So, how many of you have detasseled corn in your life like myself (when I was in junior high in my case)... it is truly the summer job from heck.
Omaha World Herald wrote:
State champion corn picker passes on his skills
BERTRAND, Neb. (AP) - It's difficult to get a photo of Wayne Guthrie's hands. The hook in one glove cuts the ear of corn from the stalk while the other hand pulls it out of the husk and tosses it into a wagon.
All, it seems, in one motion.
Guthrie, 73, proves year after year that he still can strip a corn row of its ears in record time. Earlier this year, he won his age division at the state corn-picking contest by harvesting about 800 pounds of corn in 30 minutes.
His son, Jerry, and grandson, Riley, also are 2004 state champions for their age groups. His wife, Janice, was third this year but has won past state titles in the women's division.
Guthrie demonstrated his skills recently for people attending an old-fashioned corn picking west of Bertrand. The event also featured 1930s and '40s era tractors and one-row pickers.
"When I was a kid, they always figured 100 bushels per day," Guthrie said, when asked what was a good harvest by hand. "Few people would do 100 bushels. . . . Back then, 40-bushel (per acre) corn was really good corn."
Most farmers would fill one box in the morning and one in the afternoon during harvest.
"That was enough," Guthrie said, because they had livestock chores and other things to do around the farm.
Young men who picked corn for a living had a different speed.
"If they hired you, you picked as much as you can as fast as you can," Guthrie said.
He recalled starting out at 8 cents per bushel. He finished his corn-picking career in the late 1940s earning up to 25 cents per bushel.
His speed comes from always looking ahead.
"My eyes are three ears ahead of my hands. I know how the next three ears are hanging," Guthrie said.
Although he was told for years that he was a good corn picker, he didn't enter his first contest until 10 years ago.
Since then, he has earned many titles and trained his family to be champion corn pickers.
Guthrie said he was 10 years old when he first helped his dad pick corn. That lasted until he was old enough to own his own team of horses and hire out on his own.
"I never did go to high school," he said. "I'd rather pick corn."
Ah yes, the joys of detasseling corn. I had the privilege for five seasons as a teen. During the summer of 2003, I was a member of an audit/inspection team some 25 years or so after me teen years. So I got to pull a few tassels just a few short months ago.
As far as being a job from heck, I would have to agree. However, if you're a little guy like me, baling hay was tougher. And another job that I would rate worse in the ag arena is a little job called thinnng.
Thinning is not nearly as tough physically. However, with detasseling even though you're physically going through heck, you can at least escape mentally and daydream or something. With thinning, if you daydream the job is such you will have to start over.
Sorry group, no urban legends or anything of the sort in this post.
My old signature got too old. So old it was getting almost as old me as me. Yeah, it was up there in years.
"The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."
Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1963
What's funny about that SSP thread is that, on a website where people will defend their home city/state to the death, even the Kansas guys seem to agree that Nebraska is better.
I detassled corn the summers after 7th and 8th grade. I hated it so much after the first year that my Dad had to promise to match my pay checks to get me to do it the second year. In 1988, it was hard for a 13 year-old kid to pass up $7/hr. I worked for a different company my second year. A company who didn't equate child labor with slave labor (unlike the first company) and it turned out to be a pretty relaxing job made all the sweeter by that double paycheck.
