As Lee and I were driving back to his and Jean’s house recently (March 2023) Lee shared an interesting story from high school in Seward, Nebraska. He noted that it was the only time he came into some conflict with his mother. Well, I suppose that’s possible, but the rest of the story seems entirely plausible.
When Lee was in high school, one of the standard high school summer jobs in Seward was detasseling corn. When corn is grown for seed, the grower wants to control the fertilization process so that the traits of the corn can be better controlled than they would be with natural fertilization. So as the seed corn plants reach a particular stage of maturity, kids are employed to tromp through the wet fields and pull off the corn tassels. Lee has clearly been industrious his whole life, and he was one of Seward’s corn detasselers.
School buses took the crews from town out to the contracting seed farms, where the working conditions they found were fairly terrible. The fields were irrigated, so the crew often found themselves sliding through mud. The work started early in the day, and the dewy plants ensured that all the workers were soaking wet. You can be sure that the detasselers were quite a mess by mid-afternoon quitting time. At Lee’s house a hose was strung through the trees to provide an al fresco pre-shower facility so he could get clean enough to go inside for an actual shower.
Quality control for these projects consisted of the old hands (17 years old) supervising the activity of the workers. You sure didn’t want to be called out by the scary 17 year old supervisors. So the crews worked diligently through the weeks, detasseling and showering, day after day.
Finally, the last day of work came, and the crew had made plans to go into the pool hall at Concordia college and drink cokes. This counted as a major celebration in the career of a detasseler, and it was a big deal. Lee celebrated heartily with the crew, and then headed home afterwards.
When he got home, his mother was waiting for him, and announced that he had to go back for another day of detasseling the next day. Apparently, there was another level of quality control beyond the scary 17 year olds, and the job was judged to be incomplete. You can image Lee’s reaction to the news, and it was not pretty. (He characterized it as “whining”.) He says he got an energetic earful from his mother, and it was clear that no amount of protestation would let him escape completing the job the next day. His mother’s strident reaction was something he had not seen before – perhaps borne of her father’s work as a carpenter.
The work was indeed completed the next day, and Lee was left with the indelible mark that Meyers complete their work. And I suspect that served Lee well during his fine career as an architect.