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[SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>]

Ah, Don, you hit my corn button......

I too grew up in the midwest and know King Corn well.  We too spent a 
lot of our time with corn. 

My cousin and I once buried my pesty little brother in the back of the 
corn field (can't hear anything through that stuff) and left him there 
all day.  Just before supper we went out and dug him up, brushed him 
off, threatened him we'd kill him if he repeated his offenses (stealing 
gum from my cousin) or told on us.  Recently he admitted, some 55 or so 
years later, that despite his 5 tours of duty in VietNam, and 40 years 
in a scary government intelligence job in SE Asia, he has never been 
more afraid than that day he spent buried in the cornfield.......

But they are magical places, cornfields.  We hoed for hours, and then 
for days.  It was what we did.  Laughed, teased each other, ate our 
sandwiches in the shade of the stuff.  The smell of a growing 
cornfield.....and the sounds---nothing else can bring childhood flooding 
back so fast, for me.  We cut corn, shocked corn, shucked corn, gleaned 
corn.    All kids' work when I grew up--for us, 'share and share alike' 
meant farm work; it was the great equalizer, and meant you were an 
integral part of the process.  Then it was all over for the year the day 
my uncle turned the pigs into the stubble.  Things went into winter mode 
at that moment each year.

My first 'real' job was detasseling corn for Pioneer Seed Company, along 
with the bulk of the kids my age.  Had to get a SS# for that endeavor; 
we got up and made our sandwiches, walked to Camden (3 miles) climbed at 
4AM into the back of a farm truck and were taken to whatever field we'd 
start in.  Cold, I remember, at that hour of the day; it took a lot of 
clothes, which were soon wet and even colder.  We were paid $0.22/hr 
from arrival in the field, worked and shed clothes until we had hardly 
anything on anymore, then as the sun got over, started back on with the 
clothes.  Got back to town about 6PM or so, went home to milk.  Sounds 
brutal now and probably illegal, but at a school reunion this past 
summer many of us agreed that those were among the better days we can 
remember.....

This year I went back to where I grew up for the first time in a very 
long time.  I came back home with pictures of cornfields, corn, vistas 
of cornfields, and 3 bushels fresh corn.  I was hoping some of this 
grain I brought back would parch like the old stuff did, but although 
some of it is close, not quite what we remember.  I brought OP grain my 
Amish BIL grew and a bushel of OP grown by an old order German Baptist 
family, thinking they would be closest to what we used to have.  I'll 
look again another time, see if I can get closer.  Meanwhile my brother 
will grow out some of this I got this year.

Another thing we ate a lot of was cornmeal mush.  I remember being 
somewhat shocked in my college days to discover that there were people 
who didn't LIKE cornmeal mush.  How could they not like mush?  
Especially fried mush, all crispy on the outside, and all creamy and 
corny in the middle?  I still like mush, if it's made of good corn.  One 
of my brothers maintains a good grinder of the old sort and I actually 
shipped a bushel of corn to him this fall to grind.  He will grind it in 
small batches when he does his and send along as he does it, so stays 
good and fresh.

Yes, corn.  I remember wheat and oats and soybeans and hayfields, but I 
really remember corn.

Susan Jane, in Maine


Don Bowen KI6DIU wrote:
> This got me to thinking, always dangerous when I am in the mood I am in.  I 
> grew up surrounded by corn.  As a kid I planted, cultivated, weeded, 
> chopped, and harvested corn, and played in corn cribs, shoot rats around 
> corn cribs, hid in corn rows, and fed corn to hogs and corn silage to 
> cattle.  We ate corn fed pork and cattle after they had been turned out on 
> the corn fields after harvesting.  My father sold seed corn.
>
> We farmed the place my grandfather farmed. Until it ended with me the Bowen 
> family has corn farmed since the 1620s.  My cousin still farms 1400 acres 
> of Mississippi bottom land in northern Missouri. My grandmother knew just 
> about every way possible to cook corn, corn bread, corn pone, make Hominy, 
> Grits, you name it.  We ate field corn as corn on the cob.  But over the 
> years about the only thing I get anymore is sweet corn on the cob and corn 
> bread.  The last time I had decent hominy was some my aunt made.  Maybe I 
> need to relearn some of those recipes and get reacquainted.