Northstar Livestock
12 hours ago
This is a story about a prank that my (Bill) younger brother Rob (who we lost the other day) pulled on us several years ago. This prank made the papers and the picture shown here is a cutout from one of those papers. STORY TIME - Wagon on the RoofYears ago my brother Rob along with a young fella that worked at our place who’d be about eighteen and his younger brother who’d be about fourteen or fifteen got together and thought they’d like to play a prank on us. We farmed and sold short line farm machinery at that time in PEI and they thought that putting one of our farm wagons up on our barn roof would be a great joke. They knew that we’d be keeping an eye out on Halloween night for pranksters so they thought they’d do this the night before, so that’s what they did. I’m talking about a full sized eight ton rated farm wagon here. The morning of Halloween it was still dark when we went to the barn to do chores so we didn’t notice anything amiss. Our oldest daughter went to go to the house to get ready for school and came back to the barn to ask me if I knew there was a wagon up on the roof. At first I thought the milkhouse roof because I couldn’t see how anyone could put it up the height of our main barn. Our barn was high high. I went out to take a look and sure enough it was up there - way up. I walked around the barn and here were the tools that they had used and forgot to put away. The two older ones knew where these tools would be and the younger fella always carried a box of .22 shells with him which he had dropped so it took me all of about two seconds to figure out who the culprits were. After a little while my brother came strolling in nonchalantly letting on like he didn’t even know the wagon was up there. He wouldn’t have won an Oscar for his performance and when he said that he had nothing to do with it we knew he was lying in his teeth. We didn’t believe him for a minute. I said, “You’re the guys who put it up there and you’ll be the ones to take it back down again.” People who heard about this stunt drove from miles around to see it. The Charlottetown Guardian and the Summerside Journal Pioneer newspapers both ran front page stories complete with pictures of our barn with the wagon on it. Because of this we ended up with thousands of dollars worth of advertising for our machinery that didn’t cost us a nickel. They had wired the wagon to a ventilator on the barn roof so I wasn’t worried about the wagon rolling off of the roof. To get the wagon up there the fellas had taken it all apart on the ground and taken it piece by piece up a ladder and put it back together on the roof and it was a major undertaking and a very risky one. They didn’t have a ladder that was long enough to reach the top of the roof. To compensate for this they extended our 32 foot ladder to it’s full length, propped it against the barn, Rob climbed up and stood on the very top rung and was lying against the roof face first with his arms extended out on each side for balance and this was all that was holding him there. The older of the two other boys then crawled over top of Rob and stood on his shoulders and still couldn’t reach the top so he stood right on top of his head to get the last few inches. When Rob told me how they did it afterwards I figured it was a miracle that no one was killed or seriously hurt. It was enough to make your hair stand on end. I said, “You guys are crazy.” Rob had mentioned about the youngest of the three culprits being really afraid that I would be up in arms about their prank. That day I was at the back of the farm plowing and had all day to think about it and I concocted up a scheme to have some fun too. For the first part of the plan I enlisted Brother Rob and we got his wife to use some of her makeup around his eye to make it look like he had a black eye. Well she went to work on him and did a super job with eye shadow and that kind of thing and it looked like a real dyed in the wool shiner. He pulled his ball cap kind of down over his homemade black eye and went to see the other two guys and said, “If I were you I wouldn’t go around Bill’s for a few days, he’s pretty mad about it all.” He added, “Look there,” and shoved back the peak of his hat to show his new shiner. This kid kind of gasped and exclaimed, “He did that to his own brother!” He was really worried then. That night was Halloween of course and a party was being held at the community hall which was just a stone’s throw down the road from our place. Everyone from our house had gone over except me and I was the last one getting ready. I could see the doorway of the hall from home and here was this young fella outside because he didn’t want me to catch him inside the hall. He was watching for me and as soon as he saw me walking down the road he started towards me on the other side. He wanted to see just how mad I was without getting too close to me. As he was passing by in the dark he said, “Good day Bill.” I tried to sound cross and said, “Who’s that?”, and started walking towards him. Well, he took off running and I thought this was too good to let pass so I took off after him. He ran through the church yard and down his grandfather’s lane and disappeared into some bushes. I’m afraid I didn’t make a very good showing because it’s hard to run and try to keep from laughing at the same time. I went back to the hall for a few minutes and then went down the road to my brother’s place. I told him what had happened and that we had better get hold of this young fella and tell him it was a joke or he wouldn’t sleep that night. Meanwhile this kid went home and told his family that I was really mad and how I had chased him. I think his dad had an inkling of what we were doing and said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, in two or three years he’ll probably have forgotten all about it.” That didn’t cheer him up much, the thought of dodging me for that length of time didn’t appeal to him at all. We knew that he would be watching from either around the hall or in the church yard across the road so Rob came walking down the road towards our place and as soon as this kid saw him he was right out to tell him all that had happened. Rob already knew of course so he said, “We’ll go tell him we’re sorry and that we’ll give him a hand to take it down.” He didn’t want to have any part of coming in but finally agreed to it if Rob would go first. They were coming in our