99-year-old retired farmer killed hooking up tractor

KAWARTHA LAKES — At the age of 99, retired beef farmer Jack McMullen actively worked on his rural property east of Lindsay. He was killed last month while hooking up his beloved vintage tractor.

McMullen was fatally injured while attaching a rear implement on his 1947 Ford 8N tractor inside a garage late on the afternoon of Oct. 5. The tractor rolled onto him, an OPP report said.

Friend and former long-time neighbour Gordon Lawder said that McMullen’s wife of 25 years, Barb, found him about an hour and a half after the accident. Paramedics transported McMullen to a hospital where he died shortly afterward, OPP said.

“He was hooking up a mower or a bush hog, and the tractor moved,” said Lawder, a former hog farmer who knew the deceased for more than 50 years. They were neighbours, three kilometres apart and routinely shared equipment, he said. McMullen’s senior son Barry runs the farm.

“He was a very gentle, easy-going guy. I never knew him to get really wound up about anything,” said Lawder, who expressed sadness that he wouldn’t be able to congratulate McMullen on reaching his 100th birthday this December.

He said that McMullen was known locally as a progressive farmer with two farms including a large beef feedlot. He wowed his neighbours by purchasing a red and yellow New Holland 975 combine in the early 1970s. “Everybody in the community just couldn’t believe a man buying a combine that big, oh my goodness,” Lawder recalled.

McMullen outlived his first two wives and even after his retirement, the year he married his third wife, 25 years ago, he “never really slowed down,” Lawder said. “He wasn’t in the farming operation anymore. He just was hobbying in the yard all the time.”
Lawder, a two-time reeve of the local township, fondly remembered McMullen as one of his strongest political supporters.

Statistics show that farmers over age 65 are one of the highest risk groups for farm fatalities. Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting has found that this older group accounted for 36 % of Canadian farm fatalities between 1990 and 2008.

McMullen leaves behind his wife, 13 children and their spouses, 26 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild. He was predeceased by two wives, two sisters and a grandson.