UNION GAP -- Before he went off to fight in World War II, a teenage Fred Maloney would ride a tractor around his family's 10-acre farm in the Puyallup Valley and dream up contraptions to help farmers.

He was in love with that tractor, a John Deere Model L, and he was in awe of the role technology could play in the future of agriculture. While other kids were playing sports, young Maloney was inventing machines to put up trellises and clear brush from between rows of grapevines. Service in the Navy during the latter part of the war put those efforts on hold, but even then Maloney's mind never strayed far from the work he wanted to do.

"For me to help a farmer is a glorious occupation," he wrote as the closing lines of an ode to America he wrote in the Navy. "And I'll take pride in being a definite part of the backbone of our nation."

More than 50 years later, having helped revolutionize local agriculture with the development of the first "straddle truck" for orchards, 81-year-old Maloney still goes in to work at Edwards Equipment in Union Gap. Still dreams up new machines and new ways to make existing machines better. In terms of a career, it's all he's ever wanted to do.

Though he allows he's "more of a consultant now," Maloney's input and contributions to the Edwards product line remain substantial.

"It's been invaluable," said Randy Searl, president of the company. "He's the driving force behind all the products we've sold for about the entire history of the company."

Maloney started at Edwards back in 1950, after owner Curtis Edwards saw some of Maloney's homemade machines and took him on as an in-house inventor. It was the ideal situation for Maloney, who spurned offers from larger Midwest farm-equipment companies including John Deere to take the position with Edwards.

"I wanted to be in a small company where I could be involved in everything, not just sitting in an office or working on one machine for my whole life," said Maloney, who lives in Yakima.

The industry was on the verge of a revolution and, driven by innovation from Maloney and his co-workers, Otis Goode and Gerald Searl, the small Union Gap manufacturer was poised to play a significant part in it.

Orchardists at the time were heatedly debating the merits of switching to the much larger bins that are used now, and there was a clear role for technology in facilitating that switch. The company, with Maloney's help, developed the first forklift attachment for tractors in the Yakima Valley.

According to legendary local grower Marvin Sundquist, it soon seemed as though everyone in the area had an Edwards forklift. Then came the straddle truck.

"In the mid-1950s, fruit was still being handled -- by an awful lot of growers -- one 30-pound box at a time," said Tom Auvil, a research horticulturalist with the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission in Wenatchee.

Grower Jim Christenson of Cowiche had seen such a truck moving lumber in Oregon and wondered whether Maloney and Edwards Equipment co-worker Otis Goode could help him develop a model suitable for orchards.

The premise -- that a vehicle drivers could position over pallets of boxes or bins to lift them without having to load them by hand -- was simple. But nobody, at least nobody around here, had applied it to agriculture, Maloney said.

Christenson and Goode came up with and patented the first model with Maloney's help. Then Maloney fine-tuned the concept, earning four more patents over the next five years.

"We built the first ones that were used here," Maloney said. "I don't think they were used anywhere else either."

Sundquist was among the first to order one of the new trucks, recognizing the efficiency potential of a machine that could move loads of apples and other tree fruit from orchard to warehouse in one virtually labor-free process.

"Instead of handling one box at a time and doing it three or four times before we got to the warehouse, we were handling pallets of 48 boxes at once," he said. "It was just before we started moving to bins, and it worked really well with the bins. They were very complementary."

The invention took off and Edwards Equipment, which is still in the same small facility it started in, didn't have the capability to keep up with demand. The company sold the rights to a Seattle company. The trucks became ubiquitous, and farming became more lucrative, entering even more fully a new technologically advanced modern era.

"The bin and the bin-handling technologies are what allowed the industry to grow," Auvil said.

Since then, Maloney has had a hand in developing dozens of other Edwards products -- from tractor attachments to self-propelled forklifts, even something called the Dyna-Soar which functioned as a sort of movable ladder. Like the straddle truck, they've all come from talking with growers, hearing their needs and figuring out a way to meet them.

Now, part owner of Edwards Equipment, he's kept working well beyond retirement age just because he likes it.

"In a lot of ways, there's a lot more yet to be done," Maloney said.

* Pat Muir can be reached at 577-7693, or at pmuir@yakimaherald.com.