Category: Q&A

It’s Milford Pumpkin Festival weekend

The Milford Pumpkin Festival has been going strong for 35 years thanks to the region’s hearty pumpkins and even heartier volunteers. The Granite Town Festivities Committee in partnership with the Milford Lions Club and Milford Rotary put on the event, which includes a giant pumpkin contest, a mural to be created by local artist Eric Escobar, face painting, tons of food, beer, music and much more. Wendy Mace, who is in charge of marketing for the Granite Town Festivities Committee after being a longtime volunteer, spoke to the Hippo about the upcoming festival, which runs from Friday, Oct. 11, through Sunday, Oct. 13.

How did the festival get started?

I think it started with Marilyn Kenison back 35 years ago. I think this woman just had an idea and that was the one that got it started. Her husband was a dentist in town. I know way back then the Milford Cooperative Bank was involved with volunteers, because my mom was working there at the time and she was in the very first group for a few years when it got started. It’s changed over the years until this last group of volunteers in 2018 decided to form the Granite Town Festivities Committee, which is a nonprofit. They’re the ones that are keeping it going now. Some of the players have changed over the years … but it’s all volunteers and sponsorships that keep it going. The festival is a huge undertaking. It’s a bazillion volunteers that make this happen. Organizing it, setting it up, working at it, breaking it down.

What is the opening ceremony like and what is the Citizen of the Year?

Well, they do that on Friday night. The Rotary has spearheaded having townspeople vote on Citizen of the Year and they make the announcement Friday night at the ceremony. There’s also a pumpkin runner who comes in and there’s a ceremonial lighting of the pumpkin, which is a huge jack-o’-lantern up in the town hall window, and the pumpkin runner brings it to the fireman, and the fireman goes up the ladder. Basically, they’re turning on a giant jack-o’-lantern. People get a big kick out of that. That’s part of the opening ceremonies…. And I think the president of the Granite Town Festivities Committee will be speaking this year.

What is the pumpkin catapult?

That’s put on by the Dollars for Scholars. They have actually built this catapult they put down at Railroad Pond behind TD Bank. People purchase a pumpkin and they catapult it into the pond. It’s pretty fun to watch. And they have like, I think they had, when I went down there to look at it, scarecrows as markers out in the pond that they shoot for, but it’s just kind of a fun thing to watch.

What is the Haunted Trail?

The big draw is the Haunted Trail at Emerson Park that’s open Friday and Saturday night.

It’s been built by Witches Spring. … and people buy a little ticket and they get to walk through the trail that runs at the back of Emerson Park along the river in the area between the park and the Boys & Girls Club. So they’ve made this cool little haunted trail back there that’s changed over the years too. The first haunted trail we did was in plastic, a plastic maze on the tennis courts at Keyes Field … and it was basically a maze of fog, but then it’s changed over the years. We actually had a haunted house in a creepy old apartment that somebody let us use, which was really creepy. We put it on at different places. And then they started doing the trail behind Emerson Park a while back. And now we have this great company, he’s a local guy that comes in and he builds all that stuff and builds the trail. We get a lot of volunteers from the Masons, they get to be some of the haunts. They’re involved, Oddfellows are involved, because the Masonic Temple is also back there. They’re also the ones that keep an eye on everything overnight, our gourd guards. They keep an eye on everything to make sure nothing gets vandalized overnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

What are some of your favorite kids’ activities that are at the event?

We have carving pumpkins on the Oval. You can paint a pumpkin…. You can make scarecrows. And that always cracks me up because then you see little families walking down the street with a scarecrow over their shoulder. It’s really fun. … And the town hall, there’s a whole craft show going on, artisan and craft fair going on inside the town hall. So there’s stuff there for all ages. The kids love the Haunted Trail as well. And there’s all kinds of vendors and food trucks and there’s always vendors that have special things that kids enjoy but it’s nice to have the town hall where we have more grown-up crafts and things. If you’re going to make a scarecrow or paint a pumpkin or carve a pumpkin or go to the haunted trail, there are fees for that, but they’re very nominal. And then people who are selling things. The Milford Ambulance has a little ducky race where you purchase those little rubber ducks.

How many people do you think will show up this year and where will they put their cars?

I think in the years past that they have guessed that there’s been like 70,000 people over the course of the three days. The Milford Union Square is completely shut down for this festival this year so people can park at the middle school and the high school, and we have shuttle buses that keep going back and forth. They go from the schools, they drop them off downtown, they go back and forth … so people don’t have to worry about parking because there’s plenty of parking at the schools and we’ll shuttle them right down to the festival. It goes right till the end of each night except Sunday where the festival ends, it’ll go for like a half an hour or so after. All that information is on our website; what roads are closed, where the parking is, and everything. —Zachary Lewis

35th Milford Pumpkin Festival

When: Friday, Oct. 11, from 5 to 9 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 12, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday, Oct. 13, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Rain or shine.
Info: milfordpumpkinfestival.org

Schedule of events

Opening Ceremony & Citizen of The Year Presentation
Friday, Oct. 11, 6:30 to 7 p.m. on the Oval Stage
Includes Pumpkin Runner & lighting of the Town Hall Pumpkin

The Great Pumpkin Weigh Off/Giant Pumpkins On Display: All entries for the Weigh Off must be delivered to the Milford Oval by 9 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 12. Winners are announced at noon on Saturday. Pumpkins must stay for the duration of the Festival.

