Gimme an I ... gimme an H ...

The whistle is hardwired to your brainpan now, if you're of a certain age and a certain geography. Every morning it moaned through the predawn darkness across southeast Fort Wayne, down Meyer Road and out Wayne Trace and Hessen Cassel, past Village Woods and St. Henry's and on down to  Castle Drive in Eastland Gardens, where I'd burrow deeper under the covers and know my dad had already left the house, black matte lunchbox in hand.

The International Harvester whistle proscribed your life, if you were an IH family. After awhile you'd never even hear it, or you'd hear it and it would flit through your consciousness like a ghost or background static on the radio. There but not there.

You grew up southeast, that whistle was just part of the mosaic, in other words. But you know what?

I'm 64 now and haven't lived in Eastland Gardens in more than four decades. Yet I can hear that whistle still.

So when I saw one of the old ones on display yesterday at the inaugural Harvester Homecoming in Scout Park on Meyer Road, you're damn skippy the sound of it came back to me. Suddenly I was 7, 8, 9-years-old again, lying in my narrow boy's bed, drifting back to sleep just about the time my dad was walking into Dept. 19 for another day in the shop.

My dad, Bill Smith, worked at Harvester for 34 years, from the last year of the 1940s until they closed up shop and moved to Springfield, Ohio, in 1983. Dad didn't want to make that long trek to Springfield, so he took early retirement. Last November he died at the age of 91, so he missed all the fun yesterday. The man would have eaten it up with a spoon.

He was always a sucker for history in all its forms -- he passed that lovely obsession on to his son, I'm happy to say -- and so, on a beautiful Saturday morning, I kept seeing everything through his eyes.

All those restored trucks and vehicles from the Teens, the Twenties, going back as far as 1910. An IH bulldozer. An IH tractor. Every model and permutation of the famed Harvester Scout imaginable. Photos and model IH vehicles and all manner of memorabilia -- including the sign that adorned the IH Scout which led my dad's Civil War re-enactor unit in Jimmy Carter's inaugural parade in 1977.

That one they got from my dad's own collection of IH stuff.

All of it was mute, and not-so-mute testimony to a legacy as deeply woven into this city's landscape as the moaning of the shift whistle. For 60 years Harvester was synonymous with Fort Wayne, and Fort Wayne with it. And for 34 years it put food on the table and clothes on the backs of the occupants of 3029 Castle Drive.

And not without cost, of course. Some of the memorabilia Dad took away from his Harvester years was physical. He lost the tip of one little finger when a tractor-trailer backed into it and crushed it. A fall through two false ceilings left him with a messed-up back that eventually required surgery. It happens -- and none of it ever dimmed his loyalty to IH.

Which, of course, he passed on to his children.

My mom's people, for instance, owned farmland down in Wells County, and I still remember the tractors my granddad had. One was an IH Super M. One was an IH "H" model. We called them the Big M and the Little H.

But time courses on. And so one day I was down at the farm, and I noticed my uncle had at some point bought some John Deere equipment. And of course I gave him hell about it, asking him where in God's name he'd gotten that green crap.

Blew the whistle on him, I guess you could say.