Whole load of (not so much) fun arrives on opening night of Luling's Watermelon Thump...

While many enjoyed the much anticipated opening night of Luling’s Watermelon Thump after its coronavirus-inspired hiatus in 2020, several young men were hard at work well into the night proving that watermelons aren't always fun and games in their hometown.

Fact is, if you ventured past Mikesh Produce Thursday evening at Luling’s Original Farmer’s Market, just a couple of blocks from the Thump festival grounds off North Magnolia Avenue, you could've seen firsthand that watermelons can be lots of terribly back breaking work.

Especially when a load of about a thousand arrives right at sunset, filling the entire length of an 18-wheeler flatbed, and the only way you have to get them off involves you and about a dozen of your closest friends and relatives forming a man chain to pitch the big
devils off the truck one by one, pass them along hand-by-hand, and then stack them layer by layer in massive piles on every available tabletop.

Just watching them made my back hurt.

Fortunately, most involved were light years younger than me, most high school-aged boys, or so it seemed. I barely remember what it was like to live back then, almost bulletproof through any labor and blessed with nothing aching first thing each morning, before I even woke up.

Of course, not everyone fit into that category, and those who don't usually have the physiques of professional wrestlers or body builders. Not hard to see how those Mikesh boys got those big ol’ canons where their arms should be, nor was it their first rodeo, dealing with a truck loaded with melons. You could tell.

“I bet a few of them are gonna be sore in the morning,” said stand proprietor Paul Mikesh, who far closer to my age, watched the boys from the sidelines.

Even with a bad back and arthritis, however, that doesn’t stop Mikesh from grabbing up melons all day, hoisting them onto his shoulders and loading the many vehicles that stop by his establishment near constantly each day in search of that farm fresh sweetness they know he always has there.

Plus, when he’s not at his stand helping customers, he’s usually out in his fields, tending melons or the many other crops he raises for the market. 

Normally, all his melons would be coming direct from his fields this time of year, but heavy May rains delayed this year’s crop, leaving Mikesh’s melons a good week away from ripening fully when the Thump kicked off this year on Thursday, June 24.

He said he either brought them in from elsewhere or faced going without. During Thump weekend, no less. And that just wouldn’t be proper. 

That night's load load came in from Edinburg, down in the Valley.

“I ain’t told them yet, but we have another truck coming in tomorrow,” Mikesh said, following up with this wicked little laugh.

The next day’s haul was supposed to be half as large, Mikesh said. Still, after pitching and catching melons for the several hours it took to empty that night's truck, I doubt many would relish doing it all again.

With luck, he told us, that should be enough outside melons to carry him into the next week, when his melons would be ready to harvest. 

A week later, almost all those 1,500 melons he brought in were little more than a memory. Hard to believe, but they sold the rest. 

That little stand of theirs sells literally tons of melons each week.

Thankfully, his were coming in fine right about then.

It helps when you know what you're doing, and Paul knows a thing or two about growing melons.

In addition to raising them since he was young and earning his living off them now, Paul and his company, Mikesh & Sons Produce, grew the Big Melon Contest winner at the Luling Watermelon Thump this year.

Their monster melon tipped the scales at 71 pounds, 5 ounces at the official weigh-in. That wasn’t a record breaker when it comes to melons brought in from fields around Luling in years past, but it's definitely no slouch either, especially during such a wet year.

Just four growers competed in this year’s contest, Mikesh said. Part of that comes from an overall decline in the number of active growers still around these days, but much more had to do with the weather. Those who entered were the only ones who had melons sizable enough to do so, after so much rain during a crucial part of the growing season this year.

Flip back through the past pages of the Newsboy to see information about those earliest Big Melon Contests tied to the Thump, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a couple dozen or more Black Diamond watermelon growers competing in any given year. 

Most melons were a good bit lighter than the ones we’ve seen in more recent years, the Mikeshes’ 2021 winner notwithstanding, and despite competing several times in previous years for the Biggest Melon prize, Mikesh said he’d never won it before. 

The best he’d done previously was third place, so winning this year’s contest was both a treat and a pretty big deal to him.

What’s more, that champion melon of theirs brought $6,000 when it hit the auction block for the traditional Thump sale on Saturday afternoon, purchased by retired school teacher Cody Bateman and his fellow buyers in Team GenH2..

“I was so happy when I heard about it,” Paul Mikesh told us Saturday evening. “We figured we might see better prices because the pandemic shut everything down last year, but I didn’t think it would be that much. We sure can use it, though, after the year we’ve already had.”

Hopefully, this year’s win might be the first of many more in store for Mikesh and his sons.

“I plan to keep at it as long as I’m able, but I’m definitely no spring chicken anymore,” he said. “I’m glad to see my boys will be picking up wherever I leave off, though. Because they’ll continue growing after I no longer can, that much is certain. It gets in your blood, and they’ve definitely got it.”

Above, The entire Mikesh clan gets together for the official weigh-in at the 2021 Luling Big Melon Contest, and below, Paul Mikesh and his grandson enjoy their winnings after they take home their first win ever at the 68th annual Luling Watermelon Thump.

This story, written and photographed by Bobby Horecka, first published in the July 1, 2021, edition of the Luling Newsboy & Signal. That newspaper is one of five South Texas weeklies where the writer of this blog serves as managing editor.