Mechanical Imagination Wheat Farmer Harnesses His Curiosity And Turns Tinkering Into Art

Mike Druffel Age: 54 Occupation: Farmer, inventor

Mike Druffel is an aw-shucks kind of guy.

Tell him that he’s known for being inventive, and he’ll just shrug.

Tell him that you’ve heard about the tiny to-scale running tractors that he’s made from scratch, and he’ll add a grin.

Bring up the giant gazebos he’s shaped from farm tools he’s collected, and he’ll start nodding.

And mention the Fiat that he cut in half, making each side run independently, and he’ll chuckle.

“Yeah,” he’ll say, “but you need two drivers for it.”

Part artist, part inventor, part collector - there’s little that doesn’t fascinate Druffel.

But the trick to knowing anything about him is knowing enough to ask.

And whom to ask. The Druffels are as common to the Palouse as the rolling hills.

The family came to America from Germany more than a century ago and settled in Eastern Washington in the early 1900s. As far as Mike Druffel knows, his ancestors were bricklayers and beer makers.

Now they farm.

Druffel grows wheat on a small farm about 20 minutes south of Pullman. He and his wife, Mary, have three girls and a boy.

Unless you ask, he doesn’t share his other side: the one obsessed with machinery, the one that collects and restores crawler tractors, the kind with tracks instead of wheels. He keeps them in a museum, an old bunkhouse lined with tools he’s saved from junkyards and scrap heaps.

He’s fascinated by the simplest of things, such as the ball in a ballpoint pen. “It’s so precise.”

But he’ll tackle the complicated.

He once tried assembling an air-pressure spray can, but decided to quit before he killed himself.

While most of his fellow farmers are handy, few are as driven to play with equipment and engines as Druffel.

In the cold months, when the wind howls over the hills and gnaws and tears at every tree and building, Druffel is safe and warm in his neat shop. A fire crackles in the barrel-shaped stove, and the thin winter sun trickles through a small window.

The 54-year-old farmer is at his workbench, either finishing a toy pedal tractor he rescued from a junkyard, or rebuilding the engine of a real tractor, or fashioning tiny Christmas ornaments for his children out of pipe and ball bearings.

This is his element.

Though he regrets never going to college, he doesn’t wish for a different career. He doesn’t think he’d like inventing for a living, he said. “If it were work, it wouldn’t be any fun.”

Even when Druffel was a child, he made his own toys. Once, at a family picnic, he saw that someone had fashioned a tiny crawler tractor by using a timing chain for the tracks. It wasn’t enough that his father make him one, he had to make one himself.

Though there was always room to play in the Druffel house, young Mike would often be found out in his father’s workshop.

“His father was pretty inventive, too,” said Jeanne Druffel, Mike’s mother. “He was always doing repair work and building things we could use in farming.”

Even so, her son’s drive to collect and create machinery is uniquely his own. “He amazes me,” she said.

Like her son, Jeanne Druffel can’t be idle. She knits and tats and sews. “I have to use my hands and do stuff,” she said. “There’s too much fun to be had not to.”

When Mike Druffel was a child, his favorite gifts were those he could use to build things: erector sets, for example.

Along with putting toys together, he sometimes sacrificed objects to his own curiosity.

“I had to take things apart,” he said. “There are some things I wish I didn’t take apart, because I’d have them now.”

He misses most a beautiful brass cash register his grandfather gave him.

“I had to take it apart to see if I could run it,” he said. He’s said that - and done it - more than once.

Druffel has always made toys, but about 10 years ago he started turning old wrenches and garden tools into chairs and benches. It was a good marriage of his love for antiques and his need to create.

If he ever decided to quit farming, others guess he might have a business making this furniture.

“His work is probably worth tons if he had the right market,” said his sister Kathy Wolf.

Instead, he donates the furniture to charity auctions like the ones for the Guardian Angel-St. Boniface School in Colton, where the highest price a piece of his ever fetched was $1,300.

He also welcomes children from the school on field trips to his farm so they can see and touch the old equipment.

“He loves to have people come and see what he has and he does,” said his mother.

That might be something all the Druffel family loves. Years ago, Mike and his siblings started the Johnson Parade, which crosses the small town every Fourth of July.

It began when Jeanne Druffel suggested to a passel of children that they dress up like the Spirit of ‘76 and go serenade a neighbor.

They liked it so much, it became a tradition, growing bigger each July. “Everybody started adding things,” she said. “It just had to be a handmade affair.”

A few years ago, Mike Druffel and his brother-in-law built a star for the show - a tiny, old Fiat that they cut in half. They put a single wheel under the middle of each side and a lawn mower engine in the back.

“It can split apart in one second and come together in three,” Druffel said.

A rim of rough metal caused by too many “spirited joinings” rises from where the two halves meet.

But the car, which gets taken out maybe twice a year, is well worth the effort.

“When we split apart,” Druffel said, “Oh, you should see the crowd.”