My First Job- Corn Detassler circa 1992

So, I was telling an old friend about my current miserable employment at Safeway cooking food in the Deli and she suggested I write about the different jobs I've worked over the years. I've found myself in many different professions and never settled into one for very long. I kind of liked the idea so I figured I'd start it off in this here blog. My first job was detassling corn for Pioneer Seed Company. This is a job for migrant workers or 14 year olds which is what I was. Either way you're supposed to get proper paperwork from the government to attain employment but not all of us did. For those who don't know the tassle is the business end of the corn. When the corn is mature pollin from the tassle gets released into the air and blown across the field and thus corn pollinates corn. That's the simple version. Well Pioneer didn't want corn cross pollinating they wanted to do the pollinating themselves, the selfish pricks. So, our job was to pull the tassle off every stalk of corn. If you've ever been to the midwest you would know this is a very big job.

Some fields we'd walk in groups. Each person taking a row and walking and yanking, yanking and walking. Others would be done in tractors with large arms reaching out over the rows with baskets hanging in between the rows. In the basket you would lean out into your row and essentially swim through the row yanking tassles arm over arm. Sweepers would follow behind yanking the tassles that the basket men would inevitably miss.

It was hard hot work under the Illinois sun and paid minimum wage, which at the time was $4.25 I believe. Miserable but I met one of my best and lifelong friends in one of those fields. The friend I would eventually move to Alaska with 6 years later in 1998. One day we were walking a field and bitching about our plight in life. Oh, the miseries of being a 14 year old working for 3 weeks in the summer. The Horror, the Horror....Anyway, there we were bitching about the job and coming up with new names for our boss such as "Dumbfuck Dom" for example. We were on a roll insulting Dom and detassling when what would you know Dom storms through several rows of corn like a blustering bull red faced and fuming, "This may be the worst fucking job in the world but it's the only fucking job you have!" and then he stormed off. We did feel kind of bad, for who knows how long he had been walking along with us just a couple rows to the side but almost 20 years later Neal and I are still laughing about the look on his face as he burst through that corn.

Every day we would all meet in the Hardees parking lot. I remember my dad driving me in to town every day at about 6 am to go to work. He'd drop me off in the lot. I'd sit off to the side on a parking block and watch the workers gather. At 6 am we'd all pile into an old school bus and drive out north of town to hit the fields. Most people would take the bus but there were a few that would drive themselves. There was one group of poor white trash that drove their beater every day out to the fields but they didn't last long. They hit the mother load or at least thought they did. They came across a whole crop of marijuana ditch weed growing alongside the field we were working. They couldn't believe their luck or that they were the only ones that knew what this stuff was. They quit work and somewhere found a bunch of big black trash bags and just went after it, ripping the ditch weed right out of the ground and shoving plant after plant into hefty bags, laughing and joking the whole time. Once they'd harvested the whole crop they jumped into their beater and headed off. Never saw them again. Problem with ditch weed is that it's a weed. It is marijuana but it's wild grown, not cultivated and thus doesn't have the THC content in it that the crop has. Grows all over Illinois, often in ditches, hence the name. Won't get you high, though I've heard you can get quite the headache. I remember it happened at lunch so the rest of us were all sitting in the grass watching the show. I'm not sure how but they seemed to be the only ones around that didn't know they were complete idiots. Some things in life just aren't fair.

Two summers I worked this job for a grand total of 6 weeks.