#Roger williams pumpkin spectacular ma skin#

We were trying to get a 100-pound Humpty pumpkin up the tree using two ladders and, well. We had a big old dead tree and we cut it in half. 'One of the Norman Rockwells took us five hours to carve, and it got dropped. We don't even have the pumpkins yet and it's showtime.' It took 10 men standing shoulder to shoulder in the cold, digging the toes of their boots in the mud to shove a blanket under it, then gently drag the giant to the loading lift of their truck for the trip to Providence. Take, for example, the 800-pound beauty carved with the image of firefighters hoisting the American flag for the 2001 show.

To John Reckner and crew, these are not fruits, they're performers. Edith will last another day but Archie's gonna be mush after tonight.' 'Dorothy's down,' they'll say, 'but the Scarecrow's OK. The pumpkin crew has its own kind of language, says Ms. Running the show is also nonstop work: 'Every day we take away the rotted ones, light the show, run the show, come home, redo the big ones, get up at 8 a.m.

(They use drywall saws, which have narrow blades serrated on both sides.) Another team handles the 'fillers,' simple jack-o'-lanterns that they can carve as quickly as one every three minutes.

#Roger williams pumpkin spectacular ma skin#

A team of about 20 art-school graduates uses flexible paring knives to skin off a thin layer of rind, making carvings that are extraordinarily fine and detailed. The giant pumpkins are turned over to 'gutting marines' who clean out the pulp and soak the pumpkins in diluted bleach, which acts as a fungicide. Once the carving begins, there's no letup till it's done. Then at harvest time, they buy pumpkins and do the sketching. All year long, Reckner and his wife and two grown children - all of whom went to art school - collect design ideas and patterns. 'We took care of the ticket booths and bathrooms so that John could concentrate on what he does best - carving.' 'It was a perfect marriage,' says zoo staff member Lisa Bousquet. In 2001, Reckner moved the show to Providence's Roger Williams Park Zoo, where 80,000 people saw the show and the zoo had to turn thousands more away. 'I don't know if I'm going to keep doing this.' 'This is probably the last year,' he'd say every September. About 300 people came.'īy 1999, 20,000 folks were touring the display over an eight-day period and Reckner, along with 30 friends and family, were carving upwards of 4,000 gourds. 'We started out in 1988 with a couple hundred pumpkins,' Reckner says, 'and put them up behind a local school in Oxford. As the late-afternoon light grew dim and the air turned cold, Reckner nosed his Ford along a two-lane highway until at last, to the family's amazement, they saw hundreds of jack-o'-lanterns blazing away on a hillside. He was heading to Northfield Falls, where he'd heard everyone carved a giant pumpkin at Halloween. Reckner's been in love with jack-o'-lanterns since he took his family up to northern Vermont one October more than 15 years ago. 'And I love the outdoors, so what I like most is being able to blend the pumpkins into a landscape and highlight its beauty.' 'I spend all day walking around thinking up ideas,' he says. Reckner, an Oxford, Mass., letter carrier who saves up vacation days so he can create a new show each fall. This is pumpkin carving at its best, due largely to Mr. Five hundred jack-o'-lanterns hang along the limbs of a tree that looms several stories into the sky. Off in the distance, carved pumpkins stretch out across a pond. A glowing orange Andy Warhol squats among dozens of other larger-than-life icons of the 1960s as the sound system pumps out 'Nights in White Satin' by the Moody Blues.

Around another bend, there's Anne Frank, Shirley Temple, and the Beatles. The audience piles through the gate, giddy at the sight: Giant pumpkins carved in the likeness of Mae West and Humphrey Bogart flicker softly in a copse of tall pines.

The sky glows orange for a few more brief moments, then darkness hits. A volunteer leans into a 100-pounder with a barbecue lighter and jabs at the wicks of the candles inside. His crew crisscrosses the three-acre site, bending to light tea candles inside each jack-o'-lantern, then running to the next. With only 10 minutes until showtime - when all jack-o'-lanterns needed to be in place and lit - John Reckner bumps a wheelbarrow piled with pumpkins down a dirt path. It's dusk on opening night of the Jack-O'-Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, R.I.