Lessons in an Ear of Corn

It’s corn season.

At my neighborhood grocery store, boxes of sweet corn are stacked nearly as high as the stalks they grew on here in Colorado. I like buying local produce. It makes me feel good to support the area economy; it keeps the impression of my carbon footprint a bit lighter; and it puts the sweetest corn on my plate just a few days after harvesting.

In each ear of corn – from Sakata Farms near Brighton – lives the sweet story of America’s promise and the generosity of its people. In light of today’s brutal economy, cynics may say the American Dream is all but dead. They may claim that success stories are old-fashioned and, frankly, a bit corny. (Sorry, I could not resist.)

But Bob Sakata’s success and his generosity grew from similarly bitter soil in one of the nastiest national climates in our history. The U.S. had limped through a crippling economic depression. Immigrants and the children of immigrants who looked “different,” including sixteen-year-old Bob, were perceived as threats and “the enemy,” even though he had been a citizen since birth and wanted only to finish his high school education and launch a career. Sound familiar?

There are lessons waiting to be pulled from an ear of Sakata Farms corn by a thoughtful parent or teacher. There are lessons about the hopes of two centuries of immigrants to our country. Lessons about personal tragedies and the exhausting effort needed to overcome them. Lessons about goals and heart and intelligence and, most difficult perhaps, forgiveness and generosity in the face of discrimination and hatred. And, did I mention, lessons about success.

Bob Sakata

At 84, Bob Sakata still loves to share those lessons with young people. In fact, Bob admitted to me that the one reason he agreed to sit for interviews was that my book would be written for young readers. Specifically, I believe, he wanted to help preserve the story of the 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry who held their heads high and obeyed our government’s order to assemble for internment – imprisonment really – after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Bob Sakata’s story is about so much more than corn, but whether you are at the dinner table or in the classroom, I invite you to dig in!

My biography of Bob Sakata for ages 10 and up is available from http://www.filterpressbooks.com/.