To the Editor:

I found the split at about seven on Thursday morning, on the shoulder, four inches, and I want to say plainly that it was nobody’s fault and nothing anyone did. The fruit put on twenty pounds in the last week and the skin declined to keep up. That happens. It has happened to every man who has ever grown one of these, and it will happen again, and the only difference this year is the timing.

I telephoned the superintendent at eleven and scratched. I asked that it not be announced until Saturday morning, and I am glad the office honored that, and I will say why: my neighbor would have spent two days deciding how he was supposed to feel, and that is a miserable way to spend two days before a weigh-in. Better to hear it twenty minutes ahead and get on the scale.

Eight hundred ninety-four and a half pounds. I want the number printed again in my own letter so nobody can say I avoided it. That is the largest pumpkin ever grown in this county by better than a hundred pounds, and it was grown four hundred yards across the bay from me, and I have watched it since the second week of June through a pair of binoculars I have owned since 1994, which I have never once denied owning.

He said at the scale that it isn’t an answer, and that an answer takes two, and he is right, and I am the reason there wasn’t one, and I am sorry about that in a way I did not expect to be. So: next year. Same weekend, same scale, both of us on it. I will widen nothing and explain nothing. And if he beats me on that day by any margin at all, I will say so in this space in words nobody will have to interpret.

He should take it to St. Paul. He will not place. He should go anyway and stand next to the big ones and get a good look at what he is aiming at, because I would like the answer next year to be a real number against a real number, and I have seen the man's soil and I know what it can do.

M. AakreLoon Lake