more crudely fashioned, and not as smoothly finished as the ones sitting in your toolbox. And the tools, which mostly hail from the late 1800s to the 1920s, tend to wear a gracefully corroded patina of age. But your eye will surely go to the novel wrenches instead of the familiar ones. Consider the alligator wrenches, which have swooping lines and a big open mouth lined with teeth, for grasping fasteners and pipes. The interesting lines were quite functional. This unsophisticated tool made a handy wrench for fasteners of many sizes, even if you could not get much torque and you could all too easily round off the edges of the nuts you were tightening. More handsome yet are the multitasking wrenches from the early 1900s, with elaborate ends that each adapt to several different sizes of fastener. These wrenches have a broad symmetry, and often feature a curving stem that only adds to the artsy look. Functioning like a Swiss army knife, they were a convenient and economical way to work with different nuts. Even the handle might add a couple more functions. Manufacturers provided these wrenches when a farmer purchased a tractor, a mower, a cultivator, or some other farm implement. Providing the exact tools to handle the maintenance was just part of the deal, and might include a set of four for a single implement. “I suppose back in those days a lot of people didn’t already have wrenches,” says Green, who lends the best 151 tools in his collection to the Phillips County Museum for display. He has given away many on display boards over the years, and has another couple hundred tools at home. Green discovered what a conversation piece an assortment of tools could be when his late wife took (Continued on page 61)