Once upon a time, long ago when young men wore beards, pumpkins were much larger than they are today. One day I went hunting these great pumpkins with my friend Dan. We found one in a back yard in Rome, far from its natural habitat of fields and farms, and we documented it so that no one could doubt our find.
Dan, behind a great pumpkin
The quality of this photograph is degraded because of the primitive printing process of the disreputable underground newspaper in which it was printed, to a certain extent because of the scanning process required to extract the image from a yellowed cutout from the paper, and also because the original image quality was not great. That last was because the skittish nature of great pumpkins in the wild did not allow for much time to calculate the optimal exposure.
No pumpkins or people were injured in the production of this image. The pumpkin was released as soon as we got the photograph. It was last seen hiding in a pie crust.
Dan went on to become a surgeon and my brother in law, probably not because of but in spite of the widespread dissemination of this image in the questionable media. I went on to leave the newspaper, come back again, and then leave again, finally and for good. I have never again seen a pumpkin of this size, although that does depend at least in part on one’s perspective.
I wondered how you were going to end this post and resolve the mystery. Well done!
That is HUGE pumpkin.
Well done, Mark, though it would be tough to decide whether to post this for Halloween or April Fool’s Day. By the way, beards and young men have been reunited of late!
Pablo – Thanks. I wasn’t sure where it was going until it ended.
Robin – It was nearly as huge as it looks.
Scott – Posting it was almost accidental. I brought a bunch of my old clippings home from my mother’s after she died, and this one happened to by lying on the floor in our bedroom Tuesday night when I was getting ready for bed. I decided then to scan and upload it so I could do a Halloween post on Wednesday, while I was away in Huntsville working.