The teen-age girls, somewhere around twenty of them, were gathered together outside the office and chattering away even though it was just six in the morning. A similar group of teen-age guys were gathered together about twenty feet away. The guys kept looking at the girls, and once in a while, there'd be a loud burst of laughing. I figured they were talking about the girls and probably bragging about what they'd do if they got assigned to walk the cornfield with one. That's what I'd done when I was their age and doing the same job.
I knew from that experience that wasn't going to happen. The guys were the clean-up crew and were doomed to walk through fields of tall corn in the morning, and then continue walking through the same fields in the afternoon. The seed corn company knew very well what would happen if they mixed boys and girls in the cornfield, so they made sure that never happened.
There was another reason girls didn't walk through the fields. It that day and age, girls were considered to be somewhat delicate and fragile, and wouldn't have stood up to the conditions of walking the corn.
The difference between morning and afternoon was night and day, but both were still miserable. In the morning, the corn would have captured the dew from the night before in the little pockets between each leaf and the stalk. Brushing against a corn stalk would dump some of that water on the guy, and within half an hour, he'd look like he'd taken a shower with his clothes on.
By late morning, the bright Illinois sun would have dried the corn out, so there weren't any showers anymore. What there was, was no flow of air because of the corn, heat that would suck all the sweat out of you, and super-high humidity caused by the evaporation of the water from the plants and ground beneath. The guys would still be wet, but it would be with sweat, not dew.
The girls had it a lot easier because they were girls. The girls made the first pass through each field, but they rode on platforms attached to a sort of tractor on stilts high enough to clear the corn plants. There were two platforms on each side of the tractor, and those platforms were spaced so each girl was between two rows of corn. One girl pulled the tassels on the inside row, the other pulled those on the outside row.
That's how we did it, back then, how we created hybrid seed corn that would stand the heat and dry part of the Illinois summers, had a time to maturity that matched the growing season, and most importantly, increased the yield from each acre.
The process was pretty simple compared to the gene-splicing you read about being used to make the so-called "GMO" vegetables and crops today. The grower planted four rows of corn that would become the "female" corn, and beside that and spaced a little further apart, two rows of the corn variety that would become the "male" corn.
Corn can and does fertilize itself because each plant has both male and female flowers. The female flowers grow from the intersection of a leaf with the stalk, but they don't look like flowers. Each one is a tightly wrapped set of corn husks that has "silks", fine hair-like structures that form at the tip of each flower. The male part is a "tassel", a stalk that grows from the very top of the plant. The tassel has grains of pollen attached to a small spray of thin branches that grow from the main tassel stock.
If everything goes as Nature planned, that pollen falls or is blown to nearby corn plants by the wind, is caught by the leaves, and flows down the leaf to the silks of the female flower. A grain of pollen meets a silk, and each time that happens, a single kernel of corn will grow on the cob that develops as the bud matures.
In this way, a corn plant clones itself in the kernels that form on the cob. If those kernels are planted the next year, the corn they produce will be identical to the corn that produced them. My grandpa knew this and each year, selected the longest, fattest ears from his crop and used them for seed the next year.
What I was helping the grower do was interfere with that cycle. We did that by pulling the tassels from the female corn plants before the pollen ripened so they'd be fertilized by the rows of male plants instead. Since those male plants weren't the same variety, the kernels that grew on the cobs of the female plants would be a hybrid of the two, just like a mule is a hybrid between a horse and a donkey.
The process worked really well. One could plant male plants that grew really tall and produced several partially filled ears on each stalk, and use that pollen to fertilize female plants that were short with only a couple ears per stalk, but with ears that were long, of excellent quality and were always completely filled with kernels. The result would be a hybrid with more ears per stalk than the female plant and would make a higher yield per acre of ears with higher quality than the male plant.
