In a Pickle

from New Hampshire Magazine September 2024

by Yankee Publishing - New Hampshire Group

Granite State Growers

The small Granite State town of Winchester has annually celebrated the pickle for a quarter of a century. But why?

BY CALEB JAGODAPHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX SCHOENFELD

Kevin Bazan, a stocky man in his early 50s, stands on a beige gazebo framed by corn stalks while speaking into a microphone. He has some serious instructions to convey to a group of contestants.

“You have to eat the pickle that was given to you. There’s no trading pickles or anything like that. Is everyone ready? When you get your pickle, just hold onto it. Hold on. Hold on. Get a good grip on that pickle.”

Despite the absurd, or possibly ribald, connotations of his speech, Bazan is being quite literal and rather earnest, coordinating the proceedings before him with a certain whimsical dignity.

As president of the Winchester Pickle Festival Committee, Bazan plans, organizes and executes the town’s unusual annual event with three other committee members and a number of volunteers. This specific day marked Winchester’s 25th annual Pickle Festival. Bazan was announcing its pickle eating contest, where contestants line up in the lawn adjacent to Conant Public Library and attempt to consume a single oversized deli pickle as quickly as possible.

Bazan paced in front of the gazebo, chittering into the microphone as his daughter passed out pickles. A small crowd leaned in around the dozen or so participants.

“Do all contestants have a pickle?” Bazan continued. “Like I said, it’s the first person to consume it completely. There can’t be any pickle in your mouth. I will be inspecting. Three, two, one, go!”

A PICKLED LEGACY

A pickle festival — that’s not something you hear every day. There are pumpkin fests and apple harvest days, hay rides and corn mazes, but celebrating the pickle seems ... unexpected. While harvested crops traditionally get canned and pickled before the cold season, refrigeration and industrial farming have turned food preservation into a frivolous (if not geriatric) hobby, and the word pickle doesn’t exactly conjure fall-like imagery. It just kind of floats there, green and oblong in the mind’s eye, disconnected from connotation or communion. Unless you’re from Winchester, New Hampshire, that is.

Winchester is home to roughly 4,200 residents and sits nestled in the southwestern corner of the state, bordering Massachusetts and separated from Vermont by less than a mile. It’s held an annual celebration of the pickle on the fourth Saturday of every September since 1998 (excluding 2020, due to the pandemic); 2023 signified its 25th year doing so. A pretty odd, remarkable feat. Like any sane human, I had one question: Why?

It’s a simple inquiry with a slippery answer. Here are the facts: The festival was founded in 1998 by Gary O’Neal, a Winchester resident looking to kickstart a fall celebration. Another Winchester resident, Henry Parkhurst, decided to don a green leisure suit and act as the festival’s mascot, calling himself “Mr. Pickle.” Parkhurst led each festival’s parade and took pictures with attendees at the aforementioned gazebo.

Every pickle fest would also feature volunteers distributing free pickles, a canning/pickling contest, a pickle-eating competition, and myriad vendors encouraged (read: required) to sell at least one pickle-related item. While the event started small, it steadily grew — through word-of-mouth and the advent of social media — to its current state, welcoming roughly 100 vendors and 5,000 attendees every year.

Henry Parkhurst died on Dec. 22, 2022. Gary O’Neal died on March 8, 2023. Neither of the event’s icons would be in attendance for its quarter-century commemoration.

But none of this answers that lingering question: Why? Why pickles? And, with its two torchbearers passed on, you couldn’t exactly go to the source to find out.

There was only one thing left to do: Attend the 2023 Winchester Pickle Festival and attempt to answer not only why but also, who were Gary O’Neal and Henry Parkhurst, and why were they, specifically, so fascinated with pickles?

FACING THE GREEN MONSTER

Chomping into a true monstrosity of a pickle, I felt my right jaw twinge. A sharp pain shot through my face, and I started chewing slower, more controlled. This thing was less of a pickle, and more of a gardening experiment gone wrong, discarded into a bucket of vinegar.

Heeding the advice of several pickle festival volunteers, I grasped the green monster horizontally, eating it like an ear of corn — which very quickly turned out to be a mistake. To my left stood Mike Patenaude, reigning three-time pickle-eating champion, hunched over in the shape of a question mark and absolutely demolishing his pickle. He held it up-and-down, like a microphone, twirling the pickle with each bite as if descending a salty spiral staircase, mouth-first. Duly noted.

I hadn’t planned on participating in the pickle-eating contest, but after interviewing a few volunteers about the merits of the craft, I became cornered by my credentials.

“It’s part of the journalistic experience to immerse yourself,” one lady said, from behind a table stacked with Mason jars entered into the canning competition. “Robin Roberts had to bungee jump in New Zealand. She actually interviewed their former Prime Minister and said, ‘I bungee jumped in New Zealand. Did you do that in New Zealand? That’s your home country.’ And he said, ‘Hell no.’ It’s all about inserting the journalist into the experience.”

She had a point. Plus, I got to witness a master of his craft at the peak of his powers, like seeing Jordan play on the ’96 Bulls — and, to boot, compete side-by-side with him. When I interviewed Bazan about the pickle fest a week before attending, this is what he had to say about Patenaude: “Nobody even comes close to him. He’s a monster.”

Patenaude finished his pickle in 44 seconds, while I still gripped two-thirds of mine, cold and dripping in my right hand.

“I don’t have a strategy,” Patenaude informed me in a post-game interview. “At all. Pretty much just go into it. Just, mindset, make sure you focus on yourself and not others, and that’s the big thing.”

