If you've ever wondered how North Dakota's entrepreneurial manufacturers became successful, you'll find the answers and a wealth of details in "Bobcat: Fifty Years," a 216-page book by Marty Padgett.

It's the story of how the Melroe family - father E.G. Melroe, his brother, Sig, and his four sons - started out making improvements to farm machinery on their farm near the Red River Valley hamlet of Gwinner, population about 300 in the first half of the 20th century.

It's the story of the American dream, set right here in North Dakota, that would never have come true without ingenuity and a resolve to see a job through.

And it's a story that needs to be heard, because this is how North Dakota was made. And there are hundreds more inventors in North Dakota today, making lives better through their inventions.

This is a story that anyone who's ever seen or used a Bobcat machine will find interesting.

Told in an easy style, yet with enough technical particulars, you will appreciate the intricate details of this story if you enjoy tinkering with machines, or if ever you've worked on a farm or ranch, or shoveled dirt or manure by hand, or if you're an inventor yourself. Or, if you want to read the matter-of-fact progression of a worldwide company that still calls North Dakota home.

The company's patriarch, Melroe, attended the North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo in the early 1900s, where the idea of mechanizing farm life stuck in the young man's head. He returned home with new ideas and converted manual labor to machine modernity.

With his innovation backed by education, Melroe's family farm grew. E.G. and Sig became the first combine owners in the state, in 1927, and they began making improvements to it a year later. That windrow pickup was Melroe's entry into the farm implement business.

During the Depression, it was out of necessity that Melroe put his mechanical abilities to work: Replacing broken machinery was out of the question; it simply needed to be rebuilt.

Successful manufacturing is a continual process of improvement, the book shows, and the Melroe Co. certainly hung its hat on continual improvement and response to customers' needs and demands.

This coffee-table sized book is colorful, with Bobcat red lining each page, red chapter subheadings to aid the reader's search for information, and quality black-and-white and full color photographs of the people and products in action.

There's even a copy of technical drawings filed in the U.S. Patent Office and a 1961 price list for the self-propelled loader. And the appendix holds a complete Bobcat product index with full color photos of each machine with model numbers and the years produced.

It's packed with details of the Melroe family's inventions, along with extensive sidebar stories offering up-close details of important points in the main work. This book describes the terrors and triumphs of transforming a small business from the family farm into the giant manufacturing success it is today.

When three of E.G. Melroe's four sons returned from World War II, the company moved to downtown Gwinner, the first of many moves for the fledgling company searching for manufacturing space. They had no business or financial plans and used their own money to fund their inventions, until in the 1950s one of their suppliers introduced them to a business-saving credit deal with the First National Bank of Chicago.

In 1958, the Melroe brothers met the Keller brothers of Rothsay, Minn. The Kellers ran a blacksmith shop that remanufactured plowshares and fixed other iron implements. Also inventors of necessity, they had been working on a three-wheel loader that could efficiently clean out a turkey barn for one of their customers.

The families struck a deal: The Kellers would come to Gwinner to work for Melroe Manufacturing and further develop the machine while Melroe would pay the Kellers a royalty for each machine sold. The new machine would be called the Melroe Self-Propelled Loader and later renamed the Bobcat Skid-Steer Loader.

The heart of their success was their new loader, originally designed for lighter agricultural use, that brought technical challenges until they hit on an idea to end the continual breakdowns: They enclosed the drive system in an oil bath and sales of the skid-steer loader took off. From sales of $1 million in 1960 to $6 million in 1964 to $604 million in 1994, the company grew quickly.

Time and again, Melroe proved that their loader would out perform other machinery, thereby saving their customers money.

From humble beginnings, through tremendous growth and expansion of products and sales territory, through sales of the company and the accompanying changes, the Bobcat brand in just 50 years has become known worldwide. Today, millions of people make their living off the Bobcat, one idea from two brothers and their dad.

(Kris Fehr lives with her family in Dickinson, where she directs Western Wellness Foundation and the Best Friends Mentoring Program, a nonprofit organization, and does some freelance writing.)