This time of year, in the Cunningham’s home on Topaz Street in Superior, resembles more of an assembly line than a cozy suburban living space.
“We come out here to do fine adjustments with a Dremel tool,” Greg Cunningham explained while drilling away in his brother’s garage.
“Pumpkins should be respected; they shouldn’t be eaten,” Greg’s brother Dave said while carefully carving the album cover of Meatloaf’s classic album "Bat out of Hell" into a pumpkin on his kitchen table.
“Back in 2003 is when I started,” continued Dave. “Then I started to get obsessed with how to make it better and better.”
When he isn’t carving pumpkins, Dave is a software engineer for an oil and gas company. His brother. who's retired from the Navy and a career at the University of Wyoming registrar’s office, comes down from Cheyenne to lend a hand.
Dave’s mother does some carving in Wyoming as well, and his father gets the luxurious task of gutting the gourds.
“We have a lot of scooping technology,” Dave said of the whittled down pumpkin scoops in his garage. “The tools cut some of the time out of the scooping effort, because; when you’re cleaning out 70 pumpkins, if you can cut five minutes out of each one that’s a lot of time.”
You read that right: 70 pumpkins! Dave starts conceptualizing themes and designs in February. He patiently converts his ideas into traceable sketches which he spends three weeks transferring onto the pumpkins. His family comes down closer to Halloween to help make the final push to get them all carved displayed, and lit with Christmas lights in time for Halloween night.
You’ll see everything from album covers like Nirvana’s "Nevermind" to Michael Jackson’s "Thriller". He has pumpkin renderings of celebrities who've died this year like Burt Reynolds, Aretha Franklin, and Anthony Bourdain. He does a Colorado pro-athlete every year, and even keeps up the tradition which got him running down this road in the first place: carvings of his sons.
It’s a massive undertaking, but for the Cunningham’s carving dozens of pumpkins is what Halloween is all about.
“This is a one-shot deal,” said Dave. “We spend hundreds of hours on this for essentially four hours. It’s not like there’s another night. When the weather is OK, and everything comes out well it’s a special four hours. It’s worth it.”
