SHERIDAN — We rode through downtown Sheridan on a tractor one morning, and the only people who stared were the ones who don’t live here.
Behind the wheel was 81-year-old Jack Hansen, who has taken to cruising these streets in either his Kubota or his John Deere, depending on who he’s picking up. This day it was Kat Deeds, co-owner of the Mint Bar, and me.
He picked us up at the Mint, where he’d parallel parked the Kubota beneath the bar’s iconic neon sign. We rode half a mile to the Silver Spur for breakfast, and the hostess greeted him by name without needing a glance at the parking lot to know how he’d arrived.
“Well, look who’s here,” she said to Jack from behind the counter, serving a line of men who looked like they’d just come off a shift. “Did you drive your tractor today?”
Jack had insisted on opening the door for me and Kat, his face settling into the unmistakable, triumphant grin of a man who knew he was about to turn heads. Straightening his aviator glasses, he told us plainly that he had a motive.
He wanted to make sure that the regulars couldn’t miss that he was walking in with two women.
“Some people think I’m crazier than hell,” he said. “But those guys can’t pick up women like I can. It’s the tractor.”
'Bad Moon Rising'
It wasn't the first time Jack had made an entrance at the Silver Spur.
Weeks earlier, he’d picked up Kat and a friend from the bar in the Kubota and taken them to lunch. But first, Jack, a former teacher, had some advice for the youngsters in the Mint about their taste in music.
"I was walking through her bar, and this guy's putting on all this new woke stuff these kids listen to,” Jack said. “I said, ‘Why don't you put Creedence Clearwater, Bad Moon Rising?’”
Kat turned that first tractor ride into a video, and she kept the youngsters’ music off the soundtrack. It was all Creedence, just as Jack had asked.
"I liked that,” he said. “Didn’t it sound good? Didn’t it just make you want to jump around?”
Jack never minded turning heads downtown, but he hadn't expected Kat's video to spark a rivalry between two tractor companies that already knew him well through Hansen Haying, his longtime business outside town.
“Kubota reposted the video,” Kat told me. “Then John Deere called him like, ‘Why are you driving that Kubota piece of sh*t down Main Street?’”
To make up for it, he drove his John Deere into town the next week and picked up the local John Deere bookkeeper and took her to lunch.
“He had to make up to John Deere for driving his Kubota,” Kat said.
John Deere wasn’t the only one Jack had to make it up to. Once the video got around, so did the news that he’d shown up to lunch with two women.
“My wife was kind of miffed with me over that,” Jack said. “She said, ‘What if I picked up two men and hauled them around on that tractor?’”
As the three of us waited to be seated at the Silver Spur, Kat started recapping the John Deere and Kubota feud for the staff. Turns out, they were already up to speed on both disputes set off by the video.
“He made John Deere mad, so he had to bring the John Deere down,” Kat told the hostess.
“He made the wife mad, too,” she responded with a laugh. “So now he’s got to bring the wife every time. We know, Jack. We know.”
Jack Vs. Sheridan School District
Jack’s wife, Frances, met us at the Silver Spur, polished and pretty, with blue eyeshadow that matched the silver and turquoise cross at her neck. Jack had bought it for her the same day he picked up Kat for lunch that first time.
“It was her birthday the next week so I bought her a necklace,” Jack said. “I was smart enough to do that.”
Between bites, other diners kept stopping by the table to say hello. Both Jack and Frances had been teachers, and it seemed half the breakfast crowd had once sat in their classrooms.
Jack’s history with the school district hadn’t always been so warm. In 1988, after 14 years as a welding teacher, he got a letter saying his contract wouldn’t be renewed because of falling enrollment and reduced funding.
“I didn’t have a shortage of students,” Jack said. “This other wood-shop teacher and carpentry teacher wanted to make good enrollment so they took my students and gave them to them.”
The day he got the news, Jack remembered going home to his son, who told him he couldn’t wait until high school to have his dad be his teacher.
“I said, ‘I can’t, I got ripped today,’” Jack recalled. “He didn’t understand, and once I tried to explain it to him he just cried and cried.”
Jack reached out to a teachers organization in Cheyenne, which connected him with a lawyer willing to take his case after reviewing it. When Jack said he didn’t think he could afford one, the lawyer offered to work on contingency.
