He’s given 10,000 farmers a lift!

By Paul Friggens

Farm Journal October 1955

“I think there’s life in this one yet!”

March, 1945, Okinawa, a U.S. Navy doctor works over the shattered body of diver. He’d been down 75 fee, cutting through the hull of sunken destroyer, had rescued three men buried alive. At that moment, an enemy fighter plane blew up a nearby warship.
They shipped Seaman Leo “Bud” Harsh home to die, his body flattened, his skull crushed like an eggshell.

Today this crippled veteran runs his million-dollar truck hoist business in Eaton, CO, (Pop. 1,500) and is probably the No. 1 American success story of the year.

Early every morning, cheerful Bud jeeps to his plant, Hydraulics Unlimited, and lurches in to work. Ten years after his near-fatal blast, the hunched veteran still is scarcely able to walk and suffers constant pain. Undaunted, Bud steps on his “go-buggy” scooter and starts things rolling in a enterprise that’s currently doing business in the 48 states, Canada, and Hawaii.

Already the Vet has given farmers 10,000 lifts, and at his Eaton plant, 35 employees are working overtime making 5,000 hoists this year alone. Some big-time competitors are commencing to wonder where they’ve been all the time.

Wheeling around his plant, Bud organizes production like a one-man army.

“Need another carload of tubing” (a $50,000 order!) he reminds plant manager Les Orr.

He pulls up to talk to a farm-hand mechanic who’s worked out a new production gimmick. “Give it a whirl,” Bud encourages, and says aside: “Everybody’s an inventor around here.”

He wheels into his advertising department – 10 girls mailing out 15 million promotion pieces a year. Bud writes his own advertising. “I always try to make it sound like I’d talk to a farmer.” He explained to me.

Back at his cubicle office, Bud answers his busy telephone.

“Yes sir, I’ll guarantee the hoist and take back any you don’t sell,” he tells a prospective dealer.

“Never dreamed that guy would bring us a million-dollar business,” says a prominent Eaton townsman. “First time I saw Bud rambling down main street, and not knowing his war experience, I figured he was stewed!”

Bud was born on a Colorado farm (near Merino, CO), and grew up on hard work. “We’d pitch manure or scoop beets all day, and when it got too dark to do anything else we’d milk the cows. I left home when I was in the sixth grade. I figured I’d never have any time left to think.”

The young runaway followed the wheat harvest, took flings at lumberjacking, cotton picking, turkey herding, bronco busting, and just plain bumming. Finally, he got a job as a chauffeur in San Francisco. In his spare time he took up welding – an interest that changed his life.

One day he read that engineers were looking for a way to weld underwater. He thought a lot about it. Why not a “bubble” of compressed air around the torch? He tried it out in a bucket of water. It worked!

Next, he contrived a mask for himself with piped-in oxygen so he could breathe under water.

Bud Harsh quit chauffeuring. With his home-made, under-water torch, he went to scrapping old ships in San Francisco Bay. Just before Pearl Harbor, hearing that the U.S. Navy needed divers, Bud enlisted. The Navy prompltly picked up his underwater torch idea and put Bud to schooling 50 men at a time (including some gold-braid).

Later he was ordered to sea (aboard the USS Medusa) in charge of a salvage and rescue unit. During his Pacific service, he was submerged 7,000 recorded hours. At Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa he helped rescue 75 terror-stricken, trapped men. Of his original 21 man crew, only five survived.

But at Okinawa, Bud got it! They had signaled a red alert, and nobody was supposed to dive. Bud and another diver volunteered to go down to save a trapped destroyer crew.

“We couldn’t see any planes so we took a chance for those poor devils. I let down about 75 feet and banged on the hull. I got a tap back and started cutting. I went in and managed to pull three men out of that pitch-black hole. Then an enemy fighter plane hit a ship just a thousand feet away.”

