“Wouldn't matter.”
The father smiled.
Then became serious.
“Don't get stupid.”
The boy looked toward him.
“What?”
“Money starts coming easier than you're used to, people get stupid.”
“I’m not.”
“You're thirteen.”
“That means you're automatically stupid sometimes.”
The boy frowned.
His father continued.
“You earned three hundred sixty-four dollars all summer.”
“Now you've made more than that in a day.”
“That can mess with your head.”
The boy looked toward the ledger.
“What do I do?”
“Same thing you did when you bought them.”
“What?”
“Figure out what they are before deciding what they're worth.”
The advice became the foundation of everything that followed.
The boy stopped selling unknown plate numbers.
If he could not identify a part, he placed it on a separate shelf.
He researched.
Called old dealers.
Read manuals.
Wrote letters to agricultural museums.
One retired Midland employee replied from Illinois.
The envelope arrived three weeks later.
Inside was a six-page handwritten letter.
The old man explained Midland's numbering system.
The boy read every sentence twice.
Certain letters indicated crop families.
Numbers described cell count and diameter.
Suffixes identified planter generations.
Blue plates were not ordinary production.
They belonged to a special low-volume system used by vegetable growers and seed companies.
The 42-PX plates?
Prototype production.
Only a small run.
The retired employee wrote:
I have not seen one since the company closed the service warehouse in 1976. If you truly have four, do not alter them.
The boy ran from the mailbox to the machine shed.
His father was repairing a wagon bearing.
“Read this.”
The father wiped his hands.
He read.
Then looked toward the shelf.
Four plates.
A collector later offered five hundred dollars for all four.
The boy refused.
His father nearly choked.
“Five hundred dollars.”
“I know.”
“You paid three sixty-four for everything.”
“I know.”
“Why refuse?”
“Because I don't know what they're for yet.”
His father stared.
Then started laughing.
“What?”
“You've become your grandfather.”
The boy kept two 42-PX plates permanently.
Years later, they would sit framed in his office.
Not because they were the most valuable.
Because they were the first parts he refused to sell simply because someone waved money.
He eventually sold the other two to a university agricultural engineering program for eight hundred dollars.
The professor explained that they used an old Midland test planter for small research plots.
The machine had been idle because replacement plates were impossible to find.