From what I remember of the antique tractor shows in Fredericksburg, I’d say that the most popular tractors here in the Texas Hill country during the mid-twentieth century were John Deere and International’s Farmall. In Antioch, Illinois, where Bill Wurster grew up on a dairy farm near the Wisconsin border, Massey-Harris reigned supreme.

Massey Harris had its beginnings in the Newcastle Foundry and Machine Manufactory, founded by Daniel Massey in 1847 at Newcastle, Ontario, in Canada. Daniel’s son, Hart Massey renamed the company Massey Manufacturing Co. and moved it to Toronto, where it grew into one of Canada’s largest employers. When Massey merged with the A. Harris Co. in 1891, it became the leading manufacturer of farm implements in the British Empire. In 1928, Massey-Harris purchased the J.I. Case Plow Works in Racine, Wisconsin, and soon began building its excellent tractors there, just a few miles north of the Wursters’ dairy farm. When young Bill dropped out of high school in the late 1940s, he went to work at the Massey-Harris dealership in Antioch, as an equipment assembler, mechanic and parts manager. He eventually did get his GED, and has taken many college courses in the years since. (In 1953, Massey-Harris merged with the Ferguson Company, an Irish firm which had formerly partnered with Ford, to eventually form the famous Massey-Ferguson company.)

In 1952, Wurster took a job sweeping floors at the Starks Foundry, just west of Chicago in the small town of Lyons. He rose rapidly through the ranks (doing “every job imaginable” at one time or another), and became an industry leader, eventually serving as president of the Investment Castings Institute, described on its website as “a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to promote quality standards, collect and disseminate information about the industry, and provide industry education opportunities to members.” Eventually, his career took him to Chicago and then Da ...

Read the entirety of this article in the print edition.

Subscribe online — it's quick and easy