Combo Bolens Mowing Rig – 1965 – Jeffersontown, Kentucky from Steven K Roberts.


This little video is also here in my YouTube channel, where it is more convenient to share.

When I was a kid in Kentucky, we had 5½ acres… and it was pretty much my responsibility to keep it all mowed. Our Bolens Power-Ho tractor had a reel mower attachment, but it was awful… so my father (Edward H. Roberts) designed a rig that used the tractor/sulky to pull a pair of properly offset lawnmowers. I spent many hours driving this contraption around, and like to joke that it set the tone for my later development of Winnebiko II and BEHEMOTH (geeky bicycles with trailers). The photos above and below show me in the early sixties.

A half-century later, I began digitizing the library of old home movies with my RetroScan Universal, and couldn’t resist sharing this one-minute snippet from 1964-5. (The tools I am using to digitize my father’s library of about 150 films have become the basis of a business… if you have old movies you’d like to recover or share, please contact Harbor Digitizing for more info.)

Good times. Well, not really. The novelty wore off quickly, and it took me away from my lab… but I still remember every bump and twist in that chunk of land in Jeffersontown, now overlaid with condos and other development. Oh, in case you thought I got winters off, my dad also conjured a snowplow attachment, and I had a little business clearing driveways with this contraption:

Bolens snowplow using reel mower