100 Cats for 100 years

RANTOUL, Ill. — One hundred years of Caterpillar Tractor Company will be celebrated as part of the Half Century of Progress.

“We’re trying to put together a display of different Caterpillar products over that 100-year history,” said Clayton Smith, of Mahomet, a member of the Yellow Power Caterpillar Community Club board.

“We’re going to have some early Caterpillar machines from the 1920s when they were more of agriculture-centered and then machines through the 1930s and newer when they became more of the construction equipment company we know now. Our goal is to get 100 pieces of various Cat product lines there.”

Smith will bring his 1953 D4 to the show that he’s had for about five years.

“I got into the Caterpillar equipment through a friend, Chuck Ehler. He has quite a few Caterpillar machines and I helped him work on them over the years,” Smith said.

Dave Tallon, president of the of the Heartland Earthmovers, a central Illinois antique Caterpillar enthusiasts group, will bring his 1929 Caterpillar 10, the smallest tractor the company ever made, and his 1937 800G engine, the smallest engine ever made by the company.

“The 800G is a single cylinder air-cooled engine that was used on pull-behind graders. We’ll have a couple of those at the show with the engines installed and functioning as they originally did,” Tallon said.

Leading up to the show, Tallon, Smith and other organizers are spreading the word in hopes of hitting that 100 goal.

“We’re really beating the bushes and we’ve got some committed from Iowa, Indiana, even North Carolina. We’re trying to bring them in from all over,” Tallon said.

There will be a dedicated area for the 100th anniversary displays.

“That was part of the attraction to putting the effort into doing this at Rantoul. Obviously, Rantoul is a very big show, but they had a large area that they could offer up. Rantoul is always a working show and our area will be no different,” Tallon said.

“We’re going to have an area dedicated for plowing and another area for earth-moving. We’ll even have plows, graders and stuff where a lot of people, if they have a tractor but they don’t really have any way to put it to work, can do so. So, at this show we’ll have some of those supplemental pieces where if somebody wants to see what their tractor can do, we’ll have something for them to hook up to it and give it a try.”

Tallon is in his 26th year at an engineer at Caterpillar and currently is a member of the Tract-Type Tractor group commercial team.

“I’m very passionate about the crawler tractors. I started off collecting some models of the antique Cat stuff and the current stuff. One thing led to another and now I’ve got a couple antique real machines, a bunch of models, memorabilia, that kind of stuff,” Tallon said.

“My grandfather farmed and had a bunch of antique tractors, so I grew up around antiques. When I came to working in the Track-Type Tractor group at Caterpillar, the group that started Caterpillar basically, there was a lot of pride in the history of that. So, that kind of merged or melded with my existing interest in antiques, and I kind of caught the antique Caterpillar bug that way.”

For more information, Tallon can be contacted at heartlandearthmovers.il@gmail.com.