Rachel Dahl
It’s Cantaloupe Festival Weekend, and last weekend, it was the Community Reunion. We’re back-to-back celebrating our heritage, seeing old friends, making new. I wonder how many new love stories will begin this weekend. How many old connections lost will be made. How many new traditions will start?
It’s a time for summer to draw to a close and to get back to the structure of life. It's time for the harvest.
The Cantaloupe Festival, if you didn’t know it, is the longest-running agricultural festival in the State of Nevada. It was started in 1985 when a group of locals, including the Chamber of Commerce, wanted to celebrate the agricultural past and present of Churchill County, support local businesses, and fill the gap left by the absence of the Nevada State Fair. Using the unique and delicate Hearts O’ Gold cantaloupe as the feature, the first festival took place on a closed-off Maine Street in downtown Fallon, where pickups were filled with cantaloupes, and residents and farmers, mingled and their kids enjoyed activities.
I remember being involved with the festival during high school when the Young Republicans were tapped to help with the Republican Central Committee Cantaloupe Ice Cream booth. We set up the booth, scooped the ice cream, met politicians, cleaned up the booth, and generally were covered in orange ice cream, sunscreen, and dirt for four days.
Back then, Model Dairy made the ice cream, especially for us, and we stored it, I think, in the Safeway freezers. Gil Strickland let us use their space for the three-gallon tubs, and I spent my time running back and forth between the fairgrounds and the freezer all weekend.
Those were the days when Michelle Adair, Glenn, and Donna Wassmuth ran the festival. It became or maybe began as a Chamber of Commerce event, and as I learned the ropes in our booth, I watched that committee work together with all their volunteers to put on the festival, bring in entertainment, run the beer garden, and put together all the other pieces.
I remember when they brought the county fair in and joined it with the festival. The Lions Rodeo was always a fixture, and there were bands from out of town, including Alabama, when they were just getting started. I remember when Troy and DeeDee started doing Cantaloupe Daiquiris and how we would come home from college over Labor Day Weekend just for the festival.
Eventually, I found myself running the Chamber of Commerce and spent two summers of my life doing the festival with all my friends. Permanent, forged-in-the-fire, hysterical memories of days and days spent in the dry, alkali dust of that fairgrounds working with the community, for the community, to host our festival in the desert and celebrate the sweet, orange melon.
My hat goes off to the crew we have now. Adrienne has had big shoes to fill, and she has done it with grit and grace, working seamlessly with the committee she inherited in Todd and Zip and Kim, adding Carrie.
So, while we celebrate the ritual of the reacquaintance with our community, we’ll be right here…
Rach
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