SPOILIN’ THE BROTH
Neighbor Grover sez he talks to himself because there are times he needs expert advice.
Imiss great big Black Diamond watermelons, great big yellow catfish and great big rattlesnakes.
Let me explain.
When I was a cub reporter for this journal back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the melon industry around this sandy-land country was big-time.
Growers brought their truck loads of melons to the public scales on Mill Street, and the melons were shipped on nearby railroad cars to markets across the country.
Either the manager at the scales, or the grower, would call The Reporter to have a photo taken of the first 100-pound Black Diamond melon to be weighed.
The grower and the melon always made the paper, and the grower would give us a melon which we employees would cut and eat on spread-out newspapers (what else?) back in our print shop.
We were greater in numbers back then, in the sweatshop days of hot-type letterpress production. Newspapers were much more labor-intensive then, compared to this digital era. There’d be 8 or 10 of us diving into that big, sweet, red-meat melon.
The Black Diamond gave way to the Charleston Grays because the smaller melons stacked better and more economically for shipping. And the 100-pound melon photos in the paper were no more.
Now about the big catfish and big rattlesnakes.
Was not unusual for me, having collected The Reporter’s mail at 8 a.m. from our box at the post office, to arrive at the office to see a group of men looking into the bed of a pickup truck parked in front of our business.
I knew it had to be a big rattlesnake or a big old ‘yeller’ catfish in the bed of that truck. A six-foot-or-better rattler rated a photo in The Reporter with the snake’s slayer proudly holding him aloft at arm’s length.
And those big channel cats rated a photo in the paper too, if they weighed 50 pounds or more and they often did, usually coming from river trot lines.
Biggest catfish I ever photographed was hanging from a tree limb at the home of Harry Doss. It weighed 80 pounds and Harry had called our office to see if we might want a photo before he cleaned, skinned and filleted it.
Of course I wanted the photo.
Took a lot of those over the years, and often would be surprised by a knock on the door a day or so later with a pound or two of catfish fillets all packaged up.
Never did get a package of diamondback rattler fillets.
Now when was the last time you saw a photo in your newspaper of a 100-pound watermelon, or a six-foot rattler, or a 50-plus-pound catfish?
Been a long time, hasn’t it?
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