Starts Like A Duetz

I mowed my lawn tonight, well at least most of it and if it hadn’t gotten dark I think I would have finished it all. Mowing lawn doesn’t take a lot of brain cells and my mind tends to drift into many directions sometimes the same direction over and over. I know last year I thought of the same thing over and over (I can’t remember what it was but I am guessing sometime this summer while mowing it will come to me). Anyway tonight I got to thinking how nice my mower starts. It started on the first pull and last time I mowed it started on the first pull and in fact after sitting all winter it almost started on the first pull and if I would have put the one switch in the “start” position I think it would have. It even says “starts easy” on the top of the engine. As far as a mower goes it is about the same as any mower I have owned but it definitely starts the best. As I was mowing and thinking over and over about how great the mowers started I suddenly said or at least thought, “it starts like a Duetz.” Now only two people in the world fully understand that expression and one of them is me and the other is my friend Merrill. It was January 1978 and I had just finished a year and a half as a volunteer with Mennonite Voluntary Service. MVS was a program of mostly young people who worked in community programs. I had worked as a volunteer at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center in Indianapolis. We lived in a communal house and we volunteers came and went usually stay one but sometimes two years. My term was up and Merrill had volunteered to drive out from Montana and pick me up. My mom had lent us her car. We did make a slight detour to Harrisonburg Virginia to visit some of his family attending Eastern Mennonite College. After our little trip to VA, It was then back to Indiana to pick up my stuff and go home. On the way back from Indy we took the more scenic route with stops in Iowa and Nebraska. We were headed for Nebraska to visit one of the girls (Judy Swartzendruber) who had been at Indianapolis while I was there and Iowa because it was on the way to Nebraska. In Iowa we stayed at the home of a girl who was still in our “unit” in Indianapolis (Jolene Roth). It had snowed much of the previous few days and we barely made it out of Indianapolis. I remember literally plowing our way through the snow on to the on ramp of the interstate. The snow stopped somewhere in Illinois and had been pushed eastward by a cold front. Jolene’s parents had a farm near Washington Iowa. Her dad also had a Duetz tractor and during breakfast he had been telling us about his tractor. I had never heard of a Duetz but they are made in Germany and they may be more common on American farms these days but in 1978 I am pretty sure they were rare. It was minus 30 that morning and I am guessing we had plugged in the head bolt heater on the 1969 Plymouth we were driving or maybe we had parked it in the shop. But Jo’s dad was telling us about this wonderful tractor and how it would start in the coldest of weather. SO before we left that morning we wanted to see this marvelous machine. The tractor had been sitting out all night and Merrill asked him if he was sure it was going to start. He assured us it would set about to show us. It didn’t. Try as he might it wouldn’t start. I am guessing he eventually got it started, maybe when it warmed up to minus 20. From then on whenever Merrill and I would mockingly praise something we often used the expression, “starts like a Duetz.” I tried to tell that story to Harold Funck when we visited his farm in Germany a few years ago and I saw my second Duetz tractor. Harold thought it a very good tractor and I had no reason to doubt him (nor Jolene’s dad). I tried to explain to Harold what, “starts like a Duetz” meant but he didn’t seem to understand. So when my lawnmower starts right up and I say, “starts like a Duetz” I am really saying “starts like a Duetz is supposed to.” As good as my Honda mower starts I am guessing if I were to take it to Iowa when it is minus 30 it might now start either, but who knows it might start right up, “like a Duetz.”