I was the driver of the detasseling machine. I also farmed three hundred and twenty acres, but by the time the corn tasseled, I didn't have much to do except wait until my soybeans were ready to cut. Driving a detasseling machine was a way to earn some cash, and cash is something farmers back then didn't get until they sold their crops in the fall. It was also fun because of the girls.
I was twenty-four at the time and working my dad's farm because he was sixty-six and had retired. The tax laws wouldn't let him just give me the farm. I had to buy it and all the equipment. I was going to do that just a soon as I'd socked some money away in the bank. Weather can make farming risky, and I didn't want to lose everything because of a year that was too wet or too dry.
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That morning, I checked the oil in the detasseling machine, then climbed the ladder to the seat and fired it up. After a short trip to the gas tank and a fill-up, I drove it down the white rock lane to where the girls were gathered. Behind me were four other machines driven by farmers like me.
The girls all walked over to the machine they'd been on the day before and climbed up onto the platforms. Mine did as well, except I was missing Trudy, an eighteen year old little blonde who was pretty plain and always stood on the platform closest to my right side. She had a great smile but not much figure. I asked Marsha, a brunette who had a lot of figure in all the right places, what had happened to Trudy. Marsha grinned.
"Her boyfriend got her in a family way so they got married on Sunday. She won't be back. They're living with her mom until Ricky finds a job."
I was thinking about Trudy and wondering how she'd managed to find a boyfriend, much less find one who wanted to screw her, when another girl climbed onto the platform Trudy had used.
I say girl, but she was no teenager. She was young for sure, but her face was more pretty than cute, and instead of the smaller, perky breasts most of the girls had, her breasts were full and pushed out her T-shirt a lot further.
That T-shirt was going to be a problem -- not for me, but for her. Her shorts were going to be a problem too. She had nice legs, but after a day on the detasseling machine, she was going to have little cuts all over them.
There was a dress code of sorts on detasseling machines, and it wasn't to cover what the driver would love to see. It was to protect the girls. Most girls came out the first time expecting to get a great tan while they earned some money. Since the platforms put their head and shoulders higher than the corn, they would get all the sun they wanted...for about the first three hours. After that, any bare skin started to turn pink and by quitting time, it'd be red. The next day, they'd be hurting a lot from the sunburn they got.
That wasn't the worst though. Corn leaves have sharp edges, and if they brush against you just right, they'll leave a little cut. It's not a bad cut and most don't even bleed much, but they do hurt and you'd get sliced to ribbons if you rode between corn rows like the girls did on the machine. The platforms had rails to keep the girls from falling off, but weren't solid, so the corn leaves stuck through and brushed against their legs.
The seed corn company always told the girls to wear long pants and a worn-out white, long sleeved shirt. The pants would keep their legs from getting cut and the white shirt would let through enough sun to eventually give them a tan, but not enough to burn them. I figured my new girl had been hired just that morning so she wouldn't have known. That had happened before, so I'd started keeping one of my old white shirts and a pair of worn out jeans in my truck so a girl didn't have to go home burnt to a crisp and cut up after the first day.
As it turned out, I was right. She smiled when I asked her name.
"Gwendolyn Macey, but I go by Gwen."
"Well, Gwen, you're not dressed for this kind of work, but I can fix that."
I climbed down from the driver's platform. When I came back from my truck, I handed her the shirt and pants.
"This shirt'll keep you from getting sunburnt, and the pants will keep your legs from getting cut by the corn."
Gwen looked at me.
"These are a man's clothes."
"Yep, they're mine, and you really do need them. See how the other girls are dressed?"
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She was kind of cute in my old white shirt and faded jeans, sort of like a little girl when she dresses up in Mommy's clothes. My jeans were too long by about six inches, so Gwen had them rolled up. My shirt hit her about mid thigh and it looked like she was wearing a white tent. I figured that was a good thing. Gwen's hips looked wider than mine, so my jeans probably fit pretty tight. I'd be spared the distraction of looking at a nice female ass all day long.
