Muscatine Journal & News Tribune, Wednesday August 6, 1930 page 2
Transcribed by Lynn McCleary March 7, 2022

GIRL IS NAMED TOMATO QUEEN
Callie Mae Bumgardner of West Branch to Pick Basket for the Hoovers

West Branch. Ia. Aug. 6 – Chosen by a disinterested committee of five Chicagoans, Callie Mae Bumgardner of West Branch will be the tomato queen at the Tomato festival, which will officially open the tomato shipping season at West Branch, Tuesday, Aug. 12. She is thirteen years old, the only child of Mrs. Ada Bumgardner, a freshman in high school. She will be a charming tomato queen in her appropriate costume, surrounded by 20 attendants and a retinue of pretty girls in overalls, all enthusiastic tomato pickers.

The queen will pick and present to President and Mrs. Hoover two baskets of the choicest scarlet tomatoes from the first crop of “love apples” as our grandmothers called the first soup and catsup vegetables to be harvested for commercial purposes at the president’s old home community.

This is West Branch’s first venture in an enterprise of this sort, and the many acres devoted to the culture of tomatoes this year is now beginning to show the results of the work already expended. The railroad is co-operating in putting on this festival, and the entire community will participate of the first shipment to the factory at Muscatine.

The queen will write a letter to accompany the gift to the white house.

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