1996: The jack o'lantern tally breaks world records
Crowd of 30,000 attends the jack-o'-lantern festival

By ELLEN GRIMM, Sentinel staff

They were delivered on skateboards, in strollers and in shopping bags.

They appeared wearing hair curlers, wings and jalapeno horns.

And by the time the official count was completed Saturday at 8 p.m., 13,044 pumpkins, carved and lit, lined Main Street in Keene.

That number reaffirmed Keene's position in the record books, smashing -- or squashing -- all previous records. The previous record for the most jack-o'-lanterns ever assembled in one place at one time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, was also set by Keene, which tallied 10,540 jack-o'-lanterns at the 1994 festival.

And it made Keene the undisputed landslide winner of a pumpkin challenge issued by the city of Nashua, which collected about 1,060 pumpkins during its first pumpkin festival Saturday.

But competition wasn't the point, said Jean P. Nelson, president of Center Stage Cheshire County, which produced the Keene event.

"Whether Nashua did anything or not didn't stir us," said Nelson who estimated that the crowd in Keene reached 30,000 by early evening. Celebrating as a community was the point, she said.

But the celebration was by no means confined to Keene.

Throughout the day, people signed up their pumpkins, arriving from as far away as California and Texas, sometimes finishing last-minute carvings just around the corner from the registration tables.

The long-distance winners came from England, Denmark, Yugoslavia and Ecuador. The largest pumpkin, donated by a Keene State College sorority, weighed 700 pounds. Some of the more elaborate carvings included clot faces and owls, spiders and square dancers.

This year, the celebration struck a philanthropic note as well as a festive one. People were asked to bring nonperishable food to donate to The Community Kitchen, a nonprofit agency in Keene that provides fee meals to people in southwestern New Hampshire and southeastern Vermont. The kitchen was nearly forced to close far a week recently because of a lack of cash but was kept open with the help of local contributions.

People came to work as well as to enjoy the sight of thousands of glowing pumpkins. Behind the scenes were hundreds of volunteers. "There's no way it could even begin to happen without all the volunteers, from the youngest kids who sold balloons, to older people who registered the pumpkins," Nelson said.

Jamie L. Newell, 14, a Keene High School student, spent about four hours on Saturday lighting candles inside pumpkins. Half that time was devoted to relighting candles that had been blown out or had melted down.

There was also lots of support from Keene businesses, Nelson said, from the smallest companies to the major corporations. Paragon Cable, CFX Bank, National Grange Mutual Insurance Co. and Lions Club International sponsored the festival.

Richard A. Avard, coordinator of the Nashua event, was also looking for community participation, but he had been hoping for a better turnout. "I don't think people understood what our festival was all about. It was a great day, but in order to bring a pumpkin to some place, you have to know why you're doing it. Now, People have an idea what we re all about."

This year, instead of 40-foot towers of pumpkins festooning downtown Keene, scaffolding was arranged horizontally -- in lines stretching 1,600 feet along Main Street. Many festival fans said they missed the tall wall of pumpkins, but Boston Scaffolding, which constructed the rows of shelves, was unwilling to take on the liability this year, Nelson said.

Several local people who had been content to simply observe the festival in past years pitched in pumpkins for the first time. Melinda A. Savard of West Swanzey spent three hours on her witch-pumpkin the night before the festival.

Joyce C. Smith of Keene brought her first pumpkin, as well as her 90-year-old mother's first pumpkin, carved with Una, her first name, and C., for her last name, Campbell.

And there were costumes and more costumes. Virginia and Dan Papp of Hinsdale showed up last year as a tooth and a tube of toothpaste. This year, they needed costumes for their children and for Virginia Papp's parents who had come from Connecticut for the festival. So they decided to dress as three generations of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.

The pumpkin festival gives the Bruce family a chance to show off what has been a carving tradition for 81 years. Jeffrey A. Bruce of Sullivan said it began when his grandfather, Wharton Bruce, figured out at age 15 that an effective way to advertise the produce he was selling at a fruit and vegetable market would be to make a pumpkin face using those very fruits and vegetables.

At the festival, Jeffrey Bruce and his father, Donald M. Bruce of Maine, hovered near their pumpkin, named Uriah, with its yellow-pepper nose, mushroom warts, string-bean eyebrows, radish teeth and turnip eyes.

There were a few tense moments throughout the day. A number of children were too busy gawking to pay attention to where they were and ended up separated from, but ultimately reunited with, their parents.

A few costumes were excessively scary, complained Kristin M. Joslin of Fitzwilliam. The grim reaper was one, she said. "One little kid started shrieking and dropped right down."

"With 30,000 people turning out this year, the thought of a bigger crowd showing up next year is a bit daunting," Nelson said. The festival made major newspapers this year -- it was third on a New York Times list of the 10 best things to do on Halloween weekend, and sixth on The Wall Street Journal's list.

Among the challenges: feeding everyone and accommodating all the overnight visitors. Even with 30 vendors this year, there were long lines of people waiting for food, Nelson said. Traffic seemed endless. And people had trouble finding places to stay.

Nelson said she will try to add more vendors next year and will suggest developing a list of alternative places to stay that would be available through the Chamber of Commerce. "It seems there might be people in the city who would be willing to open their homes," she said.

Also, Center Stage will have to stock up a bit more on T-shirts and sweatshirts. The group's booth made $10,000 on Saturday, selling T-shirts, balloons, popcorn and caps. "I almost fainted," Nelson said, when she discovered how much money it had made. There were only 30 sweatshirts left at the end of the day. "We even sold the clothes we were wearing -- our aprons and hats," Nelson said.

Planning for this year's festival began in August, Nelson said. Next year's pumpkin festival is already germinating. "We will start in the next couple of weeks meeting (discussing) what worked and what didn't," she said.

This dispatch was published Monday, Oct. 28, 1996 in The Keene Sentinel