THE APPLE OF HIS EYE
When Dale Deno rescued an old Appleton husker/shredder he found at the junkyard, it was just another day for a young man farming on a shoestring. “When I started out,” he says, “I used a lot of equipment I salvaged from the junkyard.” He showed the piece to his brother, who uttered the words that instantly changed the course of Dale’s life:
“What else did Appleton make?”
Dale started looking for other Appleton relics almost immediately. “I had never really collected anything,” he says. “I started with shellers because they were small and I didn’t have a lot of room. I’d be out looking at junk and I’d see something I knew had to be 100 years old. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he recalls thinking, ‘so I’ll just drag it home.’”
Dale, who lives in Menasha, Wisconsin – just next to Appleton – on the north edge of
