500 Lb. Pumpkin Arrives Unannounced

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED OCT. 2, 2006

The guys at the Engine 7 Ladder 1 firehouse are used to receiving gifts. They were among the first responders on Sept. 11, and on anniversaries of the terrorist attack they often get flowers and cards. They’ve also been given some unusual tributes, including a 6-foot-tall replica of the Twin Towers swathed entirely in red and white carnations. But nothing rivals their latest acquisition.

“I don’t get excited about many things,” said firefighter John McConnachie, “but I think it’s pretty cool.”

“It” is an elaborately carved, 500-pound pumpkin that showed up unannounced at the Duane Street firehouse one Saturday evening before last month’s fifth anniversary of 9/11. Bill and Lorraine Garvey, of White Lake, Mich., grew the pumpkin, carved it with symbols of God and country—a likeness of their daughter praying in one pumpkin eye, a neighbor boy in the other—and drove more than 12 hours to deliver it.

“I just wanted to tell those guys ‘Hey, we didn’t forget,’” Bill Garvey said in a telephone interview. The Garveys have been competitively growing “Atlantic Giants,” a species bred for size, for 20 years. They once set the state record, and their largest pumpkin weighed 700 pounds. (According to Bill Garvey, the world record is almost twice that.)

“If we’d have let it grow, that pumpkin would have been worth $1,000,” he said of the gift to the firefighters. “But the smile of the guys was worth more money than any contest I’ve ever won.”

McConnachie was on duty when the leviathan rolled into town. He helped wrestle it out of the Garveys’ pickup truck and onto hay bales in front of the firehouse, an operation that required six men.

“They were real nice people,” McConnachie said of the Garveys. “We invited them for dinner but they said they had to go get a hotel room. They didn’t even know where they were staying.”
And it wasn’t the first time that Tim Garvey trucked in a giant pumpkin from the heartland. In 2001, just after the attacks, he brought one to the local Red Cross offices. He posted a story online about the flash of inspiration that began his pumpkin-gifting habit. He wrote: “What could we do to heal America? Then one day I woke up and had the answer! We would take our best pumpkin to New York City to help them smile.”

Lorraine Garvey carved this year’s pumpkin in shallow relief, with the same design as the first. Its squat, beige face features a broad smile, with the letters A-M-E-R-I-C-A for teeth. The pupils of its heart-shaped eyes are silhouettes of children praying, and the nose is a profile of the iconic 9/11 moment when firefighters erected a flag in the rubble of the towers.

The firehouse pumpkin was coaxed to its ample proportions with cow manure, as well as commercial fertilizers like Miracle-Gro. “My fertilizer bill is astronomical,” Bill Garvey said. A supervisor at a gas company by trade, Garvey also grows corn, tomatoes, beans and peppers on his two acres, all of more edible proportions.

The Garveys returned to their home in White Lake hoping their pumpkin would be at the firehouse for a while. Tim Garvey said he’d seen pumpkins last for months. But this one lasted only a little over a week before the rot set in.

“It’s sad,” said McConnachie. “You know, you come in and it’s gone... Maybe next year we’ll know better how to care for a pumpkin.”