In the summer of 1984 west-central Indiana had an unusual number of thunderstorms. Unfortunately most of them happened at night, dropping just enough rain to get the cornfields nice and muddy for the next workday, which would invariably be sunny and hot. There were several days when the detasselers would get caked with mud in the morning and then baked into adobe in the afternoon.
In the middle of the ’84 season Bus 21 was transferred temporarily to the Odell area. You might remember that Howey’s gas station in Odell was where we met the area foremen each day when I was working a car crew back in 1976-78. You might also remember that Howey’s was not the most conscientious establishment in terms of cleanliness and food safety, if the fly larvae in the Twinkies were any indication. In any event, the Odell area needed some help and Bus 21 got the call. The area foremen there were named Ron and Zeke, and they seemed like decent guys at first. They were friendly enough, clear in their instructions, and happy to leave us alone to do our jobs. Not once did Ron or Zeke ever imply that if we couldn’t do the job, they’d find someone who could.
On our second day in the Odell area, I woke up to the sound of a really nice thunderstorm—loud, wet, and exhilarating. This is the one, I thought. This is what a day off sounds like. We had worked several hot days in a row and I don’t know that we necessarily deserved a day off but we wouldn’t have turned one down. Jay Yates, my brother Ric, Robbie Jasper, and I discussed the possibilities as we headed to Crawfordsville in the downpour, and nobody wanted to jinx it by betting on a day off.
(Only once did we get sent home before setting foot in the fields, and it happened just a few days after the Odell storm. It had been raining all the way to Romney and it didn’t look like it was going to stop soon, so Jim and Dick gave us the day off. In some ways that’s even better than getting to sleep in. It’s a nice surprise to get up, prepare for work as usual, then find out the day is yours. The college equivalent is walking all the way to class and finding a note from the professor’s secretary on the door.)
Some detasselers had a funny idea about us foremen: They thought we all lived together in a house with the rest of Dekalb management, who briefed us on the day’s activities before sending us off with a pat on the head. These kids assumed we knew what fields we’d be working in that day, the dimensions and soil composition of each field, how many plants were in each row, why that rock is next to that other rock, and so on. They didn’t understand that we showed up for work every morning just as much in the dark as they were. So as I sloshed past the kids huddled together at Walnut and Pike that morning, I was bombarded with questions.
Detasseler: “Are they going to make us detassel in this rain?”
Dono: “If they make you do anything in this rain, it most assuredly be detasseling.”
Detasseler: “Do we have to work today?”
Dono: “Not if there’s any credence to Aquinas’ doctrine of free will.”
Detasseler: “Will we get paid for all day if we don’t work?”
Dono: “Oh, definitely. I think they pay double-time for days when no work gets done.”
Detasseler: “What if I get hit by lightning?”
Dono: “Try to stand next to Rodney.”
Deep down I was fairly certain that Dekalb wasn’t going to send us out in these conditions. The forecast called for rain all day, and since the storm had already been storming for hours, the fields were going to be major slime pits. I looked to Jon Dean for a second opinion.
“There’s no way they’re going to make us work in this,” said Jon.
No one at the corner of Walnut and Pike had the power to cancel work, so we boarded the bus and headed to Odell. As we pulled up beside the area foremen’s truck a wave of murmurs murmured wavily through the bus: They’re going to send us home, they’re going to send us home.
But from my vantage point in the front seat I could hear Zeke tell Darrell Williams quite clearly to follow them to Field 107. As soon as we passed the first driveway we could have turned around in, the mood turned ugly.
“They’re going to make us work in this,” said Jon.
“Nah,” I said, drawing heavily on my legendary naivete, “they’re deep sleepers. They don’t know it’s been raining for ten straight hours. Soon as they see how muddy the field is, they’ll send us home.”
The bus stopped in the wet grass at the edge of Field 107. Ron and Zeke stood at the door to greet us foremen and told us how long it should take us to finish this field without ever acknowledging that for all practical purposes we were standing in a carwash. When they heard the anguished wails of the unhappy detasselers on the bus, Zeke said “Might as well get them boys out here and get ’em going. Faster you get started, faster you’ll be done. This field has to be done today—it’s going red.”
