[CH] Gloster, OH chile fest 99
Alex Silbajoris (72163.1353@compuserve.com)
Mon, 27 Sep 1999 10:14:30 -0400
Sco's,
I can add to Larry's report on the 1999 Ohio Chile Pepper Festival in
Gloster, as Linda and I passed through town on Saturday. We made a big
cruise out of it, running a traingle from Columbus to Gloster to Knox
County. It was a great day for a ride, and L&A were among many other bikes
on the road.
The festival was on the grounds of the town high school, with an
arts-and-crafts display inside. CaJohn's was sharing a booth with the
people from Frog Ranch, who were among the organizers. If I have the story
right, the Frog Ranch people have a warehouse in Glouster, with their farm
nearby. The town has gotten behind the effort to produce a local festival,
and they made a good effort for a first try. When we left, going north
through town, we saw red chiles painted in the old storefront windows - the
post office would have made a good photograph. The sherriff's department
had several booths, including a tasteful coffin full of drugs, and some
Civil War re-enactors had a small encampment and display. The encampment
seemed to gain some authenticity from the aromas of the sherriff's horse
nearby, but that's for some other mailing list.
They were working on a world-record ristra - apparently the Guiness book
does not yet have a category for that. They had several large orchard
crates of pretty New Mex peppers, though they had a lot of dirt on them. I
asked a lady at the organizers' booth if the peppers had been grown
locally, and she said oh no, we brought them in from Mexico. I asked if
perhaps that was New Mexico, and she said maybe that's it. They had
several long tables with stringing operations going; I got a picture of a
woman in re-enactment costume carrying a string. The individual strings
were laid down along a curving drive in front of the school, but I never
took a look at exactly what they used for string or how they connected the
strands.
It was nice to meet with John Hard again at the CaJohn's booth. As usual,
he had a row of samples laid out. It's hard to miss the chile theme of the
booth when you stroll by, and as we chatted several different people came
up to look through the shirts or bottles. It was funny to think of the
rows of samples as one big bug zapper that drew them in and blasted them,
just like a kind of background noise behind our conversation. Some went
with a quick pfftt, but others spun off with AWWAAAFF HARRRARRG
WHOOOOOOOO while we continued chatting.
Since we had a long way to go, we didn't want to linger too long, but I was
glad we stayed for the pepper-eating contest. I mean, the hula-hoop
contest was OK (a boy won; Linda says the secret is to compete shirtless)
and the limbo bar dance line was worth a photo, but I really wanted to
watch some people suffering in the sun - that's one extra twist to this
competition, there is no shade. The peppers were typical pickled
nacho-topping-type jalapenos which had been stemmed and halved but not
seeded. They set out a few long tables, and each contestant got a hot dog
bun and a glass of beverage (choice of water or cola). They had 60 seconds
to eat the first pepper (actually two halves) and 60 seconds to rest. Then
they had 50 seconds before the rest. then 40, and then 10 seconds between
rests of 30 seconds. At first the contestants were sitting straight up in
their seats, then after a while they began to remove hats and mop brows;
soon they were dabbing eyes and leaving the table. It finally came down to
one man, and a woman from the organizing committee, who won. I had
wondered how well I might have placed, but I had no intention of loading up
on salty peppers before camping in a pine woods with no facilities. I'll
go no farther with that.
I looked around for some newspaper web site links about the festival, but
the ones on the Athens paper link were dead, the Columbus Dispatch didn't
have it as a search result on glouster, and I could find no web page for
the newspaper in Nelsonville.
Let's see what they can make of this festival next year. As John said,
it's a difficult season for a grower to attend a festival, as everyone
needs to be in the fields on good days like that. I could imagine them
setting up a booth selling chile to benefit the school marching band or
something, and maybe sell people a chance to make ther own ristras to take
home. And maybe, if there is enough interest among people here, we could
reserve a group camp site at nearby Burr Oak State Park. Hm?
Alex Silbajoris 72163.1353@compuserve.com
the monlight was great in the pines