NEW BLOOMFIELD - At tonight's antique tractor pull, 50-120 competitors will vie to be the little tractor that could.
"You never know (how many)," Keith Thomas, of the New Bloomfield Lions Club, said. "It depends on the weather, but if it stays this nice we could have 100."
The event is at 6 p.m. at the New Bloomfield Lions Club Field. Admission is $5.
The tractor pull has been held for at least 20 years, Keith said, and his brother, Kenny Thomas, has been a participant for many of those years.
"Years and years ago, when I was a kid, I did a bit of it and I won," Kenny said.
He got back into tractor pulling - where tractors try to pull a weighted sled against increasing resistance for the maximum distance possible - in his adulthood. His four decades of experience as an auto mechanic helped him get a feel for tuning antique tractors.
"I have seven of them all together," Kenny said. "I bought fence row tractors - they were parked, sitting in a fence row and not running."
Many were in pretty rough shape, so he got them cheap.
"To me, it's fun because you take those old tractors that everyone's discarded and you fix them up and get them to running," Kenny said.
Some he's painted a bright, cheerful red, but the real tractor pull workhorses, like his Massey-Harris 44, have some battle scars in the form of chipped paint.
"A lot of (tractor pull competitors) nowadays go and do a lot of stuff to the engine, but I'm not into that," he added. "That's not tractor pulling; that's hot-rodding."
He is not a fan of modern tractors with their onboard computers that prevent owners from making their own repairs. All tractors in today's pull will be from before 1958.
Kenny's shed has a giant shelf full of gleaming trophies - somewhere around 400 by his count. The one he's perhaps proudest of is a first-place trophy from the state fair.
"There were gobs of tractors, over 50 in my class," he said.
Keith Thomas spoke of another competitor who does things the old-fashioned way.
"Earl Caldwell, he got a Moline, I believe it is," he said. "He just goes plumb out the gate when he's here. There's several of them that get out there quite a little ways, but it's hard to beat Earl."
Keith said Caldwell is pretty hard of hearing these days, but his tractors run to perfection.
"He tunes those old tractors by feel," Keith said. "He's quite a mechanic."
The tractors are only half of the event's attraction, Keith said. The other half is the food on sale.
"Everybody comes here for the mutton - not just for the mutton, but especially because the mutton," he said.
He's not sure why people love the Lions Club mutton so much, but perhaps the way it's cooked plays a role. It's simmered for more than three hours before being sluiced with barbecue sauce, he said.
"We have a kettle that belonged to my father-in-law that we always use to cook the mutton," Keith said. "It holds 100 gallons of water."
But perhaps what draws competitors to the pull year after year has to do with the people. Thomas told about one competitor who drives more than 250 miles to compete because he likes the folks so much.
"He told me, 'Of all the tractor pulls I do, I'd rather come to New Bloomfield than any of them,'" he said.