Detasselling Corn and Brain Injuries

In the last post, “Bulldozers, Check Pools, Dirty Tricks, and The Finger,” I briefly mentioned that in 1953 at Caterpillar Tractor Company, my first full-time job, I made $1.56 an hour, more than double the $.75 an hour I had made on my best summer job, detasseling corn. That calls to mind memorable cornfield experiences in the early 1950s, which should have prepared me for the antics and pranks I witnessed at Caterpillar. In my summer of agricultural work, the process was all manual labor; in recent years a machine does the major detasseling, followed by some clean-up of tassels by hand.

My fellow teenagers and I pulled the golden spikes of pollen out of eight rows of “female” plants so that they would not self-pollinate. Two “bull rows” were left to develop tassels and pollinate the female plants, providing the hybrid corn that modern farmers rely on for better yields.
Detasseling corn is one of the simplest of human tasks, but due to its scale is a remarkable achievement of young workers. Each year many thousands of acres of corn are detasseled. The marvel of human engineering is that in the previous century, this labor was performed by that enigma of evolution, the teenager. Mix together a hundred adolescents—boy-crazy girls and girl-crazy boys, and tell me you are willing to risk your multi-million dollar business on the gamble that they will be punctual, conscientious, and reliable workers.

Pulling tassels in Illinois cornfields was some of the most demanding work I ever did. Those who recall their time in this activity consider it one of the dirtiest and most exhausting jobs of their life, yet they look back on the ordeal as character-building. And for most of us, it was a fun experience! Early each morning we gathered in a central location in town, clambered into a stake truck, and rode for fifteen or twenty miles to the seed corn plots. For teenagers, this became an adventure, meeting other boys and girls, chatting, and joking.

We had been warned to wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts to protect us from the corn leaves, so sharp they sliced your skin like a paper cut. Mix sweat and pollen into a cut from a corn leaf and you have a concoction of burning and itching that a devil would delight in. You couldn’t wear gloves, because you had to “feel” the tassel to grab it and pull it out Most of our cuts were on our hands and fingers, especially the fold of skin between the thumb and forefinger.

We entered the fields with dry clothes, but by the time we made the first pass through the field, the dew on the corn left us soaking. That might give us a chill, but by mid-morning the hot sun raised the temperature into the eighties, and in the afternoon into the nineties. The humidity, also in the nineties, rose up from the soil, and with little or no breeze, trapped us in a virtual sauna. By then the pollen had gotten inside our clothing and made us itch so much that we ended up with rashes and deep scratches. It’s no wonder that some kids quit, refusing to work under such nasty conditions. Those of us who toughed it out were proud that we survived.

Some companies had kids walking the fields, but my outfit had “detasseling machines,” that didn’t actually do any of the detasseling, just carried workers through the field to more quickly remove tassels. The machines were homemade contraptions, a combination of Yankee ingenuity and Midwestern inventiveness. Stripping the body from a model A Ford, they salvaged the chassis, raising the radiator, engine, and axle about nine feet from the ground, fitting a sprocket to the axle with a chain linked to the drive wheels on the ground. Front wheels and back wheels straddled four rows of corn. On each side of this device a two by eight foot board provided a platform for the kid to stand on, using one hand to hold onto a vertical upright, and the other hand to pull tassels. Two workers rode each plank, one focusing on the inner row, the other pulling tassels on the outer row. A driver sat on a tractor seat and maneuvered the machine down the rows, the steering wheel reworked with a long shaft to the front wheels.

The mechanics of this device were so crude it could hardly be called a “machine.” There weren’t many safety laws in those days, and if such a homemade monstrosity were reincarnated today it would give a safety inspector a heart attack. The worst offender was the open chain drive with a large sprocket on the high axle. Being teenage boys, we wanted the world to know we were descended from apes, and when making a turnaround at the end of the row, might swing like a monkey from that high axle. Unfortunately, not every boy inherited the dexterity of his distant relatives, and risked get tangled up in the sprocket, losing a finger or two. The foremen warned us constantly of these dangers, which made it all the more appealing. If we didn’t do some of the things we were told explicitly not to do, would we be human? Maybe, but we wouldn’t be teenagers.

Our team was fortunate to have as a driver a very interesting salty guy, John, who we considered “old” because he was probably forty-five, much older than the college-age foremen. John knew so much about the world, and told us stories at lunch. His most memorable tale was about a friend of his who had supernormal or abnormal powers, or both. John told us he and his friends were in the country and stopped at a house, but couldn’t go up to the house because a dog was in the fenced yard, running up to the gate, barking and baring its teeth ferociously. John’s friend got down on all fours like a dog, started growling, opened his mouth wide to show his teeth, and slowly edged up to the gate, snarling and howling. Faced with this threat, the dog put its tail between its legs and yipped its way back to the house, hiding under the porch.

John was such a good story-teller, mimicking the dog’s fierce barking, then imitating his friend’s mean snarling, and finally the dog’s wail of surrender when it hid under the porch, that we believed John. To this day I don’t know if he was putting us on, or whether it really happened. But he told it in such vivid detail that I can still visualize his supernormal friend scaring the wits out of that dog, and if it wasn’t true, it should have been. He is probably the best story-teller I ever heard.

I am ashamed to admit a prank we pulled on John. He drove a well-maintained 1930s Chevy coupe, his pride and joy. Even in the 1950s it was a smart-looking car; today it would be considered a classic. At the end of one detasseling day, I lifted up the left side of the hood and removed a spark plug wire. We waited for John to get in and start the car, which ran very rough on only three cylinders. We asked him what was wrong with his car, but he just raced the engine and drove off, eager to get away from us pesky brats. When he arrived the next day, we saw a different side of John. He made it very clear to us that if anyone messed with his car, he’d beat the crap out of them. We knew he meant it, and we didn’t dare touch his car again.

One group of detasslers on their way home had to pass under a train trestle so low that the cab of their truck could just pass through. If you climbed up on the sideboards behind the cab, your head would strike the trestle. Some of our daredevil detasslers stood there until the last second before ducking down. The next day they tried doing it facing away from the trestle. Three boys played “chicken,” to see which one would be the last to duck. All three hit the trestle. Two escaped with cuts and bruises, one suffering permanent brain damage. This wasn’t one of the dangers of detasseling, it was just a risk of teenage foolishness. A risk with no potential reward, but lifelong consequences.

For the most part, we had fun detasseling, socializing with kids from other towns, and flirting a little. We were just kids having fun and making a little extra spending money in the process. If corn got cross-pollinated and the seed companies made a few million, we didn’t mind.