Pumpkin display to get new home
By Greg Seubert
A longtime Waupaca area Halloween tradition is coming to an end.
Sort of.
A display of lighted carved pumpkins has drawn visitors to Jim and Deb Miller’s town of Farmington home for more than 20 years.
This year’s display, which will open Oct. 20 at E668 Golke Road and remain open through the first week of November, includes about 200 pumpkins.
It will also be the last one at the home.
“Because it’s become so popular, it’s so hard with the traffic,” Jim Miller said Oct. 18 while preparing for the opening.
“I get anxiety because I’m afraid that some little kid is going to get hurt running out into traffic or something like that,” he said. “It is still a public road, so we can’t close it down.”
That doesn’t mean that Miller has plans to shut the display down. He’d just like to see it move to another location, preferably in Waupaca.
“We’re working with the city and would like to get the whole city involved,” he said. “We haven’t nailed anything down. Hopefully, we’ll start having some meetings and planning things. It’s a little relief, but it’s sad, too. I go all out with pumpkins on the roof. Everybody knows this as the pumpkin house.”
Volunteer help
Miller recruits volunteers to help carve the pumpkins. This year’s crew includes Ron Franklin; Dawn, Jim and Jackson Vinz; Dale Dobbe; Paula Minkebige; and Patty Wagner.
“We clean them out, we gut them out, we run electric lights to them all,” Miller said. “I normally try and grow them, but this year, we had to go and get pumpkins. We had to really rely on the community this year to help us out and get us pumpkins. That’s going to be my biggest challenge in the years to come: outsourcing pumpkins. We just don’t want the little ones. We would like some bigger ones. We try to incorporate the design to the pumpkin.”
Miller comes up with different themes for the carvings each year. This year’s themes include Muppets characters, the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World in Florida and the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Sometimes, it’s whatever floats my boat,” Miller said. “I have a couple hundred patterns and I spread them out on three 8-foot tables in the house. Once I have enough patterns and ideas from people, we start transferring the patterns onto the pumpkins with a tattoo gun. Then we stencil the patterns on them and can start carving maybe five days before the display opens up.
“We never carve all the way through our pumpkins so they last longer,” he said. “We put the light bulbs in them and shade them from the inside depending on how the light comes through the pattern.”
The display has grown over the years, according to Miller.
“The little kids like it because it’s different,” he said. “When I’m carving, it pulls me back to a different time. I remember trick-or-treating and things when I was younger. I hope it maybe does that for some of the older people, too. What’s really nice now is we’ve become a tradition. We’ve had kids come out who are now bringing their kids. That’s really neat.”
Busy weekend
Since Halloween is on a Sunday this year, Miller is expecting big crowds that weekend.
“That will be a crazy weekend, probably our biggest in years,” he said. “When Halloween is on a Wednesday, we get the trick-or-treaters. When it’s on the weekend, it’s too busy for trick-or-treaters. I’ll still have candy for them, but it’s so crowded.”
The Millers’ home is located at the corner of Golke Road and Knight Lane. Miller suggested that visitors park on Knight Lane instead of Golke Road to help with traffic congestion.
“The community’s been so good to us out here,” he said. “We don’t worry about vandalism anymore. I used to sit out in the corner over there with a paintball gun for probably the first five years because we had vandalism and people stealing them. My wife has actually chased kids down the road that stole pumpkins. We don’t have that anymore.”
The display gets bigger as new pumpkins are added.
“Every time we put out pumpkins, they look the best the first day,” Miller said. “My ideal day would be 50 (degrees), no sun and a little moisture in the air so nothing dries out. We put a mold blocker on them so that hasn’t been an issue anymore.
“If you search the web, you can find people who do things like this,” he added. “I would say that I’m one of the bigger ones on private land. Businesses will do things like this and they’ll have a one-weekend thing. Here, people can come out for 14 days in a row and it changes every day, depending on the weather and how many we get carved. Usually, every third day will put out a crop of 20 more pumpkins.”
Miller is the first to admit that putting the display together is a lot of work, but said the effort is worth it.
“I’ve had so many people come out in their 70s and 80s and the look on their face is so neat,” he said. “Little kids are always like that. The other thing that’s special about this is it’s temporary. It doesn’t last forever. I like coming out and visiting with people. It brings a lot of joy to my heart.”