Re: Half Century of Progress Show

Posted by Paul Searl on May 11, 2014 at 16:40:11 from (66.254.215.22):

In Reply to: Half Century of Progress Show posted by Mark Robke on May 10, 2014 at 18:28:09:

A different viewpoint, Dad and I went three years ago when the featured pickers and combines. We were attending an auction the same weekend nearby so decided to hit both. It was worth going once since we were already there, we probably won't be back.

The good:

If you love 60's and 70's muscle tractors this is a great show. You'll probably never see as much stuff in one place as well as the unique custom 4wd stuff that comes out.

Lots of that vintage on display and they had a lot of machines in the field and you could spend two days really going through everything.

The bad:

If you like early tractors or gas engines and don't care about the later stuff as much, this show will disappoint. I think we saw one steamer (nice case 110). Early gas was VERY limited, however they had brought down from the little log cabin show an great looking E-B Big 4 30 and matching JD gang plow and an early Fairbanks Morse. However, they hid those behind a big tent where most people missed them riding around on their atvs since they were hidden out of site of the main displays. We were told hit n miss engines were either banned or very much discouraged as the only one we saw was for an ice cream stand. When they say half century, they mean it.

The show is also dangerous to be on foot. We walked the whole show and covered some stuff twice, bum knees and out of shape and all, its very doable for 70% of the attendees especially if you use the trams. They have trams running the circuit as well. However, the golf carts and ATV's make the show almost unwalkable. Despite a constant drone from the announcer to slow down, people were still flooring it up and down the runways and larger aisles and very few were paying attention to driving. Most people never even seemed to get off to walk into the displays which became the one refuge from the near constant danger of being run down. Getting to the food stands literally meant climbing over rows of golf carts parked three deep in front of the stands in the no parking areas around noon. It actually made the Portland IN show seem like it doesn't have an atv problem.

Demonstrations were also poorly announced and scheduled. There would be nothing for one or two hours, then plowing, picking and combining would all be at the same time in three different areas of the show.

conclusion

Overall, we were pretty disappointed in it since our interest is in the older stuff and not the 60's and 70's muscle. It seemed poorly organized, rules were laxly enforced if at all as far as atv's went. We saw some interesting things, but it was most definitely aimed at a very specific vintage of equipment; we didn't see any reason at all to drive three hours to it last year. If we were going to be in the area while it was going on we might spend another day there, but of the dozen or so shows we go to it ranked near the bottom overall.

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