A family friend’s dad had an M with the tricycle front end. Story goes that when he was about 8 his dad put him on the M pulling a chisel and told him to plow for a while, he needed to run the 3 miles to town and would be back shortly. Not long after he left the little fella plowed across a terrace burying the chisel up to the beam. But instead of spinning or stalling the old M started to stand straight up into a wheelie. Panicking he fed her more gas which only made the rate of climb increase and it wasn’t until it was standing on about a 45 degree angle that the thought occurred to him to get on the clutch. He said he just knew that it had punched that front axle all the way through the hood when it came down it hit so hard.
He somehow managed to get it out of the terrace and back heading the right direction before his old man came back and didn’t mention it until he was an adult.
Old fellow that is my parents’ neighbor has an old M that he more than likely bought new. He’s in his 90s and farmed forever. I was stuck on one of his places once when I was hunting and he brought it down to pull me out. I rode the drawbar from his barn down to where I was stuck about a half a mile away. We hooked it up with a 100’ log chain doubled over and he never even idled it up, just eased the clutch out and drug me right out of the mud hole.
