Sweet memories

An old produce scale hangs in the garden shed at the Nelson home, but it has been almost a decade since any fruits or vegetables weighed it down. Before he died, Bob Nelson’s garden and orchard produced some of the Spokane Valley’s finest peaches, plums and tomatoes.

Nelson also grew Hearts of Gold cantaloupes, a melon once wildly popular here. Hearts of Gold are hard to find today — possibly due to changes in the climate and irrigation techniques — but memories of their sweet flesh are still ripe in the minds of longtime Valley residents.

“They’re so good,” Nelson’s widow, Esther Nelson, said, lifting her hands to her mouth as if to take an imaginary bite. “I’d go to the garden shed and eat a whole one by myself.”’

The cantaloupes have deep vertical grooves, causing them to cinch a bit at the top and bottom. The unusual shape looks somewhat like a heart, hence the name.

Once cut, the heart shape is even more prominent, and the lucky one holding the fruit gets a whiff of the cantaloupe’s fragrant juice, Valley residents said. Its flesh is firm, and its rind is thin.

Hearts of Golds should only be picked when they are ripe and crack easily off the vine, Esther Nelson said. Unlike common cantaloupes found in supermarkets that are picked green and then sweeten in the produce aisle, Hearts of Golds must be eaten soon after picking and can’t be transported far because they will rot.

The Nelsons grew the cantaloupes from about 1950 until about 1995, when the garden outgrew Bob Nelson’s ability to care for it. Valley residents would flock to the home and to other local gardens once the fruit was ready each September. If the Nelsons weren’t home, customers would weigh their produce themselves in the old hanging scale, calculate the bill and leave their money in a cashbox in the kitchen refrigerator.

“We called it ‘cold cash,’ ” Esther Nelson said.

The Nelsons have dozens of blue ribbons from the Spokane County Interstate Fair for their Hearts of Golds.

Fred Beckemeier Jr., 79, remembers his father growing up to 10 acres of Hearts of Golds during the 1930s and ‘40s on the family’s Otis Orchards farm.

“I ate them all the time,” he said.

Sometimes, Beckemeier and his friends would sneak the fruit from neighboring farms.

“You weren’t the in thing if you didn’t go out and steal melons,” he said.

To stop the thieves, farmers would put something called cotinine — a diarrhea-inducing drug — in some of the cantaloupes, Beckemeier said.

“You wouldn’t steal melons from that guy again,” he said.

Sometimes the farmers kicked the threat up a notch. One friend took a BB pellet in the rear end trying to sneak some fruit, Beckemeier said.

Hearty history

The Spokane Valley often is associated with apple orchards, but by 1925 insects and disease killed many of the fruit trees. Cantaloupes and tomatoes became the leading crops, according to Florence Boutwell in her book “The Spokane Valley: The Growing Years.”

For several years during that period, the Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce invited the Spokane Chamber out for a Hearts of Golds cantaloupe feed, Boutwell writes.

By the 1930s, the Valley was famous for its Hearts of Gold cantaloupes.

“The warm water in the irrigation ditches and the long warm growing season of those days that warmed the rocks and soil produced melons of unsurpassed quality,” Boutwell writes.

The Valley’s rocky soil provided a particularly fertile ground for Hearts of Golds, said Bob Nelson’s son, Rik Nelson. The sun heated the rocks during the day and the rocks maintained their warmth overnight, insulating the young cantaloupes as they grew.

During at least two different periods, the community named a festival after the Hearts of Golds.

Pat Goetter, former society editor of the Spokane Valley Herald, keeps a newspaper clipping from the 1930s festival. In the photo, she and five young friends are dressed for the event, two wearing tomato costumes and four wearing Hearts of Gold costumes. Wooden hearts hang around little “cantaloupes’ ” necks.

In 1977, the Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce changed the name of its Valley Fall Festival to the Hearts of Gold Festival. At one time, the festival also had been called Spokane Valley Days.

But like the fruit itself, that festival faded away. The president of the Hearts of Gold Festival told The Spokesman-Review in 1979 that the chamber canceled the event in a 7-6 vote due to traffic concerns and “disenchantment by some merchants along the parade route who felt it was more nuisance than advantage.”

Today, Valleyfest is the area’s early fall festival.

Fading hearts

Different theories explain why Hearts of Gold cantaloupes are less common in the Spokane Valley today.

Because they’re vine ripened and can’t be transported far, Hearts of Golds are the perfect farm-stand product. But fewer families sell fruits and vegetables out of their gardens today since more produce than ever is available in supermarkets.

Beckemeier said the growing season is shorter today than it was in the past, and this variety of cantaloupe needs all the warmth it can get.

“We used to have cherries on the Fourth of July,” he said. “The climate has changed. It’s colder.”

Beckemeier said his uncle forecasted a climate change in the 1930s, when he was part of the crew building the Grand Coulee Dam. The uncle told him building a basin of water in the desert would moisten the climate over the years and drop the temperatures in Eastern Washington.

“Central Washington was all desert (before the dam),” Beckemeier said. “Now, it’s all lush and greener.”

Chester Utecht, another farmer here, blames the loss of Hearts of Golds on newer irrigation techniques. The cantaloupes need to be watered from underneath. The old wooden ramps that once carried water down rows, allowing it to sink into the soil, was best for Hearts of Golds, he said.

“They will not grow a darn under overhead sprinklers,” said Utecht, 80. “They’ll get black spots on them.”

Bob Nelson’s old farm is overgrown and owned by a power company now, but the wooden gates that carried the lifeblood to the Hearts of Golds still exist. Despite the varied theories, the men can agree on one thing. The cantaloupes were delicious. Eaten with a dash of salt or simply scooped out of their skin with a spoon, memories of the fruit still make mouths water.

At least one Valley resident won’t have to rely on his imagination, though.

On a late July afternoon, Arthur Williamson crouched over some weeds in the garden he helps tend at Holman Gardens Retirement Center. The 82-year-old retired teacher walked slowly past green beans, rhubarb and saucer-sized dahlias, with kneepads strapped tight over his khaki pants.

“There we go,” Williamson said, pointing to some low-growing vines. A fuzzy green sphere, the size of a tennis ball, clung to the vine, as did a few grape-sized companions.

Williamson pulled back some leaves to reveal a white stake.

“Hearts of Gold,” it read.

He predicted an early September harvest.