MISQUAH — Arvid Paulson, who for sixty summers grew the sweet corn by which this town has privately judged all other sweet corn, died Tuesday, July 21, at his farm on County 12, with the first picking four days out and the rows, his family confirms, in excellent order. He was 89.

He built the stand at the end of his driveway in 1966 out of a hayrack and two sawhorses, and it never got fancier, because he could not see what fancier would sell. The system did not change either: picked at six, iced by seven, sold by nine, gone by noon, and the honor box on the rail for anyone who came while he was back in the rows. Asked once — by this newspaper, some decades ago — whether the honor box ever came up short, he considered the question longer than it deserved and said, “I know where everybody lives.” The archives note that he was smiling, and the archives are careful about that sort of thing.

He was born on the farm he died on. He served two years in the Army, came home, married Delores Wicklund in 1961 at First Lutheran, and planted his first commercial rows the spring their oldest was born, on the theory — his words, remembered by his sons — that “a baby and sweet corn keep about the same hours.” Delores died in 2014; he kept her chair at the stand and would not sell from it. He raised three children, corn, and by neighborly consensus the standard, and he never once raised the price ahead of the fairgrounds’ — a dozen for whatever was fair that year, rounded down, “because the arithmetic should be on the customer’s side of a dozen.”

He is survived by his sons Dale and Kenneth, his daughter Janet Ruud, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and the several hundred households of this town’s corn season. Services will be Saturday, August 8, at First Lutheran, Rev. Karl Lindholm officiating, with lunch to follow in the basement whose roof fund is in year fourteen, a fact Arvid found annually hilarious.

The stand opened Saturday at the usual hour. His family debated it for a day and then stopped debating it, because the corn was ready, and he had been extremely clear, over sixty summers, about what that means. The honor box was full by noon. Nobody counted it in front of anybody. He knew where everybody lived.