lane when a car just happened to pull in wanting to see the wagon on the roof. The boys talked to the folks in the car for a few minutes, meanwhile I got out the back door and around the house, and when the fellas in the car turned it blinded the boys for a minute with the headlights. I got close enough to the young fella that I could have touched him and said in a loud voice, “What’s going on here?” I swear this kid got from about halfway down our lane to the road in about two jumps. Rob and I started laughing and he knew then that it was all a joke and came back. I was kidding him and said that he must have wings on his arse to move that fast. He was disgruntled and mumbled something about me not being very fast. I asked them if they’d come in but Rob wanted to get home so they didn’t. The wagon stayed up on the barn for about a week. One evening Brenda and I came up from the back of the farm after checking the cattle and the fellas were on the roof of the barn taking the wagon apart. They were lowering the pieces down on a long rope so I grabbed an impact wrench and started banging the wagon back together and it was all done in a few minutes. Brenda had made some apple pies so after the wagon was back together and rolled back into place on the lot we all went into the house and had pie and ice cream and had a visit with a lot of laughs and teasing. Like I said earlier, we got thousands of dollars worth of advertising out of the whole prank and these guys had done all the work. The biggest bonus for me though was that I’d had more fun that Halloween than I’d had since I was a kid. ... See MoreSee Less
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2 days ago
We wanted to thank you folks for your notes and condolences, they helped us through a tough day. This is another story that I wrote a few years back of the two brothers we lost. There are three of us siblings left – my sister Judy, my youngest brother Scott, and myself (Bill). Again, thank you, we appreciate it. STORY TIME - Brothers GrimI came home one day when I would be in my early teens and when I walked into our living room there sat two of my brothers with casts on and looking quite forlorn. One had a cast covering his whole arm, the other had a cast on his hand. I was quite taken back and my first thought was that the two of them must have been hurt in a car accident.What had actually happened was that my brother Tom had been out riding when another horse near him kicked at the horse that he was on and hit Tom instead and broke his arm. He was knocked off of his horse by the impact and the horse that he had been riding then jumped sideways, stepped on the same arm down farther, and broke his arm again in another place. Mom took him up to the hospital and the doctor set the bones and put a cast on his arm to keep everything in place.Tom couldn’t do much with his arm like that and our younger brother Rob thought that this was an opportune time to get even with Tom who had been giving him a hard time over something for a few days before his accident so Rob hauled off and hit Tom on the head. Now we’re known for being a little hard headed sometimes but when Rob hit Tom he broke his thumb. Mom then had to turn around and take Rob to the hospital to get his thumb set and a cast put on his hand.I guess the moral of the story is what goes around comes around. It wasn’t a very good time for either one of them, and Mom – who had spent most of her day in the hospital, sure wasn’t very happy about the day’s events either. I think that right about then she would gladly have put us all out for adoption if she thought that she could have found any takers. ... See MoreSee Less
3 days ago
This is a little story that I wrote a few years ago of the three of us going for a little road trip that for me was a super nice day. As the story says we lost Tom and today we’re losing Rob as well. He took a massive heart attack with no hope of recovery and today is his last day. It seems strange that I am the oldest and still here when two of my younger brothers are gone. He lived in Prince Edward Island so due to the covid thing we can’t even be there. We do carry a lot of good memories with us. STORY TIME – Livestock TycoonsThe students in my class were to have a project for the summer between my first and second years at the Agriculture College. For my project I decided I would fit up a couple of show steers and I bought my first calf from an Angus breeder south of Guelph. At that time I drove an old truck that I had bought for $200 and thought I had a real find when I found stock racks to fit it that cost $20 so here I was set to pick up my calf. I fueled up the truck the night before we were to leave and two of my brothers, Tom and Rob, were going to come with me. We were all looking quite forward to our day away. We started out early in the morning with my old truck and got to the breeder’s farm in good time. We had a visit with the man for a while, looked over his cattle, and then loaded my calf and headed in the general direction of home. Tom had wanted to try to raise some chickens so after we had stopped for lunch we thought we would go on up to the Elora chick hatchery. He bought 50 chicks. Normally it was general practice to throw in one or two extras but the manager of the hatchery took a liking to Tom and gave him about an extra dozen. Tom ended up raising every one of his chicks. We thanked the man and headed out once again. We got as far as Walkerton and the Bluewater Angus sale just happened to be on that day so we stopped to watch the sale and I ended up buying another calf to go with the one that I had already. We thought we were real stockmen and high rollers in the livestock world, the back of the truck was filled with the two calves, and the cab of the truck was filled with us three brothers and the two boxes of chicks that Tom and Rob were holding. We got home fairly late and got our stock all settled in. We’d had a fun, interesting, and informative day. It was a day that we were doing something together that we all enjoyed doing. Two years later Tom was killed in a car accident on his way to a horse show and this is one of the pleasant memories I have of the three of us doing something special together. By today’s standards maybe our day wouldn’t seem very dynamic but it was quite an adventure for the three of us back then and it stands out in my mind even today as being a very special day. ... See MoreSee Less
