Although I haven’t personally met Tom Lepper, my brother Jaryt and I were fans of the Quincy Blue Devils of the early 90s. There was something about their work ethic, size and dominance that pulled us into following them, even though we lived across the river in Missouri. They were successful and we wanted that too.
In junior high, Jaryt and I spent our summers detasseling corn, trudging through rows of towering stalks under the blazing sun. It was grueling work. You spend most of the day talking yourself into finishing one more day, or one more row, or even taking one more step. It was more mental conditioning than physical conditioning. There was a lot of time spent questioning “why?”.
Then one day, amidst the sea of green, while navigating the rows, we spotted someone familiar near a farm adjacent to the field we were detasseling. Someone who seemed out of place, but who also didn’t.
Dumbfounded, Jaryt and I were like, “that couldn’t be…maybe it is…I think that is Tom Lepper”. We blinked and squinted to make sure our eyes weren’t playing tricks on us in the July summer heat, down on the Taylor, Missouri bottoms.
There Tom was, sleeves rolled up, work boots on, focusing on his chores on the neighboring farm. No words were exchanged. None had to be.
That day, detasseling became more than just a summer job - it became a memory etched with the magic of a chance encounter and the indelible impression that success is built from hard work.
When one of the area’s dominant basketball players of the day is putting in work on a farm in the off-season it provided us our “why” - to continue pushing through the mental challenges of our own laborious summer job. Great things come from hard work and perseverance.
Congrats Tom Lepper on your induction into the QU Hall of Fame. Your hard work has always shown through, even amidst the tall cornfields.
