This picture was taken around 1977. Note the hand position and concentration on the driver's face. That's me behind the wheel.
When I was about eight years old, I started mowing lawns around the neighborhood using my dad's Craftsman push mower. Mr. Carroll had a double lot directly across the street from my house, and it was the biggest lawn in the neighborhood. The half that didn't have his house on it looked like a hay field the first time that I offered to mow it. There was clearly money to be made.
Anyway, once the yard was cleaned up a bit, I found his old lawn tractor sitting on flat tires and still overgrown with weeds. At the time, his two teenage sons were also overgrown with weed, which explains why there was a job opening in the lawn mowing department . I pushed my father's little mower past that tractor all summer, until I finally had the courage to ask Mr. Carroll if he would sell it to me. He said he'd think about it for a few days, and the next time that I knocked on his door, he said, "You know...I'm going to give you that tractor, because I don't think you'll ever get it running again."
I thanked him, rounded up a shovel, a chain and some friends and proceeded to dig the thing out of the ground and dragged it across the street. My dad and I worked on it for a few nights after he got home from work and we finally got it up and running.
I drove the wheels off of that thing for about four years, and mowed Mr. Carrol's lawn for free until we moved away.
But I never knew exactly what kind of tractor it was. It had faded original paint, but absolutely no decals. There was a running horse painted on the front, and one of my friends told me that it was a Wheel Horse, so I assumed that he was correct. But it didn't look like any Wheel Horse that I had ever seen; the biggest difference being that my engine had a vertical shaft, and Wheel Horses have horizontal shafts.
My uncle owned a lawnmower shop in town but, oddly enough, I never needed to bring it to him. I did once tell him that I needed a spark plug for a Wheel Horse and he immediately asked how I ended up with a Wheel Horse (he didn't sell them). I told him who I got it from and he said "Oh, that's a Mustang". So for years I assumed I had a Mustang, which made sense because the running horse painted on the front was a blatant ripoff of the one on the grills of Ford Mustangs, even though it was running in the wrong direction. So for the next long time, I just assumed it was a Mustang Tractor.
Done.
But today when I found this photo, I googled "Mustang Tractor", and all I can find are images of Mowett Mustangs. They are all yellow, much smaller, look nothing like mine and have side decals that say Mustang, but no horse on the front. I've tried searching the name of every tractor that I can think of, plus generic store names that may have been made by someone else and rebranded. Nothing...
Surely, somebody in GRM Land must know what kind of tractor this was. Based on the running horse, It had to be made after 1964, but also based upon the condition that I found it in around 1976, probably no later than 1972.
