Locals as many as two or three
miles away would haul their grain to
Hassard Elevator.
In 1934, Harvey had the
opportunity to sell out his elevator
business. Yet, after a potential buyer
failed to return his phone call, he
maintained the operation.
Electricity around 1937 or
1938 was just the beginning of the
technological changes Hassard Elevator
would accept.
Then, from 1943 to 1946, when
Rink’s brother, Harvey Jr. “Buck,” was
in the service, the elevator business shut
down.
“My dad just closed the place up,”
Rink recalls. “I don’t know why, but he
was just so down about that all taking
place.
A self-professed hard worker, Rink
took to shearing sheep. The young man
also learned to drive a truck while the family business
Growth in Hassard
was shut down. Then in his teens, it was a trade he
Elevator's business in
the mid 1960s included
continued through the family’s elevator business even
selling six bins to a
through his retirement.
farmer who transported
With Buck home from the service, the elevator
them via helicopter. The
re-opened in 1947. While Buck managed the family’s
event was captured by a
local newspaper reporter.
farm, Rink worked at the elevator.
For nearly a decade and a half, Harvey, Rink and
Buck took strides to grow the family’s elevator business.
Soon after the end of World War II, the U.S. government began loaning farmers
money on their corn. Harvey purchased a corn sheller.
“We went out to different farms and shelled the corn and hauled it in to the bin
sites. When the government got involved in it, each county had a big bin site that
we’d take the corn to. That’s why all these bins here are put up in conjunction with
all of this,” Rink explains as he points to an old photo.
Five bins in the old wooden elevator, as well as an additional 10, 1,000-bushel
bins in the elevator’s annex housed the grain.
an unplanned succession
Born in 1928, Rink says he really started working at the elevator when he was 6 years
old. “We lived right across the road in a two-story house,” he recalls.
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