If you want to know what’s happening at this weekend’s Badger Steam and Gas Engine Club show, there’s a good chance Judy Clark-Mente has the details. The Baraboo woman’s been helping make the annual event happen since 1997. As a longtime volunteer, club member, and advertising coordinator, she’s also in charge of keeping one of the show’s biggest attractions, the tractor parade, moving along each day.
But the show is about much more than old tractors for Clark-Mente.
It’s family.
“My husband and my brother-in-law both were members long before my son and I,” she says. “And since then, most of my grandkids are members also.”
The family connection doesn’t stop there. Clark-Mente still has a 1951 Allis-Chalmers WD tractor that her parents bought just after they were married. It makes a trip to the show every year.
But these days, the younger generation takes the wheel.
“My son or my grandkids drive it,” she explains. “I let the kids drive it. They enjoy showing off what was grandpa and grandma’s or great-grandma and grandpa’s tractor.”
LISTEN to Teri Barr’s complete interview with Judy Clark-Mente here:
From the farm field to the show field
The club doesn’t put old equipment behind a rope and ask visitors to simply admire it. Some of the machinery still works. Clark-Mente recently helped prepare equipment for demonstrations, including a grain binder used to make bundles that are gathered and prepared for threshing during the show.
“We have field demonstrations throughout each day,” she says.
That hands-on approach is one of the reasons Clark-Mente believes the show is so important.
“It’s a chance to see how farming used to be done. And how dramatically agriculture has changed,” she explains. “All the history of how machinery was and how it has progressed to modern day. You had these little two-cylinder tractors and now you got the big huge turbos and four-wheel drives and all that.”
It’s a history lesson show visitors can experience rather than reading about it in a book.
Hundreds of John Deere tractors
John Deere is the featured manufacturer at this year’s show. Clark-Mente expects hundreds of green tractors and pieces of equipment on the grounds. But exactly how many is tough to predict.
“John Deere is a big, big collector item,” she says. “And some collectors don’t even need a trailer. They drive their tractors to the show.”
Clark-Mente’s family lives just five miles away, so they are known for driving their own tractors to the show. And sometimes they’ll bring a hay wagon along for the ride home. That’s because there’s another piece of the show that doesn’t always make the promotional materials. It’s all the work that goes into it.
One example? The straw needed for the threshing machine. It then goes through a baler. And at the end of the show, her family hauls all the straw home.
“So usually, yeah, one of the tractors has got to haul the wagons back and forth,” Clark-Mente says.
It’s a pretty good example of what makes the Badger Steam and Gas Engine Club show different, too. The machinery isn’t just something to look at — or many of the people involved, it’s part of their lives.
Clark-Mente considers it part of her family’s story.
A weekend of Wisconsin farm history
Clark-Mente has spent nearly three decades helping with the show, but she still finds something new every year. And that’s what keeps her coming back. It’s also why she hopes people who have never attended will stop by.
“There’s so much to see,” she shares. “And there’s so much of the old life. I grew up with some of the things that are on display out there.”
The Badger Steam and Gas Engine Club show runs Friday through Sunday, August 21-23 in Baraboo.
Admission is $20 for the weekend or $10 per day. Children under 12 get in free with a paying adult. Veterans receive free admission on Sunday.
Come for the tractors.
Stay for the parade.
And you’ll probably find Clark-Mente making sure everything — and everyone — is rolling along, right on schedule.
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