HUNTSVILLE — The popular antique tractor and machinery show in scenic Huntsville is in its final year. Again.
Or maybe it isn't.
"Every year, Dad says, 'That's the last time I do that,' " Dennis Probasco said. "So it's the 15th annual last show."
Harold Probasco, 84, and his sons Dennis, 61, and Gary Probasco, 60, will be displaying their restored tractors Friday and Saturday during the Probasco Engine and Tractor Show and Swap Meet.
Though it attracts engine enthusiasts throughout the region, the show is as relaxed and friendly as the Probascos themselves. The show will take place on the family's property at First Street and 6800 East, beginning at 7 a.m. Friday and ending "Sunday afternoon sometime," Dennis Probasco said.
Restoring old tractors has become a consuming hobby for the Probasco family.
"The biggest thing of it is the challenge, making a part or finding a part to get it to work," he said.
One of the more unusual machines being displayed at the show is a small, blue, rear-engine Page garden tractor.
"We're starting to figure out why that one was sitting in the fence corner for all those years," he said. "Every time we get it going, something else breaks on it."
All of the machines should be running for the show, he said.
Also on site are an old, one-room school house, a blacksmith shop and a guest house — a log cabin that sports a wood stove and a feather-tick bed.
"We have the first-grade desk that my dad sat in and that I sat in," Probasco said.
Some of the other machines include a gasoline-powered generator, an oil-well pump and a stationary gasoline engine — a sort of portable power supply that was pulled by a team of horses and used to power a threshing machine or other farm machinery.
Much of the Probascos' stuff was rescued from scrap yards. There are also magazines and Web sites where parts, decals and both junk and restored machines are listed for sale.
The Probascos have two Power Horse tractors, first made in Clinton by Albert and Bond Bonham around 1937. One tractor is the prototype, identified as such by one of the Bonhams. The odd little tractor "steers with reins like a horse," Dennis Probasco said.
"You don't have a seat on it or anything," he said. "It was made to replace the horse. You could sit back on your equipment and drive it with the reins. You could still use your horse-drawn machines."
But Power Horse tractors aren't easy to operate, he said.
"They're mean," he said. "They're tough to drive. They jump around."
A Power Horse being driven by a young relative ran over Harold Probasco when he was 78.
"It broke four ribs and collapsed a lung," Dennis Probasco said. "Two days later, he was out mowing the lawn."
The Power Horse was found to be rather dangerous because the farmer, used to pulling back on the reins to stop a horse, would cause the tractor to go into reverse instead.
Dennis Probasco said it is now verboten to get between the tractor and the trailer. The Probascos use Power Horse tractors to pull wagons loaded with visitors during the show.
e-mail: jon-webb@hotmail.com