American Dream

Tom Collins meets a man who was determined to realise his ambition.

- Tom Collins

We often have indelible, vivid memories of people or vehicles from impressionable days of our childhood or teenage years. For Dale Schoenick of rural Calumet County, Wisconsin, that unforgettable impression was of a MinneapolisMoline G1000 Vista tractor.

Schoenick grew up on a farm near a community called Pickett, in rich farmland west of Oshkosh and near Wisconsin’s large inland Lake Winnebago. The family owned Minneapolis-Moline tractors over the years. “I grew up with them on the farm; my dad had a ‘U’,” Schoenick said referring to one iconic model in the company’s many decades of tractor making. “I was a teenager in the ’60s. I told him we need to buy one of those Vistas.”

But the Schoenick family farm was small and his dad didn’t think they needed a larger, more powerful tractor. Dale never forgot the G1000 Vistas and promised himself he’d buy one someday.

“40 years later I finally got my own!” Schoenick said. The version he eventually found as an adult was not the usual diesel or gasoline-fueled types offered in North America. It is the propane version, often called LPG for ‘liquid propane gas’.

The 1967 G1000 Vista is the newest of three Minneapolis-Moline tractors he owns. The oldest, a 1941 UTS, was obtained from northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. The 1964 U302 Super came closer to his current home. It was located on a farm near Berlin, Wisconsin, in Green Lake County.

The oldest is painted in the deep yellow-orange popularly known as Prairie Gold. It is the namesake of the company’s faithful tractor collector’s organisation today.