Belden area man enjoys taking on the big projects
BELDEN —  Blistering heat, freezing rain or chilling cold wind, no matter what the weather conditions, Clyde Cook is outside working.
Poor weather can’t keep Cook, known to most as “Cookie” from moving haystacks with a bright red tractor and Layman hay mover.
For 40 years, farmers within a 50-mile radius of Belden called on Cookie and his girls “Bessie and Bonnie” for moving their haystacks from the cutting field into the feedlot or barn or to another feeding location.  
Don’t laugh, how many people do you know that name their cars or pickups, so why should tractors and hay movers be any different? 
Bessie and Bonnie kept Cookie company through many hours and many stacks.  Cookie and his girls didn’t stop with hay, though. Grain bins and even small outbuildings got relocated by this team. It was a recent chilly morning when he sat down to share memories of nearly 80 years since the start of his hay business. 
He was wearing his typical bib overalls and gray hooded sweatshirt. He chuckled and said most people don’t know he has a full head of pure white hair under that hood. 
He started moving hay with his half brother when he was just a five year-old boy. They used a team of two horses and a hayrack on the farm three miles west of Eagle Butte S.D.
Soon the team grew to four horses, which  pulled 8-ton stacks cut into two sections.
That’s a lot of horse feed.
After high school, Cookie served in the Navy attached to the 23rd Construction Battalion from Feb of 1942 to Dec of 1946.  He later attended college at Chadron State and then the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.  He began a six-year teaching career in Valparaiso where he taught Biology, Chemistry, Agriculture and a GI class. He later taught a GI class in Belden and figured income taxes on the side.  
He’s also one smart cookie.
Hay moving went from a part-time gig to his career by accident, literally. 
He was trimming trees at the Belden cemetery on a July day in 1960 when his ladder slipped and he broke his ankle.  After 14 days in an Omaha hospital, surgery, and eight months in a cast, it became evident this injury would prevent him from standing for any long periods of time.  He resigned his teaching position and decided to go back to moving hay. 
He started out with a Super M tractor and Layman Hay Mover, which  would yield him $5 per stack.  The Super M would max out at 20 mph except uphill.  The stacks would be lifted up onto the mover by winch and cables.  
In 1967, a more powerful sidekick in the form of an International 1206 tractor (Bessie) would replace the Super M.  Cookie overhauled the gears and gave her more horsepower and, “she could outdo a John Deere.”  He also remounted lights since the tire chains for winter traction would swing and blow out the factory ones.  
He tried making winter hauling more tolerable by adding a cab to the tractor, but it took six men to take it off or put it on.  It still seemed like a good plan until going downhill near Allen one day.
The gearbox on the hay mover kicked in and moved the stack forward and threw the cab onto Cookie.  With the cab and hay crushing down on him, he somehow got the gear into reverse and saved most of the hay, but the cab wasn’t so lucky.  
Another bright idea failed, too.
You may recall seeing Cookie nestled behind a heat house given to him by Carl Christensen, but “it caught on fire so that was the end of that,”  he said, chuckling. “That was a little TOO warm,” he said.  
The bitter cold did little to stop Cookie, he just put on more layers, up to seven when wind chill was way below zero.  At times that made getting up and down from the tractor tricky. 
His job wasn’t always a walk in the hay meadow.  
He remembers the front axle snapping while going 20 mph loaded over a farm dam and being thrown clear off of the front, and expecting to be run over.  He said he moved quicker than he thought he could.  He managed to kill the engine while it was still rolling. 
Area residents were used to Cookie’s antics. If the power went out for no reason, there was no need for alarm.  It was only Cookie getting tangled up in overhead power lines.  
He once got a letter from the Department of Labor after his tall stacks knocked out power for a large area of the county stating he was not to have stack height within 10 feet of the lines. He simply chuckled over that one.
And bridges could be interesting, too. Let’s just say Cookie’s loaded rig challenged even the best county engineer’s bridge construction. 
He tells of a time while hauling a full load, a bridge dropped over a foot just as the front wheels rolled on.  
All Cookie could think of as he looked into the creek 25 feet below was that he was a “goner”, but it held until he got safely off.  
Cookie wasn’t the only one with aches and pains, Bessie had to have five major overhauls and saw the close calls from the front row.  
Cookie believes there was a silver lining to having to make hay moving his career. The constant vibration of the tractor shook his foot for several hours a day, almost acting as a massage and made the chronic pain tolerable. He would “work himself tired” in order to sleep through the night from the foot that was never quite healed.
Not long before he retired the rig, he moved a 12,000-bushel grain bin south of Laurel.  He got his picture in the paper then, but they couldn’t capture the swaying action as the bin gently rocked back and forth as he crept along as slow as he could go. 
The building, rigged with planks out to the side, was guided by side walkers spotting for ground clutter as the building was only about one foot off of the ground and Cookie could only see out the front door of the shed.  The last stack moved from Sholes to Concord in 2000.  
The 1206 tractor is now in Broken Bow at his daughter’s place and her husband is planning to restore it back to its glory days.  
Cookie now enjoys his three kids and nine grandkids, and he wants to thank those who were good to him out there on the road.
It’s clear he misses it by the excitement on his face when he talks about all of the wonderful people he met along the way.  He remembers being invited in for lunch and all of the good cooks around the area. He was pulled out of many sticky (muddy) situations and several farmers also paid him more than his set price, for which he is grateful.
“God has been with me,” he said. He humbly says he would not be here otherwise.  
Cookie does not let circumstances stop him.
Despite the chronic pain in the ankle and other health issues, he continues his 26-year career as a dishwasher, which started at the Wagon Wheel in Laurel and continues at Jerry’s Hilltop just west of Randolph.  
Yes, Cookie is a remarkable man at 85. Indeed, he is one tough cookie.