Should watermelon be the Kansas state fruit? The question’s ripe for debate at Capitol
Should the watermelon be the state fruit of Kansas?
A state lawmaker and a group of rural elementary school students in his district say yes.
And they’ll get their chance to prove it in the upcoming session of the Kansas State Legislature, which starts Monday.
Rep. Mark Samsel, R-Wellsville, has introduced House Bill 2433 to designate the watermelon — citrullus lanatus — as the official state fruit of Kansas.
Samsel joined team watermelon after observing a presentation by the third-grade class of Hope Lickteig, a teacher in the Central Heights school district in Richmond, population 464, about 145 miles northeast of Wichita.
“I walked in there and I left fascinated,” he said. “If you can imagine this line of third graders all in there, nervous as can be, lined up ready to go, and they’re all dressed up and stuff. One-by-one they go up and give their sentence or two. It was pretty cool.
“I was not just sitting around my desk with nothing better to do.”
Lickteig and Samsel decided the next logical step was to take the campaign to the Statehouse in Topeka as a lesson in legislating.
“I said sure, we can get this thing filed and it’ll be just like real life,” Samsel said. “That’s not to say somebody else might not show up and have opposition and think it should be strawberries or apples or some other fruit.”
The project started when the students read a story about Oklahoma’s legislature naming the watermelon as the state vegetable, which they did in 2007. Oklahoma took that internationally controversial action because they already had a state fruit, the strawberry.
The Richmond students considered that a horticultural foul.
And they set out to set the record straight and restore the watermelon to its rightful place among fruits.
“We got to talking and they said, ‘What’s our state fruit?’” Lickteig said. “I said, ‘I don’t know, let’s look’ and we looked and we didn’t have one.”
After much research, debate and deliberation, the students picked watermelon for the state fruit over the closest contenders, nectarines and peaches.
They cited the shared experience watermelon represents in Kansas, from countless seed-spitting contests to big annual festivals in Oxford, Potwin and the grandaddy of them all, the 110-year-old Clyde Watermelon Festival, which is by law the official watermelon festival of the state of Kansas.
“It does strike me as truly Kansan in how it brings people together,” Samsel said. “It seemed to be the right fit across the board.”
Samsel’s invited the students to come to Topeka and testify when he gets a hearing on the watermelon bill.
“A lot of Kansans eat them and it’s a really good fruit and has very good health factors for you,” explained Benjamin Wuertz, age 9.
He’s one of the 10 students, now fourth graders, who Lickteig plans to bring to Topeka to testify.
“It’s going to be a little nerve-wracking, but I think I can do it,” he said.