Milford Historical Walking Tour: Saturday and Sunday, one-hour guided tour begins at the Carey House, 6 Union St.

Pumpkin Painting, Scarecrow Making, Face Painting: Saturday 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Community House lawn. Pumpkin painting $5 per pumpkin. Scarecrow making $15 per scarecrow. Face painting $5 full face, $1 one cheek

Beer, Wine & Spirits Tasting: Friday and Saturday 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Community House Lawn, tickets required

Boys & Girls Club of Souhegan Valley Pumpkinfest 5K & Kids Fun Run: Saturday 7:30 to 11:30 a.m., 56 Mont Vernon St. Registration opens 7 a.m. Kids Fun Run 8 a.m., $10. 5K Run/Walk 9 a.m., $35 ($40 day of)

Pumpkin Carving & Lighting Display On The Oval: Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., $12 per pumpkin

Rubber Duck Race: Sunday at 1 p.m., Stone Bridge; purchase rubber ducks at the Milford Ambulance booth on Middle Street

Pumpkin Catapult: Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., at Railroad Pond, TD Bank Lower Lot. Purchase pumpkins and catapult them toward fun targets in Railroad Pond. One pumpkin $3, two pumpkins $5. Proceeds benefit Dollars For Scholars.

Star Gazing/Solar Observing: Saturday evening, weather permitting, in Keyes Memorial Park, join Rich DeMidio and other amateur astronomers for stargazing and solar observing. Several telescopes available for astronomical viewing including some planet and deep sky objects.

Pumpkin Festival Mural: Watch Eric Escobar’s creation unfold over the 3 days of the festival

Featured image: Stuffing a scarecrow. Courtesy photo.

Volunteer Coordinator

Patti Sexton is the Volunteer Coordinator for UpReach Therapeutic Equestrian Center (153 Paige Hill Road, Goffstown, 497-2343), a nonprofit that works to improve the well-being of individuals with and without disabilities by partnering them with horses. Visit upreachtec.org or reach out to Patti for volunteer opportunities at [email protected].

Explain your job and what it entails.

What I’m responsible for is making sure that we have appropriate volunteers in every lesson so that the therapeutic riding or therapeutic carriage driving lessons run safely and effectively. … We also support volunteers that come in from several area agencies and they may come in and help us muck stalls or clean tack or vacuum or do laundry. It’s a very lengthy list of what we engage volunteers at the barn to do.

How long have you had this job?

I’ve been attached to UpReach since 2012 as a volunteer, and then I became staff in the winter of 2023.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

So it was kind of an interesting path. My background is in education and psychology and I taught for a few years and then bounced around in different jobs, always knowing that my passion is actually people and horses. So it was an easy partnership when I found this as a volunteer site for myself. I basically fell in love with it and couldn’t wait to spend more time here.

What kind of education or training did you need?

For this job it’s been a lot of on-the-job training. You need to learn how to interact with lots of people, how to navigate large groups of people, how to have oversight of groups that might come in and do work on the property; different organizations often will schedule workdays with us. …. A lot of the training has really just been on the job, learning what works well, learning what maybe didn’t work well and what I could do differently the next time.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

It usually involves jeans and a sweatshirt in the winter and shorts and a T-shirt in the summer. Often, you know, there’s a lot of mud and muck stuck to your shoes. There may be hay in your hair.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

I wish I had known when I was a psychology major that there was such a thing as equine-facilitated mental health. It is a field that I find fascinating …

What was your first job?

My very, very first job was as a bank teller when I was in high school.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

… [R]emember you’re part of a community, wherever you’re working, and to understand it, and to see how it moves…

—Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Gosh golly, there’s a bunch. There is a book called This is How it Always is. I just thought it was very well-written and it captured life and all of its challenges very beautifully.
Favorite movie: I would say one of my favorites is The Shining.
Favorite music: I really like country. Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, that kind of strain.
Favorite food: Chocolate
Favorite thing about NH: I love the fact that we have four seasons…. I just think it’s a beautiful spot.

Featured photo: Patti Sexton. Courtesy photo.

Ken Burns looks at Leonardo Da Vinci for his latest documentary

Ken Burns lives in Walpole and is an American filmmaker who is well-known for his documentary films and television series on a wide variety of topics ranging from baseball to jazz, from the Roosevelts to the Vietnam War, and much more. His latest, Inside The Mind Of A Genius: Leonardo Da Vinci, a film made by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, is a two-part four-hour documentary that will air on PBS on Monday, Nov. 18, and Tuesday, Nov. 19, from 8 to 10 p.m. ET. Check local listings and visit pbs.org or kenburns.com.

