BUTTE - What do you do if you’ve got a tall headframe, explosives, a Louisville Slugger, and a bunch of pumpkins? What else? Smash them!
Watch: Smashing pumpkins take the stage
Dozens of kids and their families brought their old Halloween pumpkins to the World Museum of Mining Saturday morning for a pumpkin-smashing event. They used baseball bats and sledgehammers to pound their jack-o'-lanterns into pumpkin puree.
Some kids were scary good at smashing pumpkins.
“It felt good, it really felt good. Hitting a pumpkin and let some anger out on it,” Pumpkin smasher Waylon West of Butte said.
Hitting pumpkins with baseball bats and hammers, that kind of harkens back to the old days in Butte. Isn’t that how you guys handle things?
“It’s similar to some things I experienced in the 80s around here in high school, yes,” event organizer Jim Murphy said.
If bludgeoning gourds weren’t enough, staff dropped the poor pumpkins from nearly 100 feet off the Orphan Girl Mine headframe.
The grand finale came when a group from Montana Tech’s mining school decided to blast an unfortunate pumpkin to kingdom come.
All this pumpkin pummeling made a big mess, but it isn’t going to waste.
“We have somebody who’s going to gather it and compost it and feed it to their animals and things such as that, so it just isn’t at the dump,” Museum Director Jeanette Kopf said.
