Toro bought Wheel Horse in 1986, but the Toro name didn't appear on the products until 1990. The old Wheel Horse plant in South Bend, IN was sold early on, I don't know the exact year but in the late 80's I believe. I think the story on the Classic is simply that Toro has been hugely successful with ZTR's (which Wheel Horse actually had in the 80's, by the way) while their traditional lawn and garden tractor sales have been slipping. They are also losing traditional consumer oriented dealers, as many of the ZTR sales seem to be from commercial oriented dealers who may have never even heard of a Wheel Horse tractor. So I guess the bottom line is they have made a business decision to just about kill off all their traditional lawn and garden tractors. While I can't agree with the decision, it's not mine to make, and I have to say a big "Thanks!" to Toro for keeping the traditional Wheel Horse alive for as long as they have. I will add that Toro has a long tradition of making all sorts of turf care related products, and they seem to have always adjusted and altered their product mix to the demands in the market they sought to serve. Perhaps because their specialty early on was in the commercial side, many people do not realize this company goes back to before 1920. Turf care has always been their business, not agriculture, and I think Toro was a bit uncomfortable with even touching into agriculture with their garden tractors. Why else would they have designed the otherwise very capable 5xi series with no provisions for a rear pto, no added hydraulics, and no 3-point hitch? Various ag type attachments that WH had offered were also dropped. There's no question that modern design l&g tractors have more engineering in them today. Engineers are good at figuring out the least material that will perform the intended function, and safety factors today are obviously not the round 2 or 3 times like they used to be. So today's l&g transaxle, for instance, is built to a relatively tight tolerance for HP and torque, and is expected to handle the loads for "X" number of cycles. It's kind of like "battery science" - if a Sears battery claims a "4 year" life, by golly that's usually pretty close to what you'll get out of it. On the other hand, the Wheel Horse uni-drive was designed in the days when iron was cheap, things weren't supposed to break, and owners of garden tractors expected them to not only mow grass, but to really be more of a small tractor and not just a lawn mower they could ride on. The first tractors to use the modern style, 2-piece cast housing WH uni-drive transaxle were the 5.5HP 551 and the 7HP 701 in 1961. While the design had changes and revisions over the years, most major dimensions did not change, and the fact that some of the later 6-speed transaxles are handling 50+ HP in competitive pullers is a sure sign that they were built to last a lifetime in the intended application. Todays thin-wall close-fit aluminum castings and powdered metal gears may be very cost efficient and are probably well suited for most of today's purchasers, but they are nothing like the old cast iron gearboxes that Wheel Horse, Cub Cadet, Bolens, Peerless, and others used to make. I can't do much about today's realities in terms of lawn tractor purchasers, economies of scale (the box store "make 'em cheap and sell millions" syndrome), and manufacturing economics, but I'll sure do what I can to preserve the remaining thousands and thousands of Wheel Horses that are out there! Ed

Wow, nice lazy gardens. We have bookshelves in the bedrooms. Our room has a bookshelves surrounding our bed. In our family room, we have a bookcase over my roll top desk (just for our technical and hobby books) a small table next to my chair just for several books that I like to pick up and read all the time...and books on our brunch tables in the family room are for hubby's history books and woodworking books... In our living we built a small bookcase in the wall for our very old rare books that we inherited (hubby's great Grandfather was a book binder) In the kitchen we have a bookcase cabinet, just for cookbooks. Actually the only room (besides the bathrooms) that is book free is the Dining room... correction: I have a box of our grandchildren's books in a tub on the floor in the corner of the dining room... BTW, I just boxed up several boxes of my kids college books that I plan on dropping off at their houses...

What would a kitchen designer/fashion/lay-out/furniture/magazines,etc do if we stuck to classics? Out of work! Toss out last years clothing? Rip out a kitchen and replace with the new trend? and then you say a few years later, "what was i thinking?". What a super plan and so horrendously wasteful. Levis and a good linen shirt is something that will last for years. My home is a delight and original from '62. Custom teak cabinets, entry is cork, kitchen floor is terrazzo. The rest is patina wood, the few walls are clear vertical cedar but mostly glass like a treehouse spa in the forest. It is appropriate for my custom home to live as the original architect intended. I have only replaced appliances for a more efficient living 'machine'. I'm sure he would approve. Neighbors have ripped out and trashed and re-configured and should have purchased another style home it they wanted something other than this. But really it is what one wants for their own needs. Who cares. Just follow your gut and cooking style. If you need a fridge that holds frozen pizza boxes, lol, get it. Clearly the planet needs processed food seeing the frozen food isle at the grocery...me don't do that myself. I'm a levi jeans, cook organic from scratch gal. Keep it simple, chop, create, and enjoy. I don't need the new fashion shoe or color or the 'new' and greatest backsplash or counter. That is just marketing and fashion police for followers, not independent thinkers. I never saw the movie but i know the designer. It fits the characters and the story line. Is my kitchen white? nope. But the best kitchens i have seen here at GW are solid representations of their architecture. Not at all a passing fad. I would do the same if it seemed appropriate.

I'm sure she weighs significantly less than her 'ideal' wt on those ideal wt charts I am not even sure about that...I tend to be within my ideal weight range, but at the upper end of "healthy" and twice, when I veered toward the lower end of ideal, people asked me if I was having health problems, one time stress, the other time if I had cancer. On the other hand I was temporarily on a medication that made me gain weight and I was halfway between the lowest end of clinically overweight and the lowest end of obese. (this is a range of thirty lbs at my height. A number of women I work with told me I "was finally starting to look 'healthy' and 'a normal weight for my age'. " I think our perceptions are really somewhat skewed.