531-Pound Foreigner Wins Pumpkin Event

You can make a lot of pumpkin pie out of 531 pounds of pumpkin.

That’s what the winner weighed in the 1985 World Pumpkin Weigh-Off. But much to the dismay of growers here in the self-described Pumpkin Capital of California, the international heavyweight champion hailed from River Phillips, Nova Scotia.

Pumpkin growers connected via phone link from Circleville, Ohio, Canada and England had a tough record to shoot for. Last year’s winner, Norman Gallagher, a Washington state logger, squashed all previously known pumpkin weights by producing a 612-pound Atlantic Giant variety.

This year’s champion, Michael Hodgson, won $2,000 and a trip to Hawaii in the contest sponsored by the International Pumpkin Assn.

The greatest pumpkin in the West Coast competition held at Half Moon Bay weighed in at 438 pounds. Grown by last year’s third-place American winner, Arthur Quint of Castro Valley, Calif., the nearly three-foot-high Atlantic Giant pumpkin had to be hoisted onto the scales by forklift.

“It’s all in the seed,” Quint, 74, said of this and previous pumpkin successes. “Some seeds just have the right genetic material to grow big. Then you have to water, fertilize and take care of them. It takes a lot of work.”

Maybe too much work, said his wife, Frances Quint.

“All summer long, we didn’t go anywhere,” she said. “It’s like his baby.”

Each entry in the contest must be a certified pumpkin--mostly orange, that is--following an agreement reached at an international conference in London. The British had often previously entered pumpkins that were green or gray and difficult to distinguish from squash. In the third year of the competition, which started in 1974, a separate contest was established for squash.

The pumpkin growing contest is part of this weekend’s 15th Annual Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival that is expected to attract more than 200,000 visitors to this tiny coastal town of morning fogs and pumpkin patches.

The festivities will start with the Great Pumpkin Parade down Main Street at noon Saturday. The pumpkin industry and the media-attracting festival have done much to revive Half Moon Bay, which has considerably more pumpkins than people (pop. 7,200). More than a dozen growers in the area south of San Francisco ship pumpkins as far as the East Coast and Hawaii, while thousands of purchasers flock to the pumpkin patches each fall.

“Everybody laughed at us when we first started this, but now everyone wants to have one,” said Dolores Mullin, chairwoman of the festival for 15 years and former mayor of Half Moon Bay.