On a sunny day in the mid-1960s, a young Danny Lynn Clark watched as his father, Robert E. Bobby Clark, rumbled down the road toward their family farm in Lucedale, Miss., aboard a rust-red Model A Farmall tractor. The elder Clark had purchased the tractor—a one-plow model produced throughout the 1940s—from a vendor some seven miles away and driven it down the highway to get it to the farm.
From the time Clark was 7 years old, his father let him use the Farmall to pull a ground sled to plough the family’s pea and butter bean fields. By 1978, the elder Clark sold the Farmall and brought home a Long 445 model tractor in its place, which Danny Lynn Clark has kept running for more than 50 years and still uses on that same farm in George County to this day.
“That tractor is made of good steel, has quality engineering in it and doesn’t burn much fuel,” Clark says. “While a lot of newer models seem like they’re made to throw away eventually, the old ones could run forever. It didn’t need computers or sensors and I think some of that technology makes it harder to keep them running.”
Clark’s love for farm life and older models of tractors and engines eventually grew into a desire to share his knowledge and interests with younger generations. He and his father often watched RFD TV shows together on television, prompting his father to ask if Clark could get the company to come down and do a show in Lucedale. After several years of attempts, Clark decided that the best approach would be to put on a tractor show of his own, leading him to establish the Good Ole Days Festival on March 31, 2012.
The Makings of a Festival
Clark worked together with Annis Dailey, a member of the Lucedale Chamber of Commerce and former member of Habitat for Humanity, to initially host the Good Ole Days Festival at a fairground just outside of town. Despite the out-of-the-way location and a smaller number of tractors and engines to display in the beginning, Clark says the festival quickly grew into something larger than he had initially anticipated.
When Clark went to the Lucedale county offices in 2018 to pay rent on the fairground space for that year, officials told him that someone else had already rented it out on the second Saturday in March, which became when Clark normally hosted the festival, and that he would have to reschedule.
Rather than change dates, a friend of Clark’s named Darwin Nelson–vice president of the Mississippi Songwriter Alliance and former mayor of Lucedale–convinced him to instead relocate the festival to L.C. Hatcher Elementary School. Nelson put Clark in touch with the Lucedale school board, who agreed to allow Clark to hold Good Ole Days there. The new location roughly in the center of Lucedale drew yet more visitors in the following years.
“All the help I got from Annis and Darwin ultimately shows how important it is to find the right folks who are willing to step up and help out with this kind of thing,” Clark says. “Plenty more people have helped me too, like my son Jacob Clark and my friends Arteza Ferrill, Russel Moore, and Bret and Chad Howell. We all love getting the chance to have folks come out and talk with us while having a great time with some great food.”
Good Ole Days Festival
The Good Ole Days Festival takes place every year on the second Saturday in March on the grounds of L.C. Hatcher Elementary School in Lucedale. The event features everything from craft and food vendors and live music to scarecrow contests, skillet tossing, pony rides, cake walks and more.
Antique tractors are a centerpiece of the event, with owners bringing as many as 60 tractors from all corners of the state and placing them on display. Another highlight is “hit and miss” engines, a type of engine developed in the early 1900s that fires or “hits” only when operating at or below a set speed and cycles without firing or “misses” when it exceeds that set speed. A childhood friend of Clark’s, Doug Barton, collects the engines and collaborates with Clark to bring some engines he owns to the show to explain their operation to visitors. Between Barton’s engines and other participants’, the festival often displays up to 30.
“Tractors are what I grew up with and I love being able to use them to educate the youth while providing fellowship for older folks,” Clark says. “We never charge admission for the festival and anyone is invited to bring a tractor to show if they have one. If you do have a tractor to bring in, I encourage you to just bring it as it is, in its ‘work clothes’ as I like to say.”
Another of Clark’s friends, David Rogers of Wiggins, Miss., brings a group of his own sheep and border collies to the festival every year to put on live demonstrations of sheep herding techniques for guests.
In the early years of the festival, attendants could participate in a competition to chase and capture a greased pig. Clark later changed the event to instead have guests attempt to remove a ribbon tied around the pig’s tail.
The Good Ole Days Festival also features the “Purdiest Rooster” contest, which includes separate divisions for children and adults. Another of Clark’s friends, Mike Steede, serves as the judge for the competition. Participants bring a rooster they’ve raised onto the stage in a cage or on a leash for Steede to judge based on criteria such as the sheen of the rooster’s feathers and the length of the “beard” on the underside of its beak.
All food served at the festival is prepared on site and includes a wide variety of barbecue and seafood dishes, with the only stipulation being that no two stands at the same event can prepare the same kind of food.
Clark partners with Darwin Nelson to set up live music acts for the festival. The event usually sees six to 10 acts every year performing on two stages on the festival grounds. Nelson also partners with Clark on a musical ambassadorship program that helps organize shows for other charity events and festivals in and around Mississippi, including the Greater Gulf State Fair in Mobile, Ala.
“When I was serving as mayor of Lucedale, my philosophy was that any kind of event that brings folks together in our town was a great one,” Nelson says. “Danny’s been out there doing just that for years now, even when times were lean for us in the past, and now his festival has truly become something great for our state and our community.”
For Clark, the most important aspect of the Good Ole Days Festival is helping children learn about farm life and how food is raised.
“We want kids to know about where everything they eat comes from and the equipment folks need to use to get it to them,” Clark says. “Using a tractor isn’t like picking up milk from the store, where you can do it without knowing anything about the cows. We also want grandparents to be able to tell their grandkids stories about when they drove this tractor or that tractor and what they did on their own farms. For me, Good Ole Days is about both where we came from and where we’re going.”
For more information on the Good Ole Days Festival, follow the event on Facebook.