A Wrenching Tale With a Happy Ending

My father had an eye for finding gems in what others saw as 'junk'

An eight-function Van Brunt wrench, one of the hundreds of frontier-era artifacts in my father’s collection.

If the pioneers had watched infomercials, ads for a single product would have dominated the airwaves:

“One tool is all it takes! It can pry! It hammers! It tightens and loosens bolts and nuts of various sizes! It measures, scrapes and screws! And it’s so lightweight, even the little Missus can use it! You won’t find this at your local hardware store—so order today!”

The tool was a multi-function wrench, and early on it only came with the purchase of a tractor or other farm implement. So the wrench (along with the tractor) would set a farmer back hundreds of dollars. And the six or seven functions built into the wrench were tooled to the specifications of the tractor it came with. So a John Deere wrench couldn’t necessarily fix an International Harvester tractor.

My father owned hundreds of these antique wrenches and displayed them at his hobby museum, which he opened after closing Copeland Supply. Decades earlier he had pulled the wrenches out of loads of scrap metal that had been hauled to the junk yard he once owned. The rusty wrenches were destined for the smelter, but my dad saw beauty in them. And perhaps he also appreciated their role (and that of the farmers) in cultivating the land.

Removing the grime and rust on them involved gallons of WD-40 and countless hours of scrubbing in the evenings and on weekends. Then he tirelessly worked to identify and classify the wrenches before mounting them on pegboards for display.

When visitors came to the museum, he would show them the famous “Wall of Wrenches,” explaining in exhaustive detail the difference between cast iron wrenches and forged metal wrenches. Demonstrations were available upon request.

In time, maintaining the museum got to be too much for my father. In his 80s, he decided to auction off the antique wrenches—along with hundreds of other artifacts of early frontier life. The auction house advertised the sale to antiques collectors across the country, and there was a great turnout, with heated bidding. In a surprise to him, all of those antiques became sort of a 401(k) retirement fund for him. Under his stewardship, the antiques had appreciated over time, and he chose the right time to sell.

To learn more about antique wrenches, a good resource is the Halstead, Kansas-based Wrenching News, which is also one of the best publication names in the history of publication names.