HOMER — Don Lamb has never really been bored. It’s not something he understands well. He’s far too busy to ever be bored.

“You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing,” Lamb said. “That’s the fun part for anybody that does anything. A lot of people have jobs and they hate to go to work, and then complain about it when they get home. I’ve never been down that road.”

Where Lamb has been most of his life is down a gravel road, operating his own small business in the remnants of the pioneer town of Homer. Not much has changed here over the years, and that seems to be much of the appeal for customers who come from far and wide to have Lamb look at a piece of machinery that no one else seems to be able to fix.

“Everybody asks me if I get bored,” Lamb said. “I don’t know what bored means.”

The pace of life is different in Homer. Pull into the driveway of Lamb Tractor and Small Engine Repair on a sunny June afternoon, and one will find birds singing in the trees as a soft wind blows the tall grass around the edges of the sprawling property that was once part of a thriving little community.

It may take a few minutes to wander the caverns of Lamb’s shop, which winds around what was once the Homer grocery store. A dance hall in the second story was a popular place for couples to kick up their heels on a Saturday night.

On any given day, one will find Lamb underneath a tractor, behind his welder’s hood, scavenging for a part, or welcoming members to the tractor club that meets here regularly.

Lamb has spent most of his life within a few miles of Homer. He learned young how to work on just about anything mechanical, and that work is what makes life interesting.

“I grew up about a mile down the road,” Lamb said. “In 1960, my dad bought this place behind us. It had a house and a garage, and we built a new shop. He had been farming for the Woodard brothers, but he quit that and us boys all grew up working in the shop.”

His father, Eldon Lamb, was a blacksmith who built a diverse business in his new shop at Homer.

“He worked on tractors, he did welding, he was a blacksmith,” Lamb said. “He repaired a lot of farm machinery for everybody. He sold tires, tractor tires, truck tires, and had quite a business for car tires.”

In the days when many Iowans put studded snow tires on their cars in the winter, the Lamb boys kept busying trading tires off and on for customers who flocked to Homer each spring and fall.

“When we got out of school, we’d come home and we had to work until 10:30 or 11 at night because the cars were lined up in the driveway waiting,” Lamb said. “There was a certain date in the fall when you could put them on, and then you had to have them off at a certain time in the spring, so there was a flood of people coming out.”

Somehow, all that hard work seemed like normal family life for the Lambs. When there was a project to be done, they worked on it together. When neighbors needed help, everyone pitched in again.

“My work ethic, I got to say, came from my dad,” Lamb said. “We did a lot of work. We baled hay for everybody back then. We shelled corn. We ran a custom combining business. We hauled livestock when they built the new stockyards in Webster City.”

For Lamb, learning at his father’s side just seemed like a lot of fun.

“I started working on lawn mowers when I was 8 years old and my dad showed me how to set the points on them. They all had points; it’s not like today where it’s all electronic.”

Growing up at such a time and place as Homer in the 1950s and ’60s provided its own sort of carefree spirit for kids.

Lamb recalls with fondness playing in the dusty streets of Homer as a kid in those years. The streets are long gone, but Lamb can eye a fence row and tell a visitor just where the streets and blocks were laid out. Homer had its own two-story schoolhouse, several homes, an old courthouse and four churches.

That strong faith in the Homer community is perhaps one reason Lamb has made it a lifelong practice not to work on Sundays. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and Lamb will never forget a fateful Sunday when he broke his own rule.

“I never do anything on Sunday for anybody,” Lamb said. “We were brought up that way, not to work on Sunday, and we don’t. I told my wife that day that I needed to go down and plant this 50 acres. She said, ‘You don’t usually do that.’ But it had been raining and the pressure was on to get the corn in the ground.”

It was that one time that this man who is an expert at working on any type of tractor slipped on a tractor step, grabbed the shift lever, and the rest was history. He tore up his back and his wrist, but was lucky to be alive when he was basically run over by his own tractor.

“I get shivers on my back thinking about it,” Lamb said.

The accident was in 1999. The following year he was offered a job by Case to work as a mechanic and then shop foreman in Ames. The benefits were tempting.

“When you’re self-employed, you make your own benefits, and they were offering really good benefits,” Lamb said.

He took the job and enjoyed it, but every day as he drove past his Homer shop on his way to Ames, Lamb was leaving a piece of his heart behind.

“Every day I went by here and there was a piece of me that was right there,” he said. “I was trying to do something on the weekends to help people, so I quit and I came back here.”

When he did, farmers near and far breathed a collective sigh of relief that Lamb was back in his shop. He has earned a reputation for being able to fix tractors, small engines, chainsaws, and a myriad of other farm implements that most other folks just give up on.

These days, Lamb is still overhauling tractors, welding, selling lawn and garden tires, and stays busy repairing lawn mowers and chainsaws. The combination of storms, derechos, and emerald ash borer killing the ash trees has meant that just keeping chainsaws running for folks is about a full-time job.

In August, he will again host the annual Homer Threshing Bee, bringing in folks to relive the farming methods of the past and simply enjoy an August afternoon in a place where the past seems to come to life in a most happy way.

He enjoys working with his hands, and he wishes more young people would give it a try.

“I think there’s gratification to working with your hands,” Lamb said. “Helping people is what I like to do. If you’ve got a problem, I like to solve it.”

Sometimes, when a particular project is posing a challenge, he finds the best thing to do is walk away from it for a day or two and then come back with a fresh mind to tackle it anew. Lamb doesn’t know much about giving up. It’s not part of his DNA.

“You need to figure out that there’s nothing you can’t do,” Lamb said. “There’s nothing out there that’s impossible. You can do it. You just need to study it and figure it out. Do it, and move forward. You don’t need to forget the past things, you learn from them.”