For a few years around high school and college I worked for a company that made mushroom compost.

Mixing horse and chicken manure and waiting for it to rot wasn’t a glamour job, but it was outside and I usually drove one of the Case skid steers. One morning over a doughnut a coworker mentioned a Ford Model A tractor that needed a home. The next day my brother, dad and I were visiting Verle Johnson, an International collector who just happened to have a red Sears Economy. It wasn’t the homemade tractor we’d expected. Instead, here was a machine built in a factory a few miles down the road that looked every bit the tractor, with a Ford car engine for a powerplant.

It followed us home.

At the time all we knew about the history of the Economy was what we could glean from the few pages we got with it. Most valuable was an article in a young magazine named Belt Pulley— Verle’s personal copy of Vol. 3 No. 4 — open to a Sears Economy article written by Ed Westen. With that article and a subsequent visit with Mr. Westen, we knew exactly what we brought home. Researching the company that built it and collecting its various products has become a pet project for Dad and me (see the Nov/Dec 2002 issue for Cindy Ladage’s article about Dad’s Economy).

We also became fans of Belt Pulley magazine, then featuring Kurt Aumann as editor and his wife Jane as assistant editor. My mom has always said I was born steering wheel in hand. When I decided I wanted to pursue a career in journalism, I was willing to cover any subject — as long as it had an engine and wheels. Then Kurt ran an ad looking for contributors to Belt Pulley — finally, a venue for tractor articles.

Forward a decade: I married a young lady who didn’t mind that I spent most of my free time looking through old books and magazines and talking about rusty tractors and cars. During college I secured a job working with an automobile-related magazine, and soon after Katie joined the publishing world.

Nothing’s changed in how we spend our free time, and Katie shares my enthusiasm. I’ve never been prouder than I was the day she bought her first engine or bid on her first tractor brochure at an auction. We started talking about how much fun editing a magazine could be and how much we enjoyed the antique tractor hobby. Down in Illinois the Aumanns were wondering if we’d be interested in adopting the Belt Pulley. We are very excited to be the new owners and editors of the Belt Pulley. It’s not often a couple have the opportunity to make a leap up the masthead of a magazine.

While we will learn a lot of new things along the way, we plan to share our experiences with our readers both at shows and through the Belt Pulley.

We’ve been fans for a long time, and we want the magazine to continue to be enjoyable for readers and writers, and a good choice for advertisers, as it’s been for over 15 years. We plan to give Belt Pulley a fresh paint job and take it to shows over the next year so fellow antique tractor fans can enjoy it even more.

Additional color, glossy paper and crisper printing provided by Belt Pulley’s new printer, Munson Printing Co. out of Red Wing, MN, is one big step in that direction.

The support and advice from family and friends in this venture has been tremendous. Perhaps the most appropriate instruction for the job at hand came from Uncle Elmer: “Get it lined up right. That used to be quite a challenge, especially when we were going to be threshing. The pulleys had to be lined up perfect and the belt had to have the right amount of tension to run the thresher properly.”

We can’t think of a more satisfying challenge.