A TALE OF TWO PUMPKINS
by Dave Eisenstadter
Sentinel Staff
Published: Saturday, October 16, 2010
For Alfred R. “Al” Boudreau of Rindge, pride in his prize-winning, 1,470-pound pumpkin is also mixed with some sadness.
Jeffrey A. Brooks of Greenfield, his friend and collaborator, died in July, at the height of the growing season.
“I was in shock all summer,” Boudreau said. “He was a really good guy and we worked close together for the last five years.”
Today, Boudreau’s pumpkin will compete against others grown in New Hampshire in Goffstown’s Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off, and he’s been told by organizers he is favored to win.
While Brooks will not make the Weigh-Off, one of his pumpkins will, thanks in part to the diligence of his wife, Mary S. Brooks.
The pumpkin weighs 1,025 pounds.
“I’m sure if he had been around to do it, he would have had one the size that Al had, but I was mainly doing it on my own and doing the best I could,” Brooks said.
Brooks had often watched her husband tend his pumpkins since he began about 15 years ago, but had never taken an active role in their care. When he died, she made a decision to pick up where he left off.
“He had worked so hard,” Brooks said, recalling the notes to care for the pumpkins he left her while having trouble speaking in the hospital. “I still have his notes.”
Technically competitors, Boudreau and Jeffrey Brooks began sharing resources and advice a few years ago in their quests to grow large pumpkins. Talking daily on the phone for weeks at a time, they planned out what seeds to buy, what fertilizers to use and how to care for the plants.
Boudreau was first inspired to grow large pumpkins by a weigh-off event in 1990 in his hometown of Rindge. He participated the following year with what he called a “puny” 60-pound pumpkin.
“It wasn’t good,” he said. “I was carrying mine in and everyone else had two or three guys bringing theirs in, carrying it on a tarp.”
But Boudreau later caught on. While this year saw the production of his largest pumpkin, Boudreau’s large gourds have topped towers at the Keene Pumpkin Festival 15 of its 20 years. His only other pumpkin of this season, a 950-pound colossus, can be seen in this year’s festival at the top of the Railroad Square tower, grinning the name Timken.
Brooks faced similar frustrations early on, but joined a growers club for large pumpkins, then found a seasoned advisor in Boudreau.
Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which made it difficult to breathe, Brooks was placed on disability in 2008, giving him more time to devote to his pumpkin growing operation.
This year, his condition worsened, and he was hospitalized at Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, then moved to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, where he died at age 61.
Tending the pumpkins left behind after his death became therapeutic for his wife.
When it came time to choose which fruit on the plant she would cultivate, she chose the pumpkin her husband fertilized before he was hospitalized, rather than the one she fertilized afterward — even though it was in a worse position on the vine.
Of the three pumpkins in Brooks’ patch, his fertilized pumpkin grew to be the largest.
The festivities at this weekend’s Goffstown Weigh-Off include a pumpkin hunt, a pumpkin cook-off, pumpkin catapults and a pumpkin boat race, with boats made out of large, hallowed-out pumpkins with small motors inserted in them.
The weekend may also involve a memorial to Brooks, according to Roberta Grady, executive director of the Goffstown Main Street Program, which runs the Weigh-Off.
“The growers are a very tight knit group,” Grady said. “They compete fiercely, but they are also close friends and they help each other out.”
It is a group Mary Brooks now counts herself among. Following in her husband’s footsteps, she plans to grow large pumpkins of her own next year.
Working at Monadnock High School, she will have less time than her husband did to tend to her plants, particularly in the crucial months of April and May, but all of the equipment to get the job done will be at her disposal.
“I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’m going to try,” she said.
Dave Eisenstadter can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1432, or deisenstadter@keenesentinel.com
