Page 58 - Senior Link Magazine Summer 2025 - Online Magazine

Exceptional Ted Jackson

SENIORS

TRACTOR

FERVOR

by Elizabeth Jackson

“ went down to my landlord’s house and saw a pedal
tractor sitting in the driveway. I said, ‘Whose tractor
I is that?’ And he said, ‘Oh that was my boy’s, but he’s
already out of college now.’ I asked him what he was going
to do with it, and he said, ‘Nothing. If you want it, you can
have it.’ So, I loaded it up.”

And a hobby was born.
That was in 2007. Today, if you walk into Ted Jackson’s
backyard workshop in Lubbock, there are 87 restored
pedal tractors neatly lined up on floor-to-ceiling shelves.
He has painstakingly returned each one to its former glory:
International, John Deere, Case, Ford, New Holland, Massey
Harris, Murray, Massey Ferguson, Farmall, Allis Chalmers,
even a few Olivers. All in all, he guessed that he has done
“way over a hundred.”

Born in 1940, Ted Jackson was the sixth child born to Elza D.
and Gladys Jackson in Southland, Texas. When Ted was in
second grade, they moved to northeast Lubbock where they
farmed. He attended several schools as Lubbock grew: Hunt,
Sanders, Arnett, and Bozeman Elementaries, then Thompson
Junior High. In those early years, he did some comic book
trading with Buddy Holly. That was long before he knew he
should have held on to that collection.

At Lubbock High School he played on the Westerner football
team. He was proud to be a Westerner. When many of the
kids had to move over to the new high school, Monterey,
the teams started playing for the Silver Spurs. He can still
mimic Coach “Pinky” Lowrey’s annual speech: “There are
a lot of bulldogs, and a lot of eagles…but there is only one
Westerner….” Another of Ted’s football coaches at LHS was
Grant Teaff, who went on to become a Texas legend as the
head coach at Baylor.
Most importantly: Lubbock High was where he met Martha
Lemon. This year, they will celebrate sixty-five years of
marriage.

58 Lubbock Senior Link