With the aroma of raw, perhaps overly ripe pumpkin in the air, the crowd cheered as a catapult hurled a lumpy, orange gourd overhead before it landed with a satisfying splat.
Hundreds of the ubiquitous Halloween fruit met a similar fate during the City’s annual Great Pumpkin Smash held on November 2 on the lawn behind City Hall’s War Memorial. Although the once jaunty or eerie decorations had been reduced to wet clumps, they will serve a useful purpose after being converted to compost by Black Earth Compost, rather than moldering in countless garbage bins.
Photos: Julie M. Cohen
If kids wanted a break from the destruction, they could check out a variety of Department of Public Works (DPW) trucks and other vehicles, chow down on whoopie pies, or participate in other activities.
Aside from the catapult, visitors had other somewhat macabre ways to rid themselves of the unwanted pumpkins, including slicing them in half with a guillotine, pummeling them into a wall of spikes, or simply slamming them to the ground.
Photos: Julie M. Cohen
Tom Henry, 10, and his sister Greta, 8, were unsentimental as they watched DPW staff members load their gourds onto a large catapult. The siblings and other kids enjoyed watching the orange orbs fly, hoping theirs would make it the farthest before exploding on the ground.
Others stood in a slightly shorter line to watch a guillotine swiftly bisect and crush their pumpkins. This method required audience participation as children had to activate a robot, which threw a ball at the wooden switch that triggered the sharp blade to fall.
Members of the combined Newton North and South High School LigerBots team created the orange-and-black robot as well as the guillotine.
Showing youngsters how to activate the robot, LigerBot member Sam Preston, 18, was happy to have helped create the machine.
“It’s been working pretty well,” said the Newton North senior.
His LigerBot mentor, Greer Swiston, said the group likes that older students share their knowledge with younger ones to help them successfully create projects.
Swiston said the LigerBots team members first participated in the Pumpkin Smash in 2019, stopped during Covid, and are happy to be back.
Preston, who hopes to go into engineering in the future, estimated that 150 pumpkins had been destroyed by the guillotine in about two hours. Given that the event lasted three hours and that there were other ways people could pulverize the gourds, it’s certain the community made a lot of compost and reduced a good amount of waste.
Photos: Jack Prior
