How to win a watermelon eating contest

By Amanda Mackay Smith

It was in the mid 1950s, and I was 14 or 15 years old. There was one other contestant, a boy about my age. I have no idea who he was. 

We stood up on the weather beaten open 
air stage.

We were given slabs of watermelon, and raced to see who could eat them the fastest and be finished first. 

He beat me by a few seconds. 

I looked down at the gray wooden boards at our feet. In front of me were a few drops of watermelon juice. In front of him was a 
juicy lake.

So here’s the moral of the story: If you want to win a watermelon eating contest, what you do is take hold of the slab of watermelon and smash your face into it, letting all the juice pour out on the floor,  and you eat the little bits of pulp left over. That’s what he had done.

 I had eaten it all! 

Amanda Mackay Smith grew up in White Post, Va., and now lives in Durham, North Carolina.