BOISE, Idaho — As a boy growing up in the concrete jungle of downtown Los Angeles, Pete Rathbone dreamed of getting his hands dirty and having a future in farming. After attending one of the top agricultural schools in the country, the Agriculture and Mechanical College of Texas, now known as Texas A&M, he bought property near the Snake River in the 1950s and got to work.
Rathbone grew seed and sugar beets for more than 40 years. During his decades of hard work, he began collecting farm-related tools and items, which sparked a passion. He then created his own museum in his backyard.
In a converted equipment shed in Marsing, Idaho, lives Rathbone's collection of rare farming equipment and wrenches. He calls the outbuilding the R-Lucky Star Farm Museum.
Walking through the metal double doors, Rathbone smiles and admits he "has a lot of stuff," and adds, "I've been a collector all my life."
Inside, the large open space is filled with Rathbone's stockpile of hand planters, implement seats, sugar sacks and corn shellers. But, what he's most proud of is his rows and rows of wrenches that wrap around the metal building's walls.
"It isn't the largest collection in the world but it's the only one that's hung up in alphabetical order by company," Rathbone said. "It starts on the second row and grows around."
Some of the wrenches in Rathbone's collection are the exact same, some are extremely rare, but all were standard issue farm equipment pre-WWII.
"When you bought a mowing machine or a rake or a cultivator, [manufacturers] gave you a wrench to fit all the nuts on it," Rathbone explained.
He blames his late wife for getting him hooked on collecting wrenches.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, while following his wife around to antique shops, a quick conversation with the shop owner started it all.
"The gal notices I was a little bit bored, and she said, 'You gotta get your husband interested in collecting, mine collects alligator wrenches," Rathbone remembers.
"I didn't know what an alligator wrench was," pointing to a row of well-worn wrenches high up on the west wall. "That's those ugly ones on the top in the center."
Since then, he believes he has gathered between 5 to 6,000 but doesn't have an exact number because the wrenches are "hard to count."
KTVB asked Rathbone how much he had spent on the collection, to which he responded, "Oh god, woo a lot." He revealed he had spent over $7,000 for one of his rare wrenches.
Rathbone would gladly take the time to show his wrenches to anyone who stops by his farm museum or show them one of the four books he's written about hand tools.
His passion has connected him to people around the country who share the same hobby of worn metal.
"Well, you have to have a hobby, you know, a lot of these old guys, they get so old, and they don't have anything to do, and they just die, so you need something to keep the interest up," he said.
An interest that the near 91-year-old isn't pushing aside anytime soon.
"Is there a quit when it comes to this? No, there's no quit with this," he said. "why quit?"
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