By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Forty years after Dowagiac's last garden tractor was made, Amigos are an overnight sensation, about to be featured in magazines and on a Web site at amigotractors.com overseen by grandson Chad Benkert.
This sudden success confounds the man who designed, engineered and manufactured the red tractors in a small factory on E. Railroad Street where the Eagles Aerie is today.
Max C. Hungerford, 92 today, attended the first Amigos reunion at Southwestern Michigan College's museum Saturday along with more than 40 people and 19 tractors.
"I can't imagine why grown-up people want to do this kind of stuff," Hungerford chuckled. "Our salesman wanted a tractor. He sold lawn equipment before he came to us. Stan (Sarabyn) put the first tractor together. We had about 10 (employees), I guess. The place was so small and we machined all our own parts. All we had to buy was the wheels, the steering wheel and the seat."
Paint came from South Bend, Ind.
The salesman also furnished the name, which means "friend" in Spanish.
"He used to say, 'Anyone with a big lawn needs a little friend.' That was his main selling point," Hungerford recalled.
"I was born and raised a farmer. Farmers have to do everything. You can't afford to hire someone to do anything," said Hungerford, who later designed hydraulic presses for a company in Berrien Springs for 17 years from his home shop near SMC. "You need an engine fixed, you do it yourself. You learn a lot of little things."
"It feels kind of good," he allowed. "They're all 40 years old and they still run. I feel pretty good at that."
Only about a thousand Amigos were made by the Design, Engineering and Manufacturing Co. (DEMCO) between about 1960 and July 1966, so it was odd to see so many parked in the SMC parking lot.
There were three partners, Hungerford, Gerald Slocum, who operates a furniture store near Benton Harbor, and the late Ben Schpok, whose son Jerry also attended. They divided up the responsibilities, so Ben managed the business, Jerry headed up sales and Max was in charge of the shop.
Prior to their garden tractor venture, they made a starter for lawn mower engines. A competitor incorporated a starter into its engines, killing DEMCO's starter business.
Rather than starve to death, they listened to Slocum, who had been hounding them to build a garden tractor.
Amigo's sale to AMF was agreed to over lunch at Wright's Restaurant on M-51 South. AMF discontinued production after about six months.
"I can't back it up with facts, but my intuition tells me they made the gears out of cast iron (instead of steel) and they were too weak and sheared teeth off," says Hungerford's nephew, Aaron Davis, of Marshall.
Davis, who organized the Sept. 30 inaugural reunion, grew up on a dairy farm and taught school for 30 years.
Davis' involvement began when he visited Yesterday's Tractors Web site and stumbled upon a post from Monica Cote, which said simply, "Does anyone out there know anything about Amigo garden tractors?"
His reply to her put Davis in touch with Cote's sister and brother-in-law, Bill and Barbara Stafford.
The first-time event was hosted by Museum Director Steve Arseneau.
"He provided a place for us to meet," Davis said appreciatively. "The neat thing to me is there's a lot of Dowagiac manufacturing history here."
"It was related to me by a couple of fellows who collect big tractors," Davis said, "in light of fuel prices, it's expensive to haul them around to tractor shows. Some of them have come to the realization that they can put four to six garden tractors on a trailer and have a lot more fun than with one big one. I believe the interest is at the point of growing."
That's why Brandon Pfeiffer is launching Lawn and Garden Collector magazine in January 2007. He attended because he wants an Amigo article in his first edition.
"I agree that a garden tractor's a lot easier to work with as far as restoration," Davis said. New, they ranged in cost from $550 to $750. "For the time, they were upper echelon, but the unique thing about them was that they were one of the first garden tractors to come on the market. Wheel Horse was in there about the same time. My uncle absolutely, positively wanted no belt drive from the engine to the transmission. It had to be shaft only. Another thing was they have two PTO shafts – one under belly to run lawn mowers and that kind of thing and one like a traditional farm tractor to run attachments. He designed a three-point hitch to lift rear-mounted implements. They manufactured a snow blade of their own. Their most frequent use was mowing lawns and moving snow because with a double planetary transmission, there's no foot clutch in this tractor. If you can relate to Henry Ford's Model T, a pedal for low, a pedal for high and a pedal for reverse. That's the way this thing works."