Tractors and Trucks

Carl “Feel Bad” Davis

THROUGH THE KENTUCKY COMMUNITIES of Slat and Murl and Cabell and Stop, Carl Davis is known as “Feel Bad” Davis. That’s because when he worked as a guard at the Lake Cumberland Boys Camp near Monticello in Wayne County, Kentucky, he’d sometimes go to work with a bad cold or the flu, and he’d let everybody know he felt bad.

“I’d set down, if I had a chance, and I’d blow, you know. Wheeew! ‘I feel bad today. Boy, I feel bad,’ ” he says. “I done that several times, you know, and somebody just picked up on that ‘feel bad’ and started calling me that. I was Feel Bad Davis.” His fellow workers even gave him a Feel Bad Davis cap. He doesn’t have it anymore, but he’s kept the name. “It’s all over the county now,” he says.

The one thing that makes Feel Bad Davis feel good is collecting old tractors. At last count, he owned twenty of them. His daughter, Jerrie Davis Shoemaker, explains why.

“When he first retired from working at the camp,” she says, “he didn’t know what to do with hisself. He talked to me and my sister and said, ‘What am I going to get into to fill this void, not having to work every day?’ We told him he needed to get a hobby.”

Davis owned four tractors at one time, back when he was farming a lot. But then, his daughters gave him a good reason to buy more.

And buy he did. Davis not only filled the void left by not working, he and his hobby filled an entire huge barn, part of another barn, and a big shed. He also owns five trucks, three hay balers, three four-wheel wagons, and a 1925 Chrysler automobile with a honeycomb radiator. He even has a blond saddle-mare that he bred with a jack donkey, creating a blond mule. The animals are mainly to remind him of how plowing used to be done. The mare’s sire, he was told, is the grandson of cowboy Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger.

So why does he enjoy collecting tractors so much?

“Well,” he says, almost showing the gold on his front teeth, “it just feels like I was a boy.”

Carl Francis Davis was born on January 30, 1940. He grew up in Murl, a community close to Slat, where he now lives in a house he and his brother Calvin built behind their father’s home. Slat is so named, Davis says, because a century or two ago people came from near and far to cut down nice, big oak trees to sawmill into boards for houses and slats for paling fences. Most of the people who remember the name Slat are gone now. But “Feel Bad” remembers.

Carl Davis farmed on his own for several years, and then he and his father farmed together on part of the forty-six acres at Slat. The Davises, like most farmers, used mules for plowing back in the old days, but a tractor is a lot easier, Davis says.

But collecting tractors can be expensive. Davis bought a 1947 John Deere, Size D, in Canyon, Texas. Gave five hundred dollars for it. Cost him nine hundred dollars to get it hauled to Slat.

He got a better deal on a Size U, 1950 MM—that stands for Minneapolis-Moline. It had sat in a junkyard for thirty years, and Davis claimed it for forty dollars. “I got it to running,” he says. In fact, last time he counted, seventeen of his twenty tractors would run.

He eventually got into raising grass-fed Texas Longhorn cattle. His herd grew from six cows and one bull to forty cows in just a few years. Why Longhorns? “Looks, mostly,” he says.

But after undergoing heart surgery in 2012, Davis sold all his cattle. Today, he can plow and take care of a garden and tinker with his farm equipment, but he leaves the heavy work of cutting and baling hay to someone else. “We do it on the halves,” he says. “He gets half of the hay, and I sell my half.”

Our first visit with Feel Bad Davis came in the spring of 2016. We telephoned him in the summer of 2017 to get an update. Here’s a portion of that conversation:

Have you bought any more tractors? “Yeah, I bought me another tractor, a 130 International” (built by International Harvester from 1956 to 1958; that makes twenty-one tractors for Davis).

Which one is your favorite tractor? “My favorite is a 1961-model Size 65 Massey Ferguson. We’ve had it for fifty years, and it’s been all over the road. We’ve really done lots of work with that tractor. I just love it. It’ll start and go anytime you touch it.”

What about your favorite truck? “It’s a ’60 model Chevrolet two-ton truck that me and my daddy bought. Daddy used it till he got sick and had to quit.

Did you ever have an accident driving a tractor? “No, not bad. One time, I was trying to blow my nose, and I run out of the road and hit a culvert. But I never turned over or wrecked or nothing bad.”

What have you been doing since we saw you last? “Well, lately, we’ve got a 127 yard sale going on. Flea market stuff. It’s a big outfit in everybody’s yard, nearly, all up and down that 127 highway. It goes plumb all the way to Ohio. I’m looking mostly for old tools and stuff. I hadn’t found anything that I don’t have.”

Are you still tinkering with your trucks and tractors? “Yeah, I got six of ’em out the other day, drove them around a little and put ’em back in the barn. I’m still tinkering with them.”

Are you still visiting the Kennett store and the Dairy Queen? “Yeah, I was probably at the Dairy Queen last night when you called. I loaf up there about every night. A bunch of farmers gather up there, and we talk.”

What do you talk about? “We talk about farming. The other night we talked about weed killers and bush killers, how to spray weeds, Johnson grass, stuff we don’t like.”

Is there a tractor that you’re just dying to own? “I’d like to have me a Ford tractor. I don’t have one on the farm here. I need a Ford.”

Jerrie Shoemaker and her sister, Janie Hicks, are still pondering what to do with the monster they helped create by suggesting their daddy get a hobby.

“Them tractors are mine and my sister’s legacy,” Shoemaker says. “We get to inherit all of them.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“We don’t know,” she says. “We’ve not yet decided. Sometimes we get a little aggravated and tell him we’re just going to sell them all. You know, he’s got quite a bit of money tied up in them tractors.” But wait a minute, ladies. It might not be over.

“Have you still got the itch?” Feel Bad Davis is asked. “If you saw an old tractor in somebody’s yard, one you didn’t own, would you go see if you could buy it?”

“Yeah,” he says without flinching. “I probably would.”