The super glue mud of the cornfield wouldn’t release Brent Royuk’s shoes. With row upon remaining row of tassels to pull off, and the sun climbing ever higher in the Nebraska summer sky, the Seward high schooler left his footwear behind. Cockleburs and the heat-baked mud toughened his tender bare feet to leather.

Yet the summer of 1983 produced a milestone memory for Royuk. Even in the miserable conditions, he outran “Tasseling Tom,” a six-foot-tall star school athlete, down the corn row and won the race. Decades later, and now as dean of arts and sciences of Concordia University in Seward, Royuk still relishes the underdog victory from his youth.

Thousands of Nebraska teenagers go through the corn country rite of passage each summer. For some it is their first paycheck and first real job while learning something important about themselves: After enduring the most extreme conditions a Nebraska cornfield can throw their way, they can accomplish just about anything.

Hybrid seed corn is grown on about 1 percent of Nebraska’s 9.9 million corn acres. Growing it requires a labor-intensive step called detasseling, where the flowering tassel at the very top of the plant is removed.

Producers grow hybrids by planting a single row of one corn variety between four rows of another, alternating that way through the entire field. Corn plants have male and female parts. Removing the tassels from plants in the rows of four prevents that variety from self-pollinating. Hybrid seeds form after pollen from tassels in the single rows lands on the silky corn ears of adjacent plants. This crossbreeding results in seed that produces higher yields or other desired traits such as drought tolerance or insect resistance.

Machines make the first cut. Enough tassels are missed that farmers must hire a workforce willing to rise early for three weeks of hot, cold, rain, wind, bugs, sweat and sun. Timing is important.

Yield suffers if a field is “pulled” too early. Too late, and the plants pollinate themselves, ruining the seed. In 40 years of sending school summer vacationers up and down corn rows, Mike Rader’s crews have never pulled early or showed up late.

Teenagers from St. Paul, Grand Island, Doniphan, Hastings and Trumbull load up before sunup on Rader Detasseling’s 20 busses. One hundred workers are dropped at each field – 600 workers in all. They work day-in and day-out until every unneeded tassel is stripped from 4,000 acres from north of Nebraska Highway 92 to just south of U.S. Highway 6. Opening morning is shocking for some of these children of the corn. 

“We get city kids who have never been on a farm before and it shows,” said Rader, who founded the company in 1982 with his wife, Marj, and parents Merlyn and Lucile Rader. “They step off the bus for the first time, some looking like they have no idea where they are except for that they’re probably still somewhere in Nebraska. Most become good workers, and many come back each summer until they graduate.”

Children of children who worked for the Raders a generation ago got on the bus last summer to learn about hard work for themselves.

The hardships of detasseling prepared Becca Reicks for work as an emergency room nurse. The Wood River native worked 12-hour shifts in the cornfields beginning at age 14 in 2007. Gangwish Seed Farm in Shelton promoted her to field supervisor, a role she worked each summer through college. Every day was physically and emotionally taxing. Reicks said that test of endurance strengthened her for nursing school and eventually for tragic nights in the ER at Beatrice Community Hospital in Beatrice.

She remembers when ambulances delivered teenage victims of a T-bone crash. The boys’ families filled the waiting room, their emotions raw. Reicks kept calm while assuaging their anguish and answering pressing demands for information on their sons’ conditions. Reicks said that night seemed easier than her most difficult days in the cornfield.

“When comparing the physical stress of a 100-degree day, with three more fields to go while being covered head to toe in corn rash – to working the ER – I’d take negotiating the ER any day,” Reicks said.

Early mornings and long commutes to the cornfield smoothed the road of life for Jon Bruning. As a teenaged boy learning about earning a living, summer detasseling workdays began with an hour-long bus ride from his hometown of Lincoln at 4 a.m.

That experience toughened Bruning for the days he campaigned for Attorney General of Nebraska. The campaign trail once took him from Lincoln for a five-hour drive to the Sandhills community of Bingham and a 9 a.m. breakfast with a potential donor.

Sunrise breakfasts, sunset dinners, and many miles on Nebraska backroads helped Bruning win the votes he needed in 2002 to become the second youngest attorney general in American history. High points in his political career include being reelected twice. Losing a close race for governor in 2014 was a low. Remembering the challenges of detasseling helps him put all things in proper perspective. “Those were tough times,” Bruning said. “You learn that the lows aren’t always as low as you think.”

Detasseling nearly broke 5-foot-2-inch Marilyn Thoene. She worked in cornfields near Kearney for just one season, the summer of 1969. The stalks towered over her, much higher than they seem to her today. She gained a few inches by standing with one foot on the ridges between the rows. Still, she had to pull stalks close to tear away the tassels. That slowed her down in a job that demands speed.

The bugs were “horrific,” too. Thoene’s solution – lighting Swisher Sweets “borrowed” from the glove box of her father’s truck. “People who detasseled before me said that smoking cigars would keep the bugs away. I think all it did was make me and my friends sick,” Thoene said.

Thoene reached new heights in another field, indoors and away from biting insects, working her way up to an executive officer position at Security State Bank in Ansley. Nebraska farmland figures strongly into the farm and ranch appraisal business she owns with her husband, Cy, in Ansley.

“I remember detasseling being hot and humid hard work,” Thoene said. “I didn’t mind it, detasseling is character building and prepares you for the real world.”

Detasseling wasn’t all hard work for identical twins Sean and Shane Smith, who co-own and treat patients at Back to Back Chiropractic in Omaha.

The detasseling duo watched out for each other’s backs while working in central Nebraska cornfields near their Wood River home. One day, a friendly brawl broke out in morning mud, the Smiths and kids from Wood River Rural Middle School tackling each other. Pretty soon, mud was flying.

“A wet mudball really makes a loud ‘smack,’ when it hits you in the back,” Shane Smith said. “When it is still cold out, it really stings.”

The Smith twins made a little mischief of their own, too. The boys would crouch down low, hiding, and jumping up just as detasselers got close. The victims often fell backward, instinctively grasping at stalks to break their fall. The scare tactic was easy to do in thick cornfields with stalks so high, the stuff of horror movies.

Carol Kuehl felt no fear, only anticipation, as the summer of 1969 approached. She was signed up for detasseling and looking forward to some time away from her family’s farm near Mason City.

More importantly, detasseling meant reuniting with friends she had not seen since school got out in May. She and her friends would talk among the stalks, but she didn’t neglect her work. Kuehl was promoted to “pusher,” an overseer responsible for keeping workers moving down the rows without too much horseplay or idle chatter.

One day, a 14-year-old, 6-foot-tall newcomer joined the crew, but he skipped more tassels than he plucked. Kuehl and a fellow pusher gathered the armloads of tassels that he left behind. At the end of the day, and in front of the crew leader, they dumped the tassels into his lap. The boy did not return the next day.

Kuehl detasseled to within days of her wedding to a Navy recruit from Loup City in August 1973. She planned the nuptials late at night after working full days in the field.

Along with her husband, Pat, Kuehl led the honey extraction equipment manufacturer Cook & Beals from 1990 until retiring in 2015. Now the third generation of their family runs the company in Loup City.

She found hard work rewarding. Her children and grandchildren follow the trail she blazed into the detasseling fields and family business. The Kuehls’ 13-year-old granddaughter will detassel for the first time this summer.

“Detasseling is a great first job,” said Kuehl, who remembers being loaded with her friends into trucks before the days when school busses shuttled workers to and from the cornfields. “You learn to work hard, and like my dad instilled in me, ‘If you want something, you better be ready to work for it.’”