Detasseling Corn

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In Muscatine on Tuesday, July 13, 1954, I borrowed Dad’s car to drive my partners – and high school friends – Mike Collier, Don Mullen, and Bill Mullen to our part-time summer job detasseling corn.  (Producing hybrid seed corn required removing the pollen-producing top part of the plant, the tassel, so the corn can’t pollinate itself.  Instead, pollen from another variety of corn pollinated the detasseled corn, resulting in corn that had the genetic characteristics of both varieties.)  We usually followed that by going swimming at the Weed Park pool.

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