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Karen Blessen grew up in Columbus, Neb., in the 1960s, an agricultural town of about 12,000 people at the time and not much nearby.

So when the future Pulitzer Prizewinning artist and founder of arts nonprofit 29 Pieces was a teenager and wanted to earn a little extra cash, there was only one option: corn.

“One of my first summer jobs was as a corn detassler,” Blessen says. “That was definitely the thing back in my little town. There were very few ways for kids to make money other than babysitting. Detassling corn was the way that young teenage kids made money.”

Once the corn was tall enough to be picked, Blessen and the other teenage employees would load into the back of a flatbed truck at the crack of dawn on what would eventually become a scorching summer day.

She quickly found herself in the middle of one of Columbus’ many acres of corn, collecting as much as she could carry. Being underaged and inexperienced didn’t help her cause.

“We had to walk through fields of corn. You had to walk through row after row, and the corn is a lot taller than most of the kids were.”

While the job was long and tedious, she quickly found that detassling had a lot more to do with the birds and the bees than she expected.

“It’s about corn sex,” she explains.

“You don’t want corn breeding with different varieties of corn that could ruin the hybridization. You don’t want the corn having sex with each other.”

Blessen says she barely lasted a month on the job. The day-in, day-out operation wore her down and she eventually quit.

The job went on, rain or shine, Blessen says, and the fields always were filled with bugs.

“It was a really dirty, mucky, sweaty first job,” she says. “All of us teenage girls would come home drenched in sweat and muck, covered with bugs. I remember my parents asking me to wait in the backyard before entering the house so that they could hose me off and scrub me down in the backyard.”

She made $50 for her efforts, which seems like pittance now, but was, at the time, a thrilling amount for the small-town teen.

“I went to Omaha with a good friend and we giggled a lot and went shopping for two or three new outfits for school, which was pretty much a new wardrobe in 1969.”

Once her money was spent, Blessen needed a new way to make some cash. She moved on to waitressing at a teenage hangout where servers delivered food on roller skates to borrowed cars full of hungry adolescents on awkward first dates.

Again, Blessen found she was not cut out for the job.

She says she was so uncoordinated, she didn’t last long there either — “a week, tops,” she guesses.

“I was just terrible at it. Young, clumsy and awkward.”

She was so bad at both jobs, Blessen used the experiences to push for a college education.

“Summer jobs got a whole lot better after I went to college. Actually, that summer job in the corn fields was the best possible motivation for higher education.”

Saturdays through July 30, 5-9 p.m.

JULY 2

JULY 9 The Landsharks

JULY 16 Limelight

JULY 23 Petty Theft & The Bird Dogs

JULY 30 The O’s

It’s summertime at the Dallas Zoo, and the Safari Nights concert series is back for another wild season. Bring a lawn chair or blanket and enjoy live music, beer, and wine on shady Cat Green. And check out Zoo animals while the sun goes down. It’s free with admission.

Exotic Encounter

When you have a seat on the Dallas City Council, you see some pretty wild stuff, but East Dallas’ District 9 Councilman Mark Clayton has worked somewhere even more exotic. During college, he found himself in St. Louis, Mo., for the summer after his parents moved there. Needing something to do during the long summer days, he set his sights on landing a gig at the St. Louis Zoo.

Day after day, he showed up to ask for an internship, and day after day he was shot down. But he kept at it, and his tenacity eventually paid off.

“I basically got a job there through persistence,” he says.

His day-to-day operations at the zoo were pretty boring. “I basically just told people where the bathroom was.”

That left him with plenty of on-thejob free time. He ended up absorbing more than 40 books that summer, mostly at the zoo.

“I became very well read that summer,” Clayton jokes.

“Looking back it wasn’t that bad. If you have a nine-hour day and you work really hard during three of those hours then you’ve got six where you can kind of take it easy.”

It was certainly better work than one of his previous after-school jobs.

For a while he sold newspaper subscriptions door-to-door.

The job involved being picked up after school by a stranger, dropped off in some unknown neighborhood and walking around for roughly four hours until he made his way home.

He did that for three months before calling it quits.

“That was definitely my worst job,” he says. “It made me realize I needed an education.”

The zoo job, by comparison, had major perks.

“I got to go behind the scenes. I got to see what animals were being brought in. I got to see an elephant being born. It’s not the most brainpower I’ve ever used for a job, but it was still a good experience.”

At the time, Clayton says, the St. Louis Zoo consistently was listed as one of the top in the country. The work being done at the zoo, and the way the staff went about it, gave him a different perspective.

“Everybody was always just in a good mood. The people there could have made a lot of money working in another job,” he remembers. Clayton says the experience gave him the desire for a job where money wasn’t everything.

Now he’s on city council. Go figure.