The Girls from Ames (18 page)

 

 

A
mes was known as a “high-IQ town,” and for good reason. Many of the Ames girls’ classmates were the offspring of professors at Iowa State or engineers at the Iowa Highway Commission or scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. The parents who worked at Ames Lab could seem like the most mysterious people in town; everyone knew they had quietly helped develop the atom bomb by producing high-purity uranium for the Manhattan Project.

Given the brainpower all over town, some adult friendships revolved around highbrow cocktail parties with visiting scholars. Marilyn’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. McCormack, were benefactors of the Central Iowa Symphony, so their friends were classical music lovers. Jenny’s mom, always active in politics and volunteer work, traveled in the civic-minded crowd. Because Sheila’s dad was a dentist, he and Sheila’s mom socialized with other young professionals.

But the adult friendships in town mostly took shape in the same frameworks found elsewhere in Middle America. For some of the Ames girls’ grandparents and parents, friendships were born and nurtured through eating, dancing and Friday night happy hour at the Elks Club.

Several of the Ames girls’ mothers kept in close touch with longtime friends. Jenny’s mom, who graduated from Iowa State in 1959, would get together regularly with the nineteen other girls from her sorority pledge class. (The reunions continue today, with seventeen of the women still alive and attending.) And every Tuesday afternoon, for decades, Cathy’s mom would gather with three other women for what they called the Tuesday Club.

The Tuesday Club was so crucial to Cathy’s mom that family vacations would be scheduled so she wouldn’t miss a Tuesday in Ames. Cathy liked when the club gathered at her house, because that meant Tuesday night dinners would end with the cakes and pies her mom had baked that the club members didn’t finish.

The club also offered Cathy a window into womanhood and motherhood. When she was young, she’d sit outside the kitchen, listening to the women of the Tuesday Club discuss their husbands and their kids, their resentments and their dreams. Sometimes, they’d actually take a moment and pray for their children. It was the purest form of group therapy. “Stay close to your girlfriends,” Cathy’s mom would tell her. “Men come and go, but you can have girlfriends forever.”

Across America in the 1970s, women’s coffee klatches such as the ones hosted by Cathy’s mom were in transition. Without even realizing it, these women were involved in a change in the culture. In talking about their own issues as mothers, wives and members of the community, they were tiptoeing into the still-being-defined women’s consciousness movement. They could see that their concerns were similar to the concerns discussed by women elsewhere. Women in Ames (and beyond) were all connected to the same fabric.

Meanwhile, as the parents and the kids in Ames socialized in separate spheres—the young and old each not really knowing exactly what the other was up to—there were always efforts under way to build a better sense of community between them. By the 1970s, the city had instituted its Blue Star child-safety program. Families would volunteer to place a blue star in their windows, letting children know it was a safe haven if they were ever in trouble.

Sally, Jenny, Jane and Cathy all grew up in homes with blue stars in their windows. When Sally sold Girl Scout cookies, she went only to homes of people she knew—and strangers’ homes if they had blue stars. It was fine as a precaution. But Ames was actually a pretty safe town—years would go by without a murder—so there weren’t many frantic kids banging on the doors of blue-star homes saying bad guys were chasing them. Jane’s mother never had any blue-star traffic at all, except for a boy who’d routinely knock on the door because he was locked out of his house when his mother was cleaning.

In 2001, the Ames Blue Star program closed down, in part due to liability issues: What if a Blue Star volunteer turned out to be a pedophile? And how could residents reconcile their advice to kids—“Stay away from strangers”—with telling them to go to a stranger’s door if there was a blue star in the window?

The Blue Star program was a sweet idea in theory. But it was doomed by the currents of a changing culture.

 

 

I
owa has 2.9 million residents, and each year, the state produces about 2.1 billion bushels of corn. That translates to 41,048 pounds of corn harvested for each man, woman, and child in the state. The overwhelming presence and importance of corn in Iowa can not be overstated.

Though none of the Ames girls came from farm families, cornfields played a key role in their lives. In those fields, they learned about love and sex, about the hardest kind of work—and about death, too.

