Roy Hassel was turning into a local outcast in the American grain belt, where a man’s value is frequently determined by the shine of his newest tractor. His property appeared to the passing traveler to be a catastrophe area, a jagged landscape of rusted iron and skeletal machines. It was an eyesore that the nearby farmers in the township mockingly called “The Junkyard.” But one bolt and one gear at a time, a silent revolution was happening inside Roy’s ancient barn.
It started with a straightforward “yes.” In just two years, the county’s outdated and damaged machinery was sent to Roy’s property. Farmers who were unable to pay the exorbitant costs of new equipment started discarding their “junk,” which included manure spreaders with rotten floors, grain drills with seized gearboxes, and combine heads with broken teeth. Roy embraced everything. Roy was in his barn, grease-stained and intent, while other guys watched TV or lounged on the porch on Saturday nights. Parts that everyone else had forgotten were being disassembled, cleaned, and labeled by him.
Roy’s barn was a painstakingly arranged temple of scrap steel by 1970. From Oliver manifolds to Farmall head gaskets, he had cataloged 412 different parts. A spiral-bound ledger, a precious document that cross-referenced each purchase by date, machine, and condition, was used to record each item. Dela, his wife, observed with a mix of worry and weariness. One evening, she cautioned Roy, “The neighbors are calling this place a dump.” “When does it end?”
Roy said, “When I run out of room,” without taking his eyes off a pair of brake shoes he was marking with masking tape.
But Roy wasn’t merely accumulating iron; he was unintentionally upending the local economy as a whole. The local John Deere dealer, Merl Gustiffson, saw Roy’s “junkyard” as a direct danger to his business. In Merl’s universe, a dealer’s job was to sell, while a farmer’s role was to purchase new. For the showroom, each used hydraulic pump Roy removed from a dead tractor signified a missed sale.
At the neighborhood cooperative, Merl started a deliberate campaign of rumors, calling Roy’s business a “cheat on the system” and a safety risk. Using the farm’s visual congestion as a weapon against Roy’s reputation, he counted six combines and fourteen dead tractors from the road. Merl contended that Roy was avoiding the “progress” that came with costly, flashy new debt by keeping the county’s agriculture mired in the past.
Merl was unaware that Roy Hassel was a preservationist rather than a rubbish guy. Roy was giving small-scale farmers who were one broken, discontinued part away from bankruptcy a lifeline during a time when “planned obsolescence” was starting to take hold. In order to prevent a forty-year-old machine’s shattered manifold from ending a family’s means of subsistence, he was creating a library of mechanical history.
As the “junkyard” grew, tensions in the community approached a breaking point. The rumors at the co-op and the opinions of the local elite, however, did not affect Roy. He was aware that the core of the American farm was hidden beneath the rust and worn paint. To the outside world, he was gathering rubbish, but to the county’s suffering farmers, he was the only one using a spiral notebook and salvaged steel to keep the future together. Roy Hassel was demonstrating that the term “obsolete” was only used by those who were unable to solve the problem.