One of my most favorite vintage family pictures came from my wife’s family rather than from mine. It was a picture of my wife’s mother, a recent college graduate, and about five of her young women friends, eating watermelon on Galveston beach. It was obvious they were having a watermelon party.
My family, too, had a long history with watermelons, my Wendish grandfather raising lots of them on the farm in Dime Box. Do you think it was uniquely Wendish and Lutheran that he grew watermelons with yellow meat rather than the usual pink or red? The yellow meat melons were sweeter and not as commonly grown as the pink or red. Perhaps that ‘s why he made us save the seeds when we feasted on his watermelons!
Although the people of China eat more watermelons than any other people in the world, the watermelon is the most favorite of melons in the United States. Watermelon stories, parties, and festivals have always been very popular in the United States, the King of the melons as far as melons are concerned, the cantaloupe coming in second.
Other melons eaten by Americans are honey dew, yellow melons, Crenshaws, Galia melons, Piel de Lapo melons, cucamelons, which taste like cucumbers, Dino-melons which resemble a dinosaur’s egg, and many more. Watermelon has not been my favorite melon, I have preferred cantaloupe and honey dew. My new favorite, just discovered this week, is Dino-melon (it tastes like but is better than honey dew), And when I was a kid, we called honey dew “muskmelon.”
Two Lutheran churches, each over a hundred years old, I have been closely associated with tell a similar story about watermelons. The one in Wharton tells of a generous cotton farmer from Mackay in the Wharton congregation who raised many watermelons, and would come to church in his pickup truck with the bed piled high with ripe watermelons. He would park his truck under a shade tree all day so that any and all members and anybody else in Wharton could help themselves to as many melons as they should desire!
It was also told that an equally generous rice farmer in Lissie would take a wagon load of ripe watermelons to the Lutheran church in Wallis, and put them in the huge horse water trough in front of the church. It was there because members would ride their horses to church, and the pastor had a cow and a horse needing water. The water in the trough kept them cool until folks could take a melon or two home with them. My painting of this story still hangs in the Wallis church.
Those two beautiful stories about farmers bringing their melons to church convince me that watermelons are “Lutheran.” Well, anyway we Lutherans love them!
RAY SPITZENBERGER IS BLESSED WITH SEVEN BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, PEGGY (wife), MEG (daughter), RAE ANN (daughter), LAUREN (granddaughter), AVERY (granddaughter), SYBIL (granddaughter), AND PIXIE (cat).