Time Machine: Dale’s Fruit Market

CEDAR RAPIDS - New Pioneer Co-op has opened its organic food store at 3338 Center Point Rd. NE in Cedar Rapids, which once was the site of a landmark produce market.

Dale Everett opened his first fruit and vegetable market in 1953 at 3337 Center Point Rd. NE. It was constructed of two-by-fours and borrowed canvas. After a year he moved across the street to 3338 Center Point Rd. NE, where he remained until 1986. He told a Gazette reporter he bought the property 'on word and a handshake.”

Everett said he was born in Conesville in Muscatine County, famous for its cantaloupes.

'I was just a poor farm kid. Dad had always grown watermelons. When I was 6, my dad traded a truckload of watermelons for a used bike for the five kids. We always grew watermelons and cantaloupes,” he said.

In the 1940s he began raising his own melons. His first delivery was to Carl's Food, near the Wilson & Co. meatpacking plant.

'He bought 12 watermelons. I had to carry eight down some old wooden steps to the basement, and others to cars. He paid me 1 1/2 cents a pound and all he did was stand behind the register and charge 3 cents a pound. That got to me and I decided that I was on the wrong side of this business,” Everett said.

Not long after that he moved to Cedar Rapids and opened his shop.

When Everett was 15, a neighbor taught him how to fly a small plane. He was ready for his license at 16 and eventually bought his own plane. Everett bought a school bus for $100 and took out the seats. Between the plane and the bus he traveled all over the country buying produce for his store.

Everett said one time in the 1950s, when watermelons were in season, he received a call from a Texas grower who had two semis of Big Black Diamond melons and couldn't find a market for them. Everett said he bought 1,600 of them for penny a pound and left his own in the field. The melons were delivered and put in bins in front of the market. The next day a hailstorm split them all open.

'I rushed in and called all the radio stations,” Everett said. 'I told them I was selling watermelons for 50 cents each, but tell them to bring dishpans out because they're all split from the hail.”

That was at 10 a.m. By 4 p.m. all of them were gone, he said.

Along with raising produce on 30 to 50 acres in Muscatine County, Everett pulled a semi-trailer truck to different parts of the country to pick up produce that couldn't be grown in Iowa.

Dale's Market provided produce for about a dozen local restaurants. The restaurant owners, in turn, introduced him to produce he hadn't known about: jicama, French endive and kale.

In 1963, Everett bought the Linwood Fruit and Vegetable Market at 519 16th Ave. SW from Henry Reich when Reich and his wife moved to Florida. For a while the Everetts operated both fruit markets.

The markets carried fresh Christmas trees every year. Everett believed women were more choosy than men about finding the right tree, but he said he had one male customer who spent up to 20 hours, spread out over several days, looking for the perfect tree. When whole families came to the market to hunt for a yule tree, it was the kids who won out in the tree choice, he said.

By 1983, Everett no longer used planes or buses or semis. The market hired trucks and did business by phone. He and his wife spent more than a month every year, beginning in June, in Warren, Ark., to buy vine-ripened tomatoes. Everett bought and resold 34,000 20-pound boxes of tomatoes that year alone for his store and for Nash Finch Co., Gamble-Robinson, Hy-Vee and other stores in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

He was proud to be known as the 'Cedar Rapids Watermelon and Tomato King.”

Everett's knowledge of the produce business and his marketing skills were said to have kept Dale's Fruit Market open as supermarkets became more prevalent. He said he bought quality merchandise and maintained good business practices.

'We've got to remain competitive,” he said. 'Cedar Rapids always has been a price-conscious town. The prices have got to be right or people won't buy.”

Everett felt that deliveries should be quick and produce should be put out for sale while it's fresh. Transportation was a big factor affecting quality produce. 'It should be handled carefully, refrigerated at the proper temperature,” he said.

Dale's provided one of the largest varieties of local produce. Everett estimated that 30 percent of his store's stock was grown in the area. He said he could tell the difference in two neighboring farmers' produce even if they grew the same products in the same soil. For instance, watermelons sold at Dale's usually were purchased from his brother, Fred, who farmed in Conesville. One time Fred ran out and sent his neighbor's melons thinking there would be little difference.

'I called him right back and told him they weren't out of his field. Different people have different strategies on growing, fertilizing and such,” Everett said.

In April 1986, Dale Everett sold Dale's Fruit Market to Tom Read, food service director at Linn-Mar schools.

By 1990, the produce retailer closed, a victim of chain stores.

'Produce departments in the big grocery stores have improved 100 percent in the last five years,” Read said. 'They have improved the appearance of the product and sell it at a much cheaper price than I can sell it for.”

Everett died in 2008 at the age of 79.