At least once a week all summer long someone in the Baylor family drives down south and hauls back a 48-foot semitrailer filled—front to back, top to bottom—with sweet, crisp, 90-percent-water-based nostalgia.
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Many of the customers are of Homer and Mack’s generation, and were raised, as the brothers were, in the south. Maybe their own parents grew and sold watermelons.”We fulfill a demand for something that reminds people of the south, before they all migrated north to find factory jobs,” says Keith.
Over the years they added regular stops in Chicago and Milwaukee, staying for a day in each before turning around and heading back home. In the mid-1960s Hezekiah’s sons began moving one by one to Milwaukee, where watermelon sales became an infrequent sideline to construction work for a time. Mack, who’s 62 and the youngest of the four brothers, made his way to Milwaukee in 1966. He worked there for a few years until he bought his first semi, a GMC with two gear shifts and a gutted muffler. Now the brothers and their sons use their own trucks to haul steel and other freight around the midwest when watermelon’s not in season.
“I don’t know where people pick up on that,” says Keith, who eats watermelon every day for breakfast. But he does agree they are superior to store-bought melons—they’re fresher, sweeter, and crisper, and for that he sells each individually weighed melon at a constantly changing premium. In early June the Florida melons were selling from $7 to $12 for 18 to 45 pounds. Compare that to 15-pound Texas watermelons on sale at the same time for $4.99 at Cermak Produce.
