CSNbbs

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

looooooong read but i found it enthralling. just a preteen at the time and had little awareness/concern but grew up with farm aid and rain on the scarecrow stuff.

Quote:Eating wind and snow in dead winter for 1,800 miles, Don Kimbrell barehanded the wheel of an open-cab tractor and crossed a continent in 21 days, driving a John Deere G into history. Launching from the hard-scratch plains of the Texas Panhandle, Kimbrell rode in Tractorcade—an epic 5,000-tractor farmer army that rumbled into Washington, D.C. in 1979, and occupied the National Mall, demanding political attention to address the realities of an agriculture industry in collapse.

“I’d drive it all again right now, but my body wouldn’t stand the wear,” says Kimbrell, 78, speaking through the molasses of a sweet Texas drawl. “It ground me down every day to a kind of tired that is hard to describe. I was only 36 when I started that cross-country trip, but when I finished, I was an older man than I am right now.”

Teargassed on the Mexican border, imprisoned in Texas, hammered by biblical hailstorms and crop failures, worn to the bone by a buck-wild tractor trip, devastated by the heartrending death of his teenaged firstborn, and yet grateful from his core for the opportunities afforded by American agriculture, Kimbrell is a character seemingly pulled from the muscled lines of a Hemingway novel or the colorful script of a McMurtry saga.

Quote:What compelled a farmer to step beyond the accepted bounds of convention and rage against the political machine? “I was only one man of many who spoke up and acted,” Kimbrell emphasizes. “The real story is not about me, money, or my farm—it’s about doing something when you’re a nobody. Farming was dying all around us in America while the government denied us a level playing field, but like so many other farmers at the time, for the sake of our country I couldn’t sit back and let it happen. At some point in life, everyone answers a question, ‘What are you willing to say or do?’”

much much more but provides some relevancy to today truckers.