Theatre Kapow will be starting its 17th season with Life Sucks, a play described as a “brash and revelatory reworking of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.” The show will run Friday, Sept. 20, and Saturday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 2 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage (16 S. Main St., Concord, ccanh.com). The Hippo spoke with Director Matthew Cahoon and Managing Director Carey Cahoon about the upcoming performance and season. Visit tkapow.com.

Your work is typically focused on American themes, so was there any particular reason to make a film on Leonardo da Vinci?

No, I mean, you’re absolutely right. Everything I’ve done for the last 45, 50 years has been in American history. I was working on a film on Benjamin Franklin and I was having dinner with an old friend, Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute — then of the Aspen Institute — who happened to be a biographer of Franklin. We’d already interviewed him, and he was terrific for that film. But he had also written a biography of Leonardo. And he spent most of dinner trying to push me into doing Leonardo. And I said, ‘No, I do American stuff.’ And he said, ‘But they’re both scientists and artists and all of this.’ I finally laughed and I happened to be talking to one of my producing teams, and that is led by my daughter, Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon. I said, “but Walter was pushing this, doing Leonardo,” and they said, “We should do Leonardo.” I called Walter the next day and I said, I think there’s people who want to do Leonardo. So I was sort of backed into it, but it was wonderful. Sarah and Dave moved with my two oldest grandchildren to Florence for a year from ’22 to ’23, did all the stuff and we’ve really broken new ground with our kind of visual grammar for this film to help bring alive this person who’s so central to who we are as human beings.

How does film as a medium, as well as the new visual effects, affect the story that you’re able to tell?

Well, I’m working right now, and have been for years and years, on a big history of the American Revolution, which is incredibly challenging because there are no photographs or newsreels. So you’re calibrating new different things. This is a guy who lived in the 1400s and the early 1500s. There are no photographs either. So what we ended up doing is realizing that he was so modern, he was so far thinking, that we could just split the screen, quadruple the screen, have nine panels. We could have modern footage, anticipating the things that he would invent. We could just throw in things and we could have a different kind of soundtrack that would do it. The composer, Caroline Shaw, is the single composer of the entire track, and we don’t usually have that. We usually have multiple different things going on. So it’s kind of exciting and new for us, and at the same time is most definitely one of our films and the style is the same…

Was there anything that you all discovered that you didn’t know about?

Oh, God, everything. We never make films about stuff we know about. That would be … we’d be telling you what you should know. Rather, we’re sharing with you the process of discovery. Everything is amazing. This is a born-out-of-wedlock gay man who is arguably the greatest painter in existence, who has fewer than 20 paintings. Half of them are incomplete. He has thousands of pages of notebooks. He is, as the greatest scientist of his age, without a doubt, prefiguring Galileo and Newton and Einstein. He’s investigating the nature of flight. He’s inventing machines. He does the first, we think, the first landscape in all of Western art. He does the first experimental painting in Western art. He does the first overhead view without the benefit of being up there. He’s just a capacious mind that’s restless. He doesn’t have a microscope. He doesn’t have a telescope. But what he sees with his eye, stuff people are verifying 500 years later. He did experiments on a cow’s heart using silk and grass seed and water to see how the ventricles might work. It wasn’t proven right until we had MRIs in the 1970s.

Was it that he just innately knows certain things?

Not innately. I think it’s all about this curiosity, this sort of demanding of the universe to give up its secrets.

Was there anything you think that he didn’t get to accomplish, that he was trying to do?

Well, you know, he abandoned a lot of paintings, even commissioned paintings, because he just sort of felt like he’d explored all the things he needed to explore, and yet is restless. I think he was always trying to learn how to square the circle, which is that ancient mythological concept.

What would you say to someone who doesn’t know a lot about the Renaissance to get them interested in Leonardo da Vinci?

Well, I think all you have to do is watch the film.

He’s lived such a compelling life. Let me put it in another way. This is a two-part, four-hour film, not that long by binging standards. … You’ll know exactly why [the Mona Lisa] looks the way she looks. And that is one of the great secrets of the universe, which is what he is getting at, this profoundly deep inquiry into the meaning of all of this stuff. Why I’m here, why you’re here, what our purpose is, where we came from, where we might be going, and how things work, you know, in a practical way, he’s an inventor and it’s just wonderful to get to know him.

What are the similarities between Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci?

Ben Franklin is the greatest scientist of the 18th century, he’s certainly the most famous American in the world. He’s also a great artist with his pen, his words, his humor. Leonardo’s a great artist, he’s a great scientist, he’s a great inventor, so there’s lots of similarities. And yet, Leonardo doesn’t tower over him, it’s apples and oranges, and we don’t need to make comparisons but he [Franklin] is so remarkable. Flying a kite and getting an electrical charge to come down the string to a key is a big deal. The Mona Lisa and a half a dozen other paintings are way bigger deals. As are most of the experiments he made about anatomy. First person to really dissect a brain and a skull. I mean, he just did it all. It’s unbelievable.

Was Leonardo received in the same way during his time as he is now? Did people during the Renaissance know how big a deal he was?

I can say he knew that he was without peer, but he published nothing in his lifetime. So all of those images, you know, were discovered later on. All of a sudden they realized he knew everything.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Courtesy photo.