It was  summer time and school had  just  gotten out the  first week  in June. The boys always  helped me in the orchard but they wanted to make some extra money for some special school clothes for the next year. We discussed  what  they could  do. Then we thought  about  the 4 acres  of vacant  land on the other side of  the  drain ditch. Well, we thought  about what would  grow fast and  sell fast, we came up with the idea of  melons, water melons and cantaloupe. We could sell those to the stores and to people passing by on the  road.

So with that idea the boys started clearing the land and getting it ready to plant. We had all the farm equipment We needed to get the melons planted, the corugatorand the tractor were the main things and we had a rototiller on the back of the tractor as well, and  that was all we needed. They  cleaned  up  the  weeds and  burned them, then rotolilled  the land and Gerry made  his rows  with  the corugator.

Gerry seemed to work at it  tirelessly, but  he finally got  all the  rows  planted. He  put about 3 acres into  watermelons and the other acre in cantaloupes.  Then he laid some  irrigation pipe so  he could  water the  field, and  he kept  it watered and weeded and  those melons started growing  like  you  would  not  believe. The  land  had  lain fallow for so long  it was like virgin soil. The vines  grew and  bloomed and the melons  grew. Gerry seemed to have  a knack for  growing  things. and they had many many tons of  melon to sell. Gerry enlisted  his brother  Joe to help him since he  was  only 15 and  did not  have a drivers  license. They drove around to all the  stores and  found that a lot of them had  preordered from other growers and did not  want to buy  Gerry’s  melons.

So they  decided to go  on the  road to try to get  them sold.  At the time  we had a 72  Ford  pickup, I filled  it  with gas  for them and  they  filled  it  up with melons until the  springs sagged. I should have had  a picture  of  the load  they had  on the truck. They had  decided to got to the resort  area of McCALL Idaho, many people  go there  for  summer vacation, so we  thought  it  would  be  a good  market. They left early the  next morning and  got  back late that  night.They sold alot of  melons  but did not  emnpty  the  truck. WE had a lot of melons  in it. They were tired  when they got  home, but  they had  had a good  day and  the  experience is  something  they  will never  forget, and  I won’t  either.