Wait, what? Field 107 was turning communist? This was stretching the domino theory to an absurd extreme. What the heck was Zeke talking about?
He didn’t bother explaining and I didn’t find out until a week later what it meant for a field to go red.
Turns out that going red is a crucial period for a cornfield. Here’s how I understand it: Let’s say Dekalb wants to create a new hybrid, Hybrid Z, with sturdier stalks and greater disease resistance. They plant two rows of Hybrid X, which is known for its sturdy stalks, alongside six or eight or ten rows of Hybrid Y, which is highly resistant to disease. The detasselers come along and remove the tassels from all the Hybrid Y plants so they can be fertilized by the Hybrid X plants. (This makes the X plants male and the Y plants female, which is why it’s so important for the crews to go down the right rows.) A corn plant is fertilized when pollen from the male plant lands on the silks of the female plant.
Now, the silks on a corn plant appear sometime before the plant fully matures, and after they’ve been exposed for a couple of days they turn a purplish-reddish color—or, in the vernacular of the agronomist, they go red. Once a plant goes red it’s ripe for pollination, so if you’ve left too many Hybrid Y tassels in the field you’re going to blow the whole deal.
Zeke might have assumed we wouldn’t have understood any of this. He also might have been consumed by a sadistic fervor to watch us slog through a cornfield in a typhoon. Either way, we foremen had no answer when our crews demanded to know what was going on.
Detasseler: “Why are we doing this?”
Dono: “I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”
Off we went into Field 107 and within seconds we were all carrying an extra five pounds of mud on each shoe. Visibility through the downpour was virtually nil. Our clothes were plastered to our bodies but at least I was wearing cutoffs so the rain just rolled down my legs.
Unfortunately the temperature was right around 60 degrees so it was a cold, cold rain.
Shouts of “Bastards!” and “Sonsabitches” and “Dicklicking bastard sonsabitches” pierced the air periodically. Yates and I tried to take our minds off the weather by singing every Beach Boys song we could think of. Some of the more mischievous fellows went the mud ball route.
We took a mid-morning break and let everyone board the bus for a few minutes, but during that break the Buttman and some of his acolytes convinced most of the kids that a work stoppage was in order. They weren’t going back out in the storm. Darrell Williams encouraged us foremen to get the guys moving in case Ron and Zeke came by, and we tried. “Next round, guys,” we announced half-heartedly. “Let’s go.”
Nobody moved. The busload of drenched detasselers was on strike. Jon and Bob and I found ourselves in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar position: We sided with the rebels but were employed by the current regime. The negotiations began and a compromise was reached: Darrell agreed that the break could continue until the rain stopped. Cheers rang out. Labor won a small victory over management, if sitting on a bus with forty steamy clammy detasselers is your idea of victory.
At one point Bob Suiter stood up and said “Guys, since we’re going to be here a while, let’s all sing.” There were groans and jeers from the crews, but Bob didn’t miss a beat, launching into the Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight” with campfire hand-clapping.
When the rain stopped a few minutes later, the crews seemed ready to go back to work. I don’t know how much Bob’s singing had to do with that, but the point is that they had taken a stand and affirmed their right to disagree. I was proud of them for that. They weren’t sitting on the bus out of laziness but as a legitimate protest against what they saw as an injustice.
And when the rain let up, they lived up to their bargain. They disembarked, headed for the next rows, and were met immediately by another downpour. Detasselers of a lesser character might have made a mad dash back to the bus, but these guys had already made their statement. They forged ahead, resigned to their fate.
Ron and Zeke drove by while we were putting the crews in the field and didn’t nod, didn’t wave, didn’t even look in our direction. They came back at lunchtime and led us to a drafty machinery barn where we ate standing up with cold wrinkled fingers. But to show what nice guys they were, Ron and Zeke told us we could go home when Field 107 was done—and that we could clock out at five no matter what time it actually was.
This seemed pretty generous until we realized we had two full rounds to do in a pretty long field—that’s two hours even on a dry sunny day. We finished up just before 4:00. They gave us an hour.
We remained in Odell for one more day, and when we got transferred back to Romney, Jim Something and Dick Nothing looked like long lost friends.