Sweet Corn Ripe 325 



One of the things Chambers tried to improve was sweet 

 corn. He had good land on which to make his trials. It was 

 historic corn land. The Mohawks had planted corn in those 

 fields running down to the Connecticut River before the 

 Massachusetts colonists established their frontier forts along 

 the valley. The settlers in Deerfield and Greenfield and Wis- 

 dom had raised corn and sent it and furs to Boston in trade 

 for salt fish. They made a rhyme about it: 



Conway for beauty, Deerfield for pride, 



If it hadn't been for codfish, Wisdom would have died. 



Bill Chambers liked to think about those earlier corn plant- 

 ers as he puttered about his own garden. For years he selected 

 special ears for seeds, he cut off tassels of some plants in order 

 that only specially selected stamens should pollinize the 

 crop. He bagged certain ears and pollinized them himself, by 

 hand, then covered them carefully again in order to be abso- 

 lutely sure of the lineage of the corn those ears would produce. 

 What he got out of all these clumsy experiments was a breed 

 of sweet corn that was quick to mature, yellow in color and 

 even sweeter than the leading varieties of sweet corn. 



The neighbors to whom he gave some of the ears to taste 

 came back and asked for seed. Bill Chambers shook his head. 

 He steadfastly refused to give away or sell a single seed. 



When he died, Bill Chambers did not have much to leave, 

 at least not as the world reckoned values. But up in the attic 

 of his house there was a paper bag labeled "My corn seed." 

 There are few gold mines that have yielded the fortune that 

 was in that paper sack. 



The executor of Chambers' estate took the corn and planted 

 it in his garden. When the ears were ripe he invited a seeds- 

 man he knew to come to dinner. The main dish was a yellow 

 sweet corn. The seedsman laughed a little when he saw it. 

 But after the first mouthful he put down the cob and looked 

 hard at his host. "Where did you get it?" and "Do you know 

 what you've got?" and "How much will you take for it?" 