Marilyn’s older brother, of course, died at that intersection of four cornfields. That car accident occurred because the corn in September 1960 had grown to nine feet tall, obstructing the view. So Marilyn knew how a cornfield could quietly become a killer.

Karla, Cathy, Sally, Jane, Karen, Kelly and Diana became overly familiar with cornfields starting at about age thirteen, when they got their first summer jobs detasseling corn. Crew members were supposed to be fourteen, but some of the girls lied about their ages and were hired.

Iowa is the top state for corn production because there’s usually plenty of rain, the soil is deep and rich, and farmers have grown adept at raising livestock whose waste offers nutrients that best fertilize cornfields. More than half a century ago, corn was said to be “knee-high by the Fourth of July.” But by the time the girls got their jobs, modern hybrid corn seed and better weed control meant the corn was shoulder-high in early July. And by August, when detasseling was under way, the corn was already at its maximum height of up to twelve feet tall.

For Iowa kids, detasseling is a character-building rite of passage. The job of a detasseler is to prevent corn from pollinating itself. Kids are hired by the thousands each summer to walk through the fields removing the tassel, which is the pollen-producing top of the corn plant. This allows pollen from a different variety of corn, grown elsewhere in the field, to blow over and pollinate the detasseled corn. The resulting crop is healthier, with higher yields and better-tasting sweet corn.

In theory, detasseling is a romantic notion. Pollen dust would blow across hundreds of acres, with the corn plants attempting their own form of sexual activity. The rows of stalks without tassels were referred to as the “female” rows and the ones with tassels were the “males.”

As the girls quickly learned, however, there was little romance in the work. It was mind-numbing, repetitive and wearying. They’d have to wake up at 5 A.M., before the fields got too hot, and they’d get picked up by an old school bus chartered by seed corn companies. They’d spend the next eight hours walking through half-mile-long rows of corn, yanking off tassels. By the end of each day, they had detasseled thousands of plants and walked almost ten miles.

In the morning it was often chilly, and they had to contend with dew that soaked their clothes and mud that climbed up their ankles. By afternoon, they felt like fainting from the heat and insect bites, and they were itchy from brushing against the leaves. They tried to guard against corn rash by wearing bandanas and long-sleeved shirts and pants, but it always got too hot later in the day, so they’d take off layers of clothing. The girls liked getting a tan, but the resulting corn rash felt like a bad sunburn covering their entire bodies. There were rumors that detasselers could also end up getting “corn fever” from the heat and repetitive exertion, rendering them insane. That was apocryphal, or at least they never came upon such a victim.

“The working conditions suck!” Diana wrote in a note to Kelly one night after detasseling. “It’s so wet, you’d die! There are ponds knee-deep in the middle of the fields! I feel like we’re in rice paddies during the Vietnam War—trudge, trudge, trudge. Half my crew goes barefoot, but I did it for one round yesterday and cut the hell out of my feet.”

Despite the conditions, the girls did have their share of laughs. For a while, some of them had that buxom crew chief in her early twenties who was a celebrated wet T-shirt contest winner. The girls got a kick out of how the boys on the crew enjoyed watching the chief sweat through the day.

The girls had fun rating the cutest boys in the field, but too much of the time, detasseling was an isolating job. Because each girl had her own row and the corn was so high between them, they couldn’t really see each other or talk to each other. They’d come upon each other only when they got to the end of a row. Yes, the boys were there, too, but the girls were often too dead-tired and dirty to interact much with them. (Later, when Sally met her husband, they had in common the childhood experience of detasseling. He had some good stories, too. Once, he was too slow finishing up his last row of the day and the bus left without him. In those days before cell phones, there was no way to call his mom, and there are no phone booths in cornfields. So he started walking back toward civilization and, eventually, miles up the road, someone he knew happened to drive by and pick him up.)