The blast killed Bud’s diving companion outright, and they fished the shattered, hemorrhaging Bud out more dead that alive. Weeks later, back at an Oakland hospital, Navy doctors stared at the battered diver and marveled that he lived at all.

“What’s the deal?” asked the sailor.

“Looks like walking is out,” said the doctors.

“The Hell it is,” the diver defied.

One night soon after, he rolled off his bed and dragged himself to the bathroom. “I knew then that I could make it: that the doctors were wrong.”

Before long, with his wife’s help and encouragement, he was learning to walk again, clinging to chairs, reeling along the hospital corridors. Next he was pushing a four-wheel “walker,” then hobbling on canes, and in nine months he was invalided home to Greeley, CO.

Bud drew $196 monthly pension – 100% disability – but “I’ve got to work, got to stand on my own,” he kept telling his wife Linnea.

With $800 savings, he purchased a pin-bal concession (a game that doesn’t involve gambling). Bud, Linnea, and their adopted baby son made the rounds of taverns and restaurants.

She counted the nickels, while he checked the machines. But each day he dragged home in worse pain. And Linnea didn’t like the taverns. Bud saw a good chance to sell at a profit and quit.

About that time he visited his brother Kenneth, farming near Greeley, Ken had just bought a new truck hoist costing $650, and weighing almost a ton. “Sure beats shoveling,” he enthused. The creative Bud shook his head. “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his chin reflectively, “but there ought to be a lighter, cheaper hoist. And I think I can build it!”

With his pin-ball profit, Bud rented a small general repair shop in Greeley, and commenced experimenting on the side. He needed a shop lathe. The Army was selling surplus lathes – two for $600.

Bud gasped, and Linnea nearly fainted, when a pair of 24-foot lathes arrived. They weighed 13 tons each!

The Army had used the $50,000 monsters to bore gun barrels. Bud rounded up an extra $500 to pay the freight, borrowed his brother’s tractor to power one of the huge lathes, and went to work.

He noticed that most conventional hoists were designed for heavy equipment. Bud decided to shoot for the farmer, and the little guy.

First, he had to design a short hoist that would fit under a truck and still expand to raise the truck box. After repeated tries, he designed a unique multi-stage cylinder that telescoped from 27 to 91 inches, and fit any-size truck, pickup, or trailer. For stability, he introduced twin cylinders.

Next, he worked out a valve to control the oil flow to the cylinders and hold it under pressure. “I didn’t have the stuff to build anything fancy. I had to knock old bearings to pieces for parts.” Bud finally made his valve work.

In a few months, he had developed his first crude hoist. But the cylinders leaked oil. Pinching his pension pennies, he experimented with new materials. He ran out of funds and a $650 bank loan. Enthusiastically, he poured out his story – what his lift would do for farmers.

“Sorry,” the banker shook his head, “but I don’t want to have to pray for your success.”

Fuming, Bud stopped at a local junkyard for more scrap. Dealer Abe Winograd heard his story and offered to help with a loan and the use of his old blacksmith and harness shop in nearby Eaton.

In bitter Christmas weather that froze water in their home-made trailer, the busted Harshes moved to Eaton and parked behind the tumble-down blacksmith shop. No Christmas lights in their Alley! Linnea trimmed a tree in the trailer, made a rag doll for adopted Karen, one, and with the $1.49 she left bought a fire truck for Delbert (Daniel), five. “Best Christmas we’ve ever had,” she cheered Bud.

Bud fixed tractors and implements by day, and experimented by night. Linnea used to find him in the morning slumped over his shop bench. He made test after test and still his hoist leaked oil.

Months passed. Bud was desperate when suddenly one night he remembered the design of the Navy’s 16–inch turret guns. He knew them well. They used tight-fitting “O” rings as stationary seals. Why not the same idea for his hoist? Bud finally located the manufacturer of the neoprene, oil-resistant “O” ring and licked his last problem.

