HUSBANDRY: At Renz’s

The tall corn of Paul Renz’s fields, outside Platte City, Mo., grows 80 bushels an acre, even in a dry year. Thousands of people from tall corn states went out to Renz’s last week, parked their cars, climbed for places on the crook of low hills—a sort of natural balcony—around one field. At noon 13 wagons drove past the crowd. Beside the driver in each wagon sat the finalists in the U. S. cornhusking championship, all of them famous huskers, winners of sectional tournaments. They were young fellows in old work-clothes. Each husker had one bare hand and one hand in a glove equipped with a little steel hook or a sharp steel peg. They lined up facing the corn with their wagons and waited for the cannon-shot that would start them working.

The right weather for husking is cold and clear—the husks, brittle then, break easily. At Renz’s the air was warm and the ground muddy, but the wagons went fast. A good husker never looks at his wagon. He trains his team to move the way he husks, stand a pace, step a pace, to the rattle of the ears on the bangboard. White corn, yellow corn. 45 ears a minute thumping into the wagon. . . . An ordinary workman could not pick it up as fast as that even if it were husked. Red corn. . . . At a husking bee when you find a red ear you have a right to give your best girl a kiss.

The huskers’ hands worked like shuttles in two motions—up and down. They tore the ears off the stalks, twisting the instruments on their gloves so as to lay bare the smooth corn kernels. With their free hands they took hold of the bare ears, twisted and snapped off the rest of the husks, threw the ears into the wagons.

Yankee Roberts of Missouri, using a peg, passed down his rows in bounds but he was only taking two rows at a time. Harold Holmes of Rio, Ill, working as though there were no hurry at all, took three rows at once, seldom losing an ear. Tague of Iowa had his hat and shirt off and tore at the cornstalks like a madman fighting a phantom army. Near Holmes was his neighbor and friend, Walter Olson, another Swedish-American. Alone in their fields at home they had often tried to decide which could husk fastest. They had 80 minutes now to husk in and they worked carefully, getting clean ears. When a second cannon-shot ended work Olson’s pile of 25.27 bushels was about two pecks better than what Holmes had husked. Wild Clyde Tague of Guthrie County, Iowa, came in third.