VIDEO: Melons celebrated in Dixon

DIXON - Bumblebees, battling bighorns and cowboys dressed in pink - by all accounts, the Melon Days parade went off without a hitch last Saturday.

"We had fun dressing up," Dixon resident Steve Pieper said.

Pieper and his grandkids, Louie, 9, and Maria, 11, sported old-fashioned attire aboard their soft sage green 1940 Oldsmobile, which the family restored over the course of the last year and a half.

"It was a family project," Pieper said. "We all worked on it."

The Piepers weren't the only family turning heads in unique automobiles during the parade. The McLoeod "family tree" carried four generations of the McLoeod family through the parade. Originally from Dixon, but now living in Ronan, Kayla Willer said her dad put in the elbow grease to create the log cabin coated truck, which now resembles a log cabin much more than the Chevy Caprice it once was. This is the family's fifth year participating in the Melon Days parade.

"We always played in it when we were kids," she said.

Arlee's Betty May Schall said it was her kids who talked her into riding a bull horn decorated four wheeler with her great-grandson, Levi Nentwig, of Ronan, in the parade. For the 85-year-old, the smile on her great-grandson's face made the trip worth-while.

Unfortunately, it's been another rough year for Harley and Joey Hettick, owners of the famed Dixon Melons, Inc. Still recovering from the $60,000 robbery of last September, this season's melon crop was doing fine until a series of July hail storms took out 80 percent of the field. A series of fundraisers by some of their friends in the Missoula and Dixon area raised the Hetticks $15,000 to plant this year's crop, which was only about half the size of 2009's.

"We got hit with two hail storms in one day, and then another a week later," Harley Hettick said. "It's not going to be a very high profit year."

Despite the hardships, the family has persevered. Truck-loads of Dixon cantaloupe were available for purchase at Dixon's Melon Days, with contestants in the festival's melon-eating contest slurping up every last bite.

"Watermelons and honeydew, some of the exotics are just around the corner," Hettick said, as long as the weather cooperates with some necessary bright sun and hot temperatures.

A three-on-three basketball tournament, kids' games, races and the Farmers' Olympics accounted for most of the afternoon's action. Sprints, potato sack, three-legged and wheel-barrow races tested each child, and some adults, to the max. Contestants won money for every win, and some speedsters accumulated quite a stack of cash before the day was done. Digging for candy and coins hidden under a heap of hay kept kiddies of all ages occupied when their age group wasn't racing.

"This is a lot of fun," volunteer finish-line judge and result-keeper Liz Posio said. "I think I'll help out more next year, too."

Prize money for the races came from a number of raffles and fundraising events done both at the festival and throughout the year before. The Farmers' Olympics, however, requires participants to pay to enter, but they can earn the whole pot if they win.

Saddling a barrel, mending a fence and driving a nail into a post were just a few of the event's challenges. Organizer Cheryl Morigeau said the games were making a come-back after low participation caused them to be excluded from the festival for a few years in a row.

Hoping to increase attendance at the festival next year, organizers said they plan to ramp up the fundraising for the 2011 event. Melon Days attendees should look forward to the return of an already sponsored lil' buckaroo rodeo and a city slicker rodeo for adults, Morigeau said. The tentative plan is to spread the rodeo over two days with sheep-riding, calf-riding and all the usual events taking place.

"It's going to be really big," she said.