“I said, ‘Are we going to win?’” Jack said. “He said, ‘I don’t take these cases for my health.’”
Two years after filing, Jack and Frances ended up on the stand in a trial against the school district. Jack remembered the first day of that trial like it was yesterday.
The lawyer asked him about his own educational history, and Jack told him he attended elementary through high school in the Sheridan School District and then Sheridan College and University of Wyoming. Then the lawyer asked how many times he’d been in Vietnam as a soldier.
“I said, ‘I did two trips there.’” Jack said. “The lawyer goes, ‘There you have it, jurors. This is the way they treat this man.’”
The jury agreed the district had ignored its own seniority rules and awarded Jack $90,000. Half went to the lawyer.
Frances said she and Jack spent the rest on teaching certifications after the district told them it would hire them back if they earned them.
“They said they would hire us back if we were in elementary education,” Frances said. “But they lied.”
“I still hate them to this day,” Jack said. “But I’m OK with it.”
‘We Used to Be Tough’
Those trips to Vietnam were more than a footnote in a court case. The Silver Spur keeps a copy of Jack’s war stories on hand, a spiral-bound, homemade-looking book, and after we ordered breakfast he asked the waitress to bring it over.
Jack had wanted to fly. Facing the draft in 1965, he watched fighter jets launch from a carrier off Vietnam on TV at his mother’s house in Sheridan, then walked into a Navy recruiter’s office the next morning and left believing he’d be piloting one.
By the time he reached boot camp in San Diego, he knew better. A ranch kid who understood machinery, didn’t like the water and didn’t swim was steered toward the Seabees, the Navy’s builders who work on land.
By May 1967 he was landing at Dong Ha, a few miles south of the demilitarized zone, after three days in a C130. He and his battalion built for the Marines there and then at Khe Sanh, where it took until the end of July to lay a 4,000-foot runway under fire.
But building was only part of the work.
“The most bodies we ever carried were at Khe Sanh,” Jack recalled in the book. “That was our job too, to carry the bodies and build buildings.”
Jack made two trips to Vietnam, and the book included photographs of him as a young man. The square face and wide grin were the same, and so was the look of a man about to crack a joke.
“We used to be tough,” Jack said. “I was once. But I’m kind of an old, has-been candy ass now.”
‘Only If You Take Me In A Tractor’
The tractor rides also started as a joke.
Before she worked at the Mint, Kat was at a car dealership when Jack, who had taught her father in high school, stopped by and said he wanted to take her to lunch.
“I said, ‘Only if you take me in a tractor,’” Kat said.
Jack held up his end and picked her up in the tractor. Years later, he came into the Mint and said he wanted to take her to lunch again, and Kat told him the same terms applied.
“This has become such a funny thing,” Kat said. “He’s very well known here in town. He’s always been in Sheridan, besides when he went to Vietnam. Everybody knows Jack. He’s just like everybody’s friend in town.”
Their first ride, the one Kat turned into the video that sparked the Kubota-John Deere feud, came in early October. The next waited a few weeks, because Kat went on a hunting trip and got engaged.
Once Kat told Jack the news, the tractor quickly became part of her wedding plans.
“He told John Deere that he was going to pick me up and take me to my wedding in a tractor,” Kat said. “John Deere called and offered to shine up his tractor for the wedding.”
What began as a running joke is now a fixture of Kat’s wedding plans. Next summer, she intends to have Jack pull her and her bridal party in the tractor, and both he and Frances are on the guest list.
It isn’t the entrance she ever pictured, but she’s looking forward to it.
“Never did I ever think about a tractor and my wedding in the same sentence,” Kat said. “But it will be great and it will be part of people that I care about, so it’ll make it even more special.”
On the ride back to the Mint, Jack joked that he’d run over anyone who got in his way, and that he wasn’t worried about getting pulled over because it would be a sad day for any cop who tried. He’d be flying down the road, he said, if it weren’t for Kat and me.
He parallel parked in front of the Mint again, and as he climbed down to say goodbye, City Council member Greg Luhman happened to walk by, another local who already knew the whole story of Jack’s downtown tractor rides.
“Does this mean we’re going to see a John Deere again?” he said with a smile as he waved to Jack pulling off in his Kubota.
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
