Surviving my corn detasseling days

Kregg Halstead

Detasseling at best is brutal, gritty, dirty work. If you are doing half-mile rows, going from one end to the other is going to take you around an hour, meaning you get to access your water at best say once every two hours. If you are doing shorter quarter-mile rows, nevertheless, you are looking at being able to take a swig of precious water only hourly. From being in the field from the crack of dawn, you get soaked from the dew bathing the corn plants, and then later bake under the Amazonian summer Iowa sun. If you are of a certain height (which I was), each corn plant’s leaves will hit you smack in the face. And from removing the tassels themselves by say day four, your hands and fingers will be covered with small, sharp cuts and your face and any exposed areas will be developing corn rash.

From the period from 1977 to 1985 (ages 11 to 19 for me), I used to dread the day after July 4th, because detasseling and all it meant and demanded was looming. For the times, the money was incredibly good, especially for successfully completing a contract which was delineated in acres, but also even as an hourly worker making from the perspective of a teenager, newfound wealth possible and within reach. With my detasseling money in late August 1980, I bought a moped (my prized possession throughout high school — a Honda Express — for $375 from Storm Lake Yamaha (near where Pizza Hut is located today).

Age 14 was the minimum age you could work as an hourly worker for one of the seed corn companies, which meant getting to the Storm Lake High School parking lot by 6 a.m. to board buses to then go out to the corn fields (both south and north of Storm Lake depending on the company and the year). Other than my Storm Lake Advertising Guide once a week paper route, and some lawn mowing, it was the first paying job I ever had. Each day on the bus and in the fields was almost a matter of survival.

There was lots of hazing from the older kids (par for the course in those days) as we 14-year-olds were collectively known as “Little League detasselers.” Lunch was the best time and with our huge calorie outtakes and active teen-age metabolisms, we used to push down huge amounts of food, primarily summer sausage sandwiches topped off by Hostess cupcakes or Ding Dongs.

I don’t think we had porta-potties in the field (those came in later years). But despite all of this, there were lots of fun and funny moments that I still remember and smile about 45 years later. Our bus driver was the most negative, crochety old guy (in those pre-chat and social media days we kids would have never dreamed that we could have complained about him and maybe got him removed). And despite him sitting all day on the bus with us working, he always was giving us negative feedback that we “were taking too many leaves” (if you take more than one in removing the tassel it negatively affects the still-growing ear of corn and in general the per bushel by acre yield of the corn field). And once at the end of a long day as we were completing the final round and one by one filing onto the bus for the ride back to Storm Lake, one could plainly and readily see that someone had (I think inadvertently) left a huge tassel at the end of their row, with our bus driver immediately seizing upon this and declaring angrily but also later comically that the tassel “looked like a G** D*** Christmas tree out there.”

One of the older boys in our crew had been the lead role in seemingly every play and musical Storm Lake High School had put on while he was in school as he was quite theatrically and musically inclined, and from that day forward, wherever the bus driver would appear, he would be serenaded by a version of “Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree” played by this brave 18-year-old on his harmonica, and everyone on the bus, including eventually the bus driver, would die laughing.

And we had another guy in our crew (say maybe age 24) who was already married and was known as “the married guy.” And one day right before lunch one of the guys in our crew had first seen and then caught a garter snake, and I don’t know how it happened but soon crew members were more and more putting $5s and $10s into a pot on a dare to the married guy to take a bite out of and swallow part of the snake! And to at least my amazement and that of my fellow 14-year-olds (he really must have needed money as I don’t think his career was going too well) he did it! The married guy ate a snake!

That was detasseling in 1980 in Storm Lake. Any job I have ever had after that was gravy.

Kregg Halstead’s family lived in Storm Lake from 1972-1986, and he graduated from Storm Lake High School in 1984.