One day well after she arrived in Los Angeles as a makeup artist, Cathy was working with model Cindy Crawford and they got to talking. They realized they were from neighboring states, Iowa and Illinois. Turned out that Cindy, who grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, had been a detasseler at age sixteen. A photographer from the local paper took her photo working in a cornfield, and modeling scouts saw it. She never had to detassel again. By the next summer, she was a model.

Cathy couldn’t help but tell Cindy about her own detasseling experiences with the Ames girls. “She and I had this whole detasseling moment,” she says. “We bonded over that.” And, of course, she later told the Ames girls about her interaction. After all, women who detasseled as girls feel they’re part of the same battle-weary sorority, and it was fun to realize Cindy Crawford was a member.

Sally, the only one of the girls living in Iowa today—she lives in Spirit Lake, 180 miles northwest of Ames—passes by cornfields all the time. Sometimes, she thinks of the other girls and those long days detasseling. “Out in those cornfields,” says Sally, “that’s where we learned there was honor in a hard day’s work.”

 

 

W
ork wasn’t all that they learned in the cornfields, of course. For the girls today, a stalk of corn also can bring back memories of flirting or making out or crying over a boy too drunk to notice them. All through high school, even in the winter, they went to giant keggers deep in the cornfields surrounding Ames. One of their friends, Jeff Mann, was the son of a teacher, so he had an old mimeograph machine in his basement. He’d run off maps and pass them out to hundreds of kids, pinpointing the exact spot in the specific cornfield where the beer was (and the cops weren’t).

Before Iowa’s drinking age went from age eighteen to age nineteen in 1978, party organizers were even allowed to give the location of cornfield keggers on the Ames High morning announcements, since many of the seniors could drink legally. (The drinking age was raised further, to twenty-one, in 1986, but underage drinking never let up. Like other college towns, Ames had to contend with high-school kids who grew up fast, modeling the university students.)

Sometimes, on kegger nights, the girls would get horribly lost driving around in the dark on gravel roads, corn all around, and then suddenly, they’d see fifty taillights off in the distance, a glowing beacon signifying “The party is this way!” When they pulled up, Jeff Mann or other organizers would be there, charging everyone $5 for an all-you-can-drink plastic cup. A keg back then cost $30 and dispensed about 165 beers. Four or five kegs could last the night, and with five bucks from each of two hundred revelers, Mann could make a healthy profit. One year, the Ames High yearbook had a photo of a smiling cornfield-keg host holding a huge fan of $5 bills.

Some of the girls started attending the cornfield keggers when they were fifteen years old. Kelly’s mom even drove her to her first cornfield party, nine miles out of town, and wondered why a guy was at the edge of the field, collecting money from everyone. “We all have to help pay for the band and the pig roast,” Kelly told her mother. “There’s a band back there. And a big pig, too.” Her mother was quizzical, but accepted the explanation and drove away. The boy who promised to drive the girls home ended up too drunk to drive, so fifteen-year-old Karla, who had no license, took the wheel. It was pitch-dark, far from civilization, on the bumpiest dirt roads, but she got the girls in the car safely back to Ames.

The keggers were a blast. Some boy would bring a boom box, with Ted Nugent or Bruce Springsteen blasting out of the speakers. Or the kids would stand around singing all the bombastic lyrics to songs on Meat Loaf’s
Bat Out of Hell
album.

As they became more accustomed to those keggers, the Ames girls brought their predictable personalities. Sheila, so often the life of any party, could walk into a cornfield and, like a character from
Cheers,
elicit shouts of “Sheila!” Everyone knew her name and was glad to see her.

Meanwhile, Marilyn, the doctor’s daughter, attended these parties warily, hoping not to get in trouble. She feared embarrassing her family, as if a headline—“Doctor’s Underage Daughter Caught Drinking Deep in Cornfields”—might be splashed across the next day’s
Ames Tribune
. Her clearest memory of a cornfield kegger was the time the cops came and she ran for her life deep into the field, the crunching and cracking of stalks at her feet. She stood hiding behind the corn, waiting for the coast to clear, her heart pounding.

Now as adults, when the girls spoon servings of corn onto their children’s dinner plates, these are the sorts of memories that some of them think about.