I’m honored to breakfast most days with an interesting amalgam of South Dakotans ranging from long-eared curmudgeons to middle-aged guys who remember Oleo, and a few youngsters who stumble in wearing stylish, sleeveless vests for coats and think Oleo is a store-bought cookie. 

They gather at places like Cook’s Kitchen here in Brookings, or the Palace Café in White and The Valley in Volga to predict the weather, kid and kibitz about one another’s imagined frailties, enjoy eggs of the sunny-side variety and maybe take up a well-worn leather dice cup and resort to a noisy game of Ship, Captain and Crew to determine who picks up the bill.

They also talk shop.

As an occasional interloper who doesn’t know beans or buckshot about horses, tractors or cars, I’ve discovered that my breakfast friends represent South Dakota’s three distinct horse-powered epochs beginning with dirt paths that morphed to gravel roads that blossomed into tarred highways snaking like wagon wheel spokes out from the state’s dozen or so major trading hubs. 

They cover the horsepower waterfront on this sea of grass we call home.

The older guys grew up astride horses or harnessing placid pairs of polite Belgians on cold mornings in dark barns.

The Oleo mixers fondly remember sitting on a springy tractor seat and keeping time to the rhythmic intonations spewing from the upright exhaust pipe.

The youngsters in padded vests recall double-clutching their way through high school in a two-tone Chevy with a padded dash and a radio speaker blaring from the back.

They all can lay claim to being world-class experts on horsepower. Believe me, they know their business. If I had a horse with a hitch in its get-along, a vintage tractor with a bad cough or a car with a cantankerous clutch, these are the virtuosos I’d call for help.  

Fortunately for all of us, similar masses of prairie polymaths are common in South Dakota.

Wherever they are gathered, their conversation is akin to a college-level course on the common measurement of energy equivalency, otherwise known as horsepower. They know the subject backwards and forwards.

The oldest in our crowd grew up with horses. They can spot a splay-footed sesamoid a mile away. They remember with sad eyes the faithful horses that were part of their lives, with names like Bluebird, Bessy, Big Jim and Prince.

Then there are the vintage tractor enthusiasts at our morning klatch. They can recite the horsepower of B.F. Avery’s ponderous steam traction engine or the 1915 Mogel 8-16 that could duplicate the heavy lifting of eight draft horses with hooves big as pie tins. 

They own neckties and logoed caps the exact color as the handsome Massey-Harris Junior Model 101 or one of the other makes and models. They know that industrial yellow was the official color of the nearly five-ton Minneapolis-Moline Model 706 and may throw in its horsepower on the drawbar without being asked. 

Heck, I don’t even know what a drawbar is. 

Then there are a few younger coffee sippers who occasionally mumble something that sounds like “mocha” and grumble because the coffee isn’t served as it should be with whipped cream dusted with cinnamon on top. 

They probably wouldn’t know a horse’s pastern from a hole in the ground, but give these youngsters a screwdriver and a pair of plies and they’ll overhaul a ’56 Golden Hawk Studebaker blindfolded. Don’t even ask them about door windlaces, headlight bezels or latch knuckles.

But if you need a bezel, or fender skirts for a ’47 Hudson Commodore, stop by a South Dakota café some early morning before sunrise. They’ll tell you where to look. 

Those warm, friendly early morning South Dakota places are havens for horsepower mavens.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.