"Multiple sources."
"Did my cousin put you up to this?"
The banker didn't answer that directly. "There's been an offer. It's a fair offer—more than fair given current market conditions. 350,000 for everything. The buyer has verified funds."
Rick knew instantly who the buyer was.
He called Alan that night. Janet answered. Alan was out feeding cattle. When he came in, Janet told him Rick had called. Alan didn't call back.
Rick called again the next morning, and the next. On the fourth call, Alan answered.
"You're trying to steal my business," Rick said.
"I made a fair offer through proper channels."
"You humiliated me."
"No," Alan said. "You humiliated yourself when you laughed at me in front of customers and told me you didn't believe I had money. You've been treating me like I'm an idiot for 20 years, Rick. Like farming 320 acres made me some kind of failure. Like not going into debt made me a coward. Well, I'm not the one who's losing his business."
There was silence on the line.
"The offer is 347 after I negotiated down property tax adjustments," Alan continued. "It's good for 30 days. After that, Deere's going to start looking at relocating the franchise anyway. Your banker knows it. You know it. So, you can take my offer or you can wait 6 months and take nothing."
Rick hung up.
2 weeks later, Rick signed. The closing was October 14th, 1988. Rick didn't show up in person; he sent his lawyer with the signed documents.
Alan sat across from Rick's banker and the title company representative and signed his name 19 times. When it was done, he owned Hutchinson Implement Company. He renamed it Petroski Equipment the following week.
The community response was complicated. Some people thought Alan was a vulture—taking advantage of family, kicking a man when he was down. Others thought Rick had it coming, that he'd operated on arrogance and credit for too long and finally met someone who'd operated on discipline and cash.
The farmers who'd been refused credit or service by Rick's dealership during the tight years—and there were several—started showing up at Alan's place almost immediately. The mechanics Rick had laid off in '85 came back; Alan hired all of them. The parts manager stayed; Alan gave him a raise.
Rick left town and moved to the Twin Cities. Last I heard, he was selling insurance. He and Alan haven't spoken since the closing.
Alan ran the dealership for 11 years. He sold it in 1999 to a regional agricultural equipment company for just under $2 million. He kept farming. He's still farming today—over 2,000 acres now, most of it bought during the crisis at bottom prices.
It is easy to make Alan a hero and Rick the villain, but that is too simple. Rick wasn't a bad businessman because he was reckless; he was operating the way most dealerships operated in the late '70s: on credit, on expansion, on the assumption that growth would continue. That model worked until it didn't. When the crisis hit, Rick was exposed and couldn't adapt fast enough.
Alan wasn't a genius. He was conservative, sometimes painfully conservative. If the crisis hadn't happened, Rick would probably still own that dealership and Alan would still be farming 320. Alan's strategy worked because the crisis happened. He survived by being cautious while others failed by being aggressive.
Alan understood something fundamental about leverage: not financial leverage, but emotional leverage. He knew Rick thought he was smarter than Alan. He knew Rick had always thought Alan's conservative approach was weakness. And he knew that when the opportunity came, Rick wouldn't be able to see him as a legitimate buyer because Rick had spent 20 years seeing him as a lesser version of himself. That blind spot cost Rick his business.
When Alan walked into that dealership and asked for six tractors, he was testing something. He was testing whether Rick could set aside family history and pride and see a legitimate customer with legitimate cash. Rick failed that test. If Rick had said yes, filled that order, and treated Alan with basic respect, none of the rest would have happened. Alan would have bought his tractors and left. But Rick laughed at him.
The six tractors? Alan bought them eventually: three from a dealership in Glencoe, two from the dealer in Hutchinson after Alan owned the place, and one from an auction in Iowa. He still has two of them, both 4650s, both with over 15,000 hours now, both still running.
In 1988, Minnesota had 63 John Deere dealerships. Today, there are 28. Consolidation happened; it was inevitable. The question was never whether small dealerships would survive, but who would own the ones that did. Rick thought he would; Alan knew better.
According to dealership industry analyses from the late '80s, the average John Deere dealer in the Midwest was carrying inventory worth 2.5 times their annual sales. That's how floor plan financing worked. But when sales dropped 70% during the crisis, that inventory became an anchor. Dealers couldn't liquidate it without taking massive losses, and they couldn't afford to keep it without bleeding on floor plan interest. The ones who survived were the ones who cut deep, held cash, and waited for the bottom.
Alan waited for the bottom, then he bought it.
Other farmers did similar things in the late '80s: buying equipment dealerships, feed stores, small-town banks, even neighboring farms. It wasn't about being predatory; it was about being positioned. If you managed to survive with cash and no debt, opportunities appeared that would never come again.
Some people can't forgive that. They see someone buy a neighbor's foreclosed land or a relative's failed business, and they see exploitation. Maybe sometimes it is. But sometimes it's just what happens when one person makes different choices and positions themselves differently. Alan didn't cause Rick's problems; the crisis caused Rick's problems. Alan just refused to join him in them.
There's one more piece to the story. In 1995, when Alan had been running the dealership for 7 years, Rick came back to Hutchinson for a wedding of a mutual cousin. They ended up at the same table at the reception.
Janet told me about this later. She said the two of them sat there for 20 minutes without speaking while everyone else at the table tried to make conversation.
Then Rick finally looked at Alan and said, "You could have offered to help me instead of taking it."
Alan didn't answer right away. Then he said, "You never asked."
Rick said, "You never offered."
Alan said, "When exactly would you have listened? When you were buying your lake cabin? When you were buying your third building? When you were laughing at me in front of customers? You didn't want my help, Rick. You wanted me to fail so you could feel better about your choices."
Rick left shortly after that.
Janet said Alan sat there for a long time after Rick was gone. She asked him if he felt bad about what happened. Alan told her no, he didn't feel bad, but he didn't feel good either. He felt like he'd won a fight he never wanted to have in the first place.
That's probably the most honest answer anyone could give about what it was like to survive the 1980s. Nobody won. Some people just lost less than others.
Alan Petroski bought six tractors and ended up buying the dealership. But the real story is about pride and humiliation and the ways family can wound deeper than strangers ever could. It is about two boys who grew up together, took different paths, and only one of them made it through.
And the one who made it through still lives 10 miles outside Hutchinson. He still farms, and he still remembers the look on his cousin's face when he laughed at him. Some victories cost more than losses.