It was July 1960 in Lafayette, Indiana, I was 14 years old and wanted to make more than $6-8 a week delivering newspapers. Someone had mentioned to me and 4 of my buddies that a hybrid seed corn company was hiring teenagers to detassel corn at $1.00 an hour for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Detasseling corn was basically removing the tassels from selected corn rows to create hybrid seed. The work sounded simple enough, but it turned out to be the hottest, scratchiest, most exhausting labor I had ever experienced.
On my first day, I wore a t-shirt and had no gloves or sunscreen. Central Indiana in July feels like a tropical jungle. Out in the open, without wind, trees, or clouds, moisture evaporates then settles onto the fields – a fat, invisible blanket of humidity woven thicker by the hour as the sun rises in the sky and heats up the corn field and the heat index regularly climbs to 110 degrees.
The foreman yelled to start pulling off the tassels from 4 out of 5 rows and continued yelling faster and faster. The experienced workers wanted to get a bonus for speedy work so they insulted the newbies like me as lazy and worse.
I was desperate for relief by the mid-morning break, disoriented from dehydration. By noon I was dripping wet and the dry corn leaves had scratched and poked my hands, arms, and face. I was exhausted, took a 20-minute break for a sandwich, and then continued working on autopilot counting the minutes until 5 p.m. At the end of the day, the foreman came up to us and said they didn’t need our group anymore so we got fired. My lesson learned after one day was that I was not made out for detasseling corn.
After my junior year in high school, I was 16 and worked the summer at the Purdue University Experimental Farm in West Lafayette, IN. Our crew of 6 measured corn and sorghum leaves and pulled and hoed weeds as part of research on seed varieties. I remember at lunch we would heat a big metal pot of water, pick and shuck ears of corn, and immediately toss them into the boiling water for a few minutes. We took them out of the hot water and as soon as they cooled ate them. I remember the taste as the sweetest corn I ever ate, no butter needed. Other memories are of raw hands and a sore back from bending over from 8 to 5 in the oppressive Indiana summer heat and humidity. One day we got a so-called bonus field to weed meaning whenever we finished we were done for the day. I remember someone saying as we started that all they wanted to see from us was assholes and elbows.
My most vivid memory of that summer though is of an Indian Sikh Ph.D. student with a turbin who was collecting sheep poop in bags to determine nutrition properties for a forage crop he was feeding them, a job I luckily avoided. I remember hearing a yell and seeing him chasing a half dozen spooked sheep with a hoe through his forage crop field, probably cursing in a foreign language, as his turban had come undone and was streaming behind him in the wind.
After my high school senior year, I worked the summer on an assembly line at National Homes in Lafayette, a manufacturer of pre-fabricated homes. The company mass-produced home components in the factory and assembled them on site, instead of building them one at a time by hand. I worked the daytime 7-3 shift, primarily on the wall panel line with a belt pouch full of nails and a 16-ounce claw hammer. The one memory that sticks with me is banging my finger the first day, drawing blood, and being told I couldn’t leave the line unless I could see bone through the cut. The regular workers were tough, they sucked it up and seldom complained about working conditions.
The owner had recruited a number of these workers in the 1950s, specifically from the small town of Tazewell in the hills of eastern Tennessee. They valued family, church, loyalty, military service, hard work, and drinking beer and moonshine. My experience with them was overwhelmingly positive, and I later served alongside many men with similar backgrounds in Vietnam.
After my freshman year in college, I worked the summer at an Alcoa Aluminum plant in Lafayette on the 7-11 night shift on an assembly line loading aluminum tubes into boxes, at about $2.25 an hour which was big money for me then. After a couple of weeks, I felt like a walking zombie at work, always checking the clock and trying to wait for the shift to end. Then every once in a while, there would be a supervisor come along and say we had a bonus batch to load. The older workers on the shift would agree and we went into all-out loading as the hourly pay doubled during that batch.
Looking back, these jobs taught me far more than how to earn money. They taught me the dignity of physical labor, respect for the working people, the importance of a strong work ethic, and the value of education. After spending summers in cornfields, factories, and assembly lines, I became increasingly determined to build a future that depended more on my mind than my back.
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