When we got the job all done and were gathering up all of the equipment that was to be returned to Three Rivers, I sent Whitey Davenport, with a truck, to bring a Pole Trailer from Hawks to Onaway. The trailer was what is known as a Balanced Trailer. They are made up of a framework, mounted on a truck axle, upon which is bound a 30 or a 35 foot pole which serves as a tongue. When Whitey got to Onaway he didn’t have the trailer, so I asked him why he didn’t bring it with him. That was the first that he realized that he didn’t have it. He had lost it somewhere between Hawks and Onaway, a distance of about 20 miles.
We started out looking for the trailer, imagining all sorts of terrible things that could have happened. We had gone only a few miles when we saw it in a farmers front yard with the pole tongue sticking through a crotch of an apple tree. If it had not been for that tree, the tongue would have gone right in the farmer’s front door, because it was headed directly at it.