Shocking corn

Each fall, memories of the hard work of shocking corn come back to Larry Scheckel. Submitted sketch.

Shocking corn on the 238-acre Scheckel farm near Seneca in the heart of Crawford County was a demanding job in the mid-1950s.

The Scheckels bought a new McCormick Deering corn binder in 1948 and kept it in the west wing of the granary. That McCormick Deering corn binder was a marvelous machine. Driven by a big wheel that ran along the ground, it had two large prongs that guided the corn stalk into the cutter. When a sufficient number of corn stalks were cut and gathered in the mechanism, the knotter was activated, the sisal twine was cut, and the corn bundle would fall over onto a horizontal elevator. When Dad saw that three or four bundles were lying on the attachment sled, he activated the chain-driven device that shunted the bundles onto the ground.

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