2005: 22,153 falls short

PETER J. CLEARY Sentinel Staff

Five was a common guess among the younger crowd Saturday for the number of pumpkins in Keene.

Other guesses included 98, more than 1,000 and 10 million.

And one seven-year-old girl, coming in with a guess a bit higher than the average among her peers, said she thought there were 162 pumpkins. She changed her estimate to 162,000 after some prodding from older family members.

None of the kids polled said they actually counted the pumpkins — that was too daunting a task — but five seemed like a good guess to many.

Regardless of the number, there were certainly more in Keene than Chesterfield, according to Chesterfield resident Dimitri Seger. That town only had four pumpkins, said Seger, himself a four-year-old.

The actual count in Keene was 22,157 jack-o’-lanterns.

And though Keene still holds the record for the most jack-o’-lanterns in one place — 28,952 — a competing festival in Boston beat out Keene this year.

There were 24,541 pumpkins on Boston Common Saturday.

“We’re happy for them but we still hold the record,” said festival coordinator Suzanne L. Woodward.

Next year, she said, Keene will rally.

One person visiting Keene from the Boston said that not only did she fail to bring a jack-o’-lantern to Keene, she was even thinking about leaving with one Saturday night.

“We were hoping to go home with a pumpkin,” said Ricki S. Rubin, of Somerville, Mass. She needed one for her porch, she said.

She said she was undecided Saturday afternoon about which pumpkin to snatch, but it had to meet one requirement.

“It will be one small enough to fit in my pocket,” she said.

And while there is no new world record this year, the festival isn’t about the numbers, Woodward said.

“Breaking the record would be fun,” she said Saturday afternoon, “but it’s not at the top of our list.”

The festival, rather, should focus on making sure people have a good time, she said.

And many kids downtown said they were having fun.

Ivy Pepin, 9, of Chesterfield, said she was enjoying looking for the pumpkin she carved. She didn’t seem discouragedshe had to pick her pumpkin out of the thousands on display.

“It just has a smiley face,” she said of her jack-o’-lantern, adding it was a little scary.

Some of the smiley-faced pumpkins downtown may turn into mush overnight with the rain, Woodward said Saturday, making the clean-up job this morning a bit more difficult.

But even with the mush, the streets should be pumpkin-free by noon today.

And after the cleaning is done, Woodward said, it’s time for her to take a bubble bath.