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It's a good question to raise. I wish folks were finding and talking to older and retired employees. But you ave to be careful in what you believe. Here's with the white Farmalls from 1950. One, these tractors were built 55 years ago. If you had a guy that was fairly young (25) that worked at Louisville, he'd now be 80. That being said, a lot of the guys at Louisville who worked on the line did just that. They worked there, stuck parts on, didn't really care about that many years down the road, there'd be collectors that cared. One problem that I've especially hit is that even in the engineering ranks, folks worked on their projects, didn't really know that much about what else went on. There's actually retirees who do talk about stuff that happened from the early 1960s on- Bill BOrghoff wrote a good article in Red Power a couple years ago, the guy that did Cub Cadet development and some of the transmission on the 706/806 talked to me some, and others (Hank WIll did some articles based on his knowledge. Pre-1963, there are a few IH guys still left from engineering, not many. And memory is a frail thing. That being said, there's some awfully good records of the thngs that IH did in the Wisconsin Historical Society that date back to the McCormick Family in the 1700s on up. They're not perfect, some stuff from IH is still retained by the various companies, some stuff got lost over the years, but you don't have to rely on human memory. No human is going ot remember the first tractor off the assembly line in a particular month in 1950- the records are just fine. There's great stuff about tractor development from 1906 through 1940. There's something like 70 different IH publications and records that IH produced for the 1950 demonstrator program. There's 5000 cubic feet of material- no build cards or shipping records yet, but how about Mogul and Titan blueprints?
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