Jubilant, he demonstrated his first successful hoist to Linnea. I dumped from the side, front, or back. Instead of a ton, it weighed only 300 pounds. “And I’ll sell it,” Bud told his wife, “for a dollar a pound!”

A year after he had started experimenting – and now $8,000 in debt – Bud organized Hydraulics Unlimited and shifted into production. He hired two farm boys to help him. “I learned in the Navy to pick farmers – they’re reliable and get things done.” In the worst winter in the West’s memory, the disabled Bud dragged himself through waist-high drifts and then almost froze in the ramshackle blacksmith shop.

He stuck it out to assemble his first hoists for the market. Appropriately that winter, a coal trucker made the first purchase.

Chancing to see it installed, a leading farmer, Ben Nix, ordered the second hoist. After that everybody at the Nix farm wanted to use that truck. “Un-loaded seven tons in two minutes – it was the greatest labor-saver that ever came to my farm.” Nix bought three more hoists for his farm trucks – installed them himself.

The word spread. A combine operator used his hoist in the Great Plains wheat fields. Farmers saw it and fired in orders. Bud put a young salesman on the road. He returned with a whopping order for 50 truck hoists in Montana.

Fed up on the beans they had been eating, Bud and Linnea went out to celebrate with a shrimp dinner, and plotted new conquests.

Now Harsh showed his business genius. “If farmers like my hoist in Montana, they’ll like it in Maine,” he told his wife. “I’m going to line up dealers all over the country.”

The veteran needed backing for his national sales campaign. This time Bud approached a different banker. “Now, if it was a cow I could see the market value,” the banker demurred. “We’re just not interested in this kind of loan.” But before he was done, Bud walked out with $20,000.

The enterprising vet hired a couple of high school girls to comb Dun and Bradstreet for a list of responsible farm equipment dealers. As a starter, he mailed a leaflet to 28,000 dealers.

The leaflet netted a flock of inquiries nearly shoving Hydraulics Unlimited through the leaky roof. “Eaton has jumped from fourth to a first class post office now,” boasts postmistress Pauline Allison.

Hydraulics’ first year made history but when Bud closed the books on his 1949 operation, he had been able to build only 100 hoists and was still in the red. Linnea was thankful for the Navy pension when she made out the payroll.

The second year Hydraulics turned the corner – grossed $57,000, and netted a small profit. Bud cut himself in for $50 a week salary. Every year since, the sensational Hydraulics Unlimited has doubled its gross.

Last year at Christmas time, Bud realized his crowning triumph. With sales approaching $1 million, he was able to inaugurate profit-sharing. Wheeling into his plant, Bud called his employees together and announced simply: “Business has been good. Linnea and I don’t need it all. I’m giving a bonus.” He passed out a 35-cent an hour bonus amounting to several hundred dollars for each worker.

Recently, a union tried to organize Hydraulics but the workers voted it down.

Each fall the 37-year-old employer shuts down his entire plant for a week so everybody can go deer hunting in the Rockies. Bud heads for thills himself and hunts his buck from a jeep.

“Pretty hard to get a job here,” says manager Les Orr. “We just don’t have much turn-over, and I’ve got at least 100 names on a waiting list.”

Tycoons in their thirties, the Harshes still keep their feet on the ground. Some time ago Bud splurged with a new Lincoln, but linnea hid it behind the trailer and walked to the Grocery.

About the only concession the family has made to their recent prosperity is to move into a modest, ranch-style home with swimming pool. The pool, however, is for family and employees alike. A doctor urges swimming to tone up the ex-divers shattered nerves and muscles.

Recently, Bud flew his family to Hawaii for vacation. “After diving all ove the Pacific, I wanted to see what it looked like on top!”
With his phenomenal success, Bud is getting attractive offers to sell out. He isn’t interested. “What would I do with myself?” In place of selling, he’s just moved into a bigger plat at the edge of Eaton. “Twelve acres here. We aim to grow,” he told me proudly.

The venturing vet needs no banker to pray for his success now!