JACK OF HIS TRADE

Like many of us, Scott Cully admits that carving a pumpkin is no easy task.

“Those things are a bear to carve,” the Eugene man said. “You’ve got to kind of hold them down. They’re always moving.”

Cully was talking about “normal-sized” pumpkins, the ones you buy at the grocery store, carve up and put on your porch this time of year. But pumpkins that weigh as much as a couple of pro football linemen — or an entire offensive line? Piece of (pumpkin) cake.

“Give me a big one anytime,” Cully said.

Take it from a guy who knows. Cully, 49, holds the Guinness Book of World Records mark for Largest Jack-o-Lantern.

In fact, he has set and broken that record five times in recent years, most recently two years ago when he carved what was then the world’s largest-ever pumpkin, 1,689 pounds just outside Providence, R.I.

That record (for world’s largest pumpkin) was broken this year by Christy and Nick Harp of Jackson Township, Ohio, who grew one that weighs 1,725 pounds.

Cully, 49, met the Harps when both he and they were on NBC’s “Today Show” on Oct. 17, and was invited to come and carve it in Ohio, and thus break his own record again. But a death in his family over the weekend back in his home state of Connecticut prevented that, Cully said.

Now, he and the grower he gets his massive pumpkins from, Kirk Mombert of Harrisburg, are hoping that the University of Oregon and ESPN’s College GameDay will let him carve two pumpkins on the pregame show this Saturday morning outside Autzen Stadium.

Cully, who is in Connecticut this week, said he hopes to return to Eugene to carve a “Duck” and a “Trojan.” But no one has responded to their request since they presentred the idea to the UO, Mombert said Tuesday.

“He loves to carve pumpkins,” Mombert said of Cully. Watching Cully at work, that is obvious.

Last Thursday, Cully — the general manager of the Fall Creek Nursery who moved his family in June to Eugene after 14 years in Ashland — carved a wicked looking jack-o-lantern with two faces in just 3½ hours at the Fifth Street Public Market out of a 700-pound pumpkin grown by Mombert.

Cully, who typically earns $2,000 for such carvings (minus his own expenses; large pumpkins are typically not cheap), was commissioned by ShelterCare, the Eugene nonprofit agency that provides services to the homeless and brain-injured, as a fundraiser, a preview to the market’s “Jack-O-Lanterns on 5th” event Saturday. (Cully did the carving for $400, a ShelterCare representative said.)

Cully began as a pumpkin grower in Connecticut in the mid-1980s. In 1985, he grew what that year was the world’s largest pumpkin at 550 pounds, which landed him on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

“Pumpkins were a lot smaller back then,” Cully said.

Since then, pumpkin growers have been trying to outdo one another, meddling with genetics and hand-pollination. The day when a one-ton pumpkin arrives is not far off, said Mombert, who no longer enters competitions but has won the prestigious Half Moon (Calif.) Bay World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off with 1,000-pound-plus gourds.

In 1988, Cully and his wife, Imy, decided to try carving one of their giant Connecticut pumpkins, about a 400-pounder, Cully recalled.

“My wife and I had a couple of bottles of hard cider and some knives, and it was a beautiful New England afternoon and, bada bang! — we did this three-dimensional carving,” Cully said. When they moved to Oregon in 1993, the Cullys gave up growing pumpkins. But he has never stopped carving the world’s largest.

He even got to carve one for Vice President Al Gore in 1999 at his residence in Washington, D.C., after Cully and some other well-known carvers were invited to Gore’s annual Halloween party. “That was a blast,” Cully recalled.

Nowadays, Cully gets invited to carve massive pumpkins all over the United States, sometimes even in Canada and Europe, at private parties, shopping malls, promotional events and the like. His designs often draw oohs and ahs and lots of questions as he goes at it, twirling his knives like a maestro conducting an orchestra.

How much does that thing weigh?

What do you practice on?

How did you begin doing this — were you a sculptor?

“I do this for fun,” Cully said, kneeling down and carving away with his favorite tool, a simple 3-inch paring knife. “It keeps me in the pumpkin-growing community that I was a part of once, and that’s a blast.”

He also does it for the influence it has on children, he said. “I do this to show what can be done with pumpkins, especially for children. To really show that you can be creative, without any fancy training, without any fancy tools. That’s probably the most rewarding part of this for me, to see a kid who actually listens and takes it upon himself to carve a pumpkin. It doesn’t have to be a huge pumpkin, just any pumpkin.”

His message to parents? “Get off the couch. Go out to the farm stores. Get yourself some pumpkins — and carve them. And if you really want your kids to be good at it, you need to carve more than one pumpkin a year. Get one every weekend between the end of September and Halloween. Set some time aside to spend with your kids.”

Cully’s own children, Rose, an Eighth-grader at Eugene’s O’Hara Catholic School, and Patrick, a freshman at Willamette University in Salem, “are excellent carvers,” he said. “They love it,” he said. “They’ve seen an awful lot of (carving), I’ll tell you that.”