Beemer, Rod 1941-

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Beemer, Rod 1941-

PERSONAL:

Born 1941; married; wife's name Dawn; children: three sons.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—Bennington, KS. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Freelance writer, 1997—. Custom furniture designer and builder.

WRITINGS:

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) Ford N Series Tractors, Motorbooks International Publishers & Wholesalers (Osceola, WI), 1997.

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) Ford Tractor Implements, MBI Publishing (Osceola, WI), 1998.

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) John Deere New Generation Tractors, MBI Publishing (Osceola, WI), 1998.

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) Inside John Deere: A Factory History, MBI Publishing (Osceola, WI), 1999.

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) American Farm Tractors in the 1960s, MBI Publishing (Osceola, WI), 1999.

(With Chester Peterson, Jr.) Minneapolis-Moline Farm Tractors, MBI Publishing (Osceola, WI), 2000.

John Deere: Small Tractors, MBI Publishing (St. Paul, MN), 2002.

John Deere Two-Cylinder Tractors, MBI Publishing (St. Paul, MN), 2003.

The Deadliest Woman in the West: Mother Nature on the Prairies and Plains, 1800-1900, Caxton Press (Caldwell, ID), 2006.

(With Tracy Nelson Maurer) John Deere, MBI Publishing (St. Paul, MN), 2006.

Contributor of articles to magazines, newspapers, and anthologies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rod Beemer's books concentrate on the history of American agricultural tools, especially tractors and the companies that made them. Although farmers have used machines in their fields for centuries, tractors for plowing and other mechanized farm equipment first came into their own at the very end of the nineteenth century. Gasoline-powered tractors became popular during World War I, when Henry Ford introduced the Fordson model. The John Deere Company, which got its start by introducing an advanced plow designed specifically for heavy American soils in the 1820s, began manufacturing its first two-cylinder tractors a hundred years later, in 1923. The Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company, formed in 1929 just before the start of the Great Depression, introduced many innovations into prairie-style tractors, including a model that could double as a family car. "This was not your ordinary tractor," Lynn Grooms wrote in Farm Collector. "It included a Philco radio, windshield defroster, wipers, cigarette lighter, dash lights and much more. But it proved too costly for farmers and was succeeded by an industrial model, which had some success when cities bought it equipped with snowplows for street snow removal." Beemer's works emphasize the variety and importance of American agricultural machinery during a period when a majority of the population of the United States lived in rural areas and small towns.