As a kid living on a New London oil production camp, Lee Wheelis grew up bike riding, pond fishing, and watermelon seed spitting. The latter was popular in the summer, when the fruit was ripe and temperatures were high.
It’s fitting that Wheelis would end up spending the better half of his life in Luling, a town of 5,600 residents that’s known for its four-day celebration of watermelons held every year since 1954. Still, it took almost 10 years before he attended the Watermelon Thump festival for the first time. When he finally made it out in June of 1984, one event caught his eye: seed spitting. “I thought, ‘Well, shoot, I used to do that as a kid,’” he says. “‘I’ll give it a shot.’”
He not only won that year, but he also became a festival regular, often participating in the seed spitting competition—winning some years, losing others. In 1989, the competition was fierce. The current world record holder for watermelon seed spitting distance was in attendance, as were several other top spitters.
As Wheelis lined up at the spitway, he could see a line marking the world record. He had two attempts. On the second, his seed soared through the air so fast that he lost track of where it landed—until someone more than 60 feet away pointed to a spot on the ground. At 68 feet and 9 1/8 inches, Wheelis’ seed had broken the world record. The town reveled in the fact that the record was set at the Watermelon Thump—and that the honor was claimed by a Luling resident.
But for 81-year-old Wheelis, the win was only one moment in a life as a husband, father, veteran, and grandfather. “I was a hero for about 15 minutes,” he says. “Then I went back to our way of life.”