Patenaude wore a deeply-stained red hoodie, and from what I read on a Facebook comment, had just gotten off work in Keene, at noon, and raced over to make the 1 p.m. start time of the contest. This man would stop at nothing to be a champion.

Patenaude was one of many colorful local characters dotting the day. Upon first arriving in Winchester, on the hunt for coffee after a two-hour drive, I ambled over to a pop-up tent and was met by a true force of nature: Louise Dianne Sylvester holding court.

Selling handmade baked goods, Sylvester reeled in just about every unsuspecting passerby who got within earshot; it was as if she had her own gravitational pull. “I’m telling you, I’m the real deal!” she barked at me as I eyed the calzones. “I’m like, ‘No one’s ever seen or met me before!’ That’s how legends are made. But if you want an Italian, I’d say get it real soon, because these go quick.”

I later learned that Sylvester’s peddled her wares at the pickle fest since its inception — and that 2023 would be her last time doing so.

“It’s just a lot of work,” she said. “I’m exhausted. I’m fatigued. I live in town, so the pickle festival is like hometown to me, so I have to come out.”

Catching her at a picnic table on a short break from pushing pastries, Sylvester told me, among other things, that she won the New Hampshire Bake-Off five years in a row, from 1982 to 1986; owned and operated a number of bakeries across the state, before closing them all in 2000; and, after being married four times, is “looking for number fiiiiiive. I’m a hopeless romantic. One of these will work eventually — or not!”

And, oh, yeah, she also knew Gary O’Neal and Henry Parkhurst, working at a catering company with the former and living at a renovated schoolhouse in Ashuelot (a village in Winchester) where the latter once worked as a teacher.

Nearly every conversation I had eventually cornered Henry and Gary’s absence; it hung in the air like a thick fog, unavoidable and alien. At the gazebo where Parkhurst used to take pictures with attendees — dripped out in green and chewing up the scenery — now stood a Mr. Pickle monument: his former outfit, propped up and empty, next to a framed photo of Parkhurst at pickle festivals past.

If their absence loomed that large, I can only imagine what their presence was like. Talking to volunteer after volunteer, resident after resident, this is what I gathered: Gary O’Neal was an eclectic Winchester resident who worked as a chef and held a passion for the arts. Hoping to give Winchester its own fall festival, O’Neal considered other beloved galas — Keene’s pumpkin fest, Harrisville’s zucchini fest, Grafton’s garlic fest — before deciding on the pickle.

There was no definitive reason, no obsession with the pickle; rather, it was a matter of creative pragmatism. On top of maintaining friendships with a number of local farmers known for their pickling, O’Neal clocked the affordability of pickle-making and wanted to give Winchester a mark of real idiosyncrasy.

With that said, there’s no denying Winchester’s sizable Polish community — and pickled foodstuff plays a huge role in Polish cuisine. The Pickle Festival’s Facebook page even states, somewhat discreetly, that it’s a “fall festival to celebrate the Polish heritage of Winchester.”

Talking to people, though, more or less belies this notion. Most longtime residents say the pickle has become something of a coincidental symbol for the town — something they’ve embraced, but not because of its importance in Polish culture. They just have this pickle fest every year, and now people associate Winchester with pickles.

“I think, over time, it has turned into a town identity,” said Jeny Levisee, a canning contest judge and 18-year Winchester resident. “We have this wonderful festival and winter’s coming, so how do we preserve food? It really did take on a life of its own and people celebrate that.”

SIZING UP MR. PICKLE

And then there’s the legend of Mr. Pickle. Who was Henry Parkhurst?

It wasn’t difficult to find out. Every Winchester resident seemed to have a story about Parkhurst lighting up a room, putting on a performance, or being a role model in the community. Multiple people

told me that Parkhurst was “irreplaceable,” that he was “larger than life.” Resoundingly, nobody wanted a new Mr. Pickle; Parkhurst was so good at inhabiting the character, at hamming it up and making the day one to remember, that searching for a replacement seemed pointless, almost disrespectful. Maybe there could be a “Ms. Pickle,” or a new mascot of sorts, but there would be no replacing the one-and-only Mr. Pickle.

On every other day of the year, Henry Parkhurst was a longtime Winchester resident, former schoolteacher who taught multiple generations of the town’s adolescents, and a 19-year Winchester state representative. He had a love for theater and frequently appeared in local Lions Club plays. He was known to sport a vast collection of bolo ties. He resisted technology, so could be hard to contact if you didn’t run into him in town. And, more than anything, the people of Winchester truly cherished him.

“He was a great guy. He commanded respect,” said Kathy Morehouse, a lifelong Winchester resident and vice president of the Winchester Pickle Festival Committee. “Grown men would see Henry at the diner, having breakfast, and come in and take their hat off: ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Parkhurst, how are you?’ It was just his character — just who he was, what he stood for. He’s touched a lot of lives.”

WMUR’s “New Hampshire Chronicle” covered the 2022 Winchester Pickle Festival and, unbeknownst to all, captured Mr. Pickle’s last pickle fest. Although moving laboriously in the segment’s footage, Parkhurst still operates with moxie, taking photos, giving out hugs, and firing off zippy quips for the camera. At one point he says, “I’m the spirit of the pickle festival. I’m not who I am when I put on this suit.”

And isn’t that what pickles are all about, anyways? On the fourth Saturday of every September since 1998, Henry Parkhurst transformed into Mr. Pickle, a plethora of cucumbers metamorphize into pickles, local blue-collar guys mutate into speed-eating champions, and the small town of Winchester, New Hampshire, has, and will continue to, become the pickle capital of the world. As Sylvester says, that’s how legends are made.