Pumpkin Catapult Contests

Where men are men and the gourds are nervous: the 2004 World Championship Punkin Chunkin Contest in Delaware.

Image: Barbara Proud / PhotoShelter

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Orson Welles once begged out of a party at Gore Vidal's house in Los Angeles by saying: "I have an early call tomorrow. For a commercial. Dog food, I think it is this time. No, I do not eat from the can on camera but I celebrate the contents. Yes, I have fallen so low."

But not nearly to the depths to which NBC sunk in Beijing. With Bob Costas dripping sincerity and Brian Williams gurgling hyperbole, the peacock network did not so much cover the Olympics as celebrate American medaling. Instead of the Summer Games, we got B-picture melodrama, flag-waving, gaudy nationalism, endless promos for NBC's fall lineup and tight close-ups of weepy athletes.

Lost amid these Crying Games has been the death of a towering, though largely unsung pioneer of sports and finance, Henry "Harry" B.R. Brown.

In the business world, the 82-year-old New York investment banker was best known for co-inventing the money-market mutual fund in 1969, and creating a $3.5 trillion industry.

After retiring to his hog-and-cattle farm in Leesburg, Virginia, the former chairman of the fund manager the Reserve devoted much of his time to his hobbies: fireworks and trebuchets—the latter, medieval siege weapons that went out of production around 1350.

Brown helped build and bankroll catapults for long-distance pumpkin launching in the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Contest, an annual two-day rite of autumn that fills the skies of southern Delaware with airborne squash. From 2000 until 2003, Brown co-captained a team that reigned over the trebuchet division.

His interest in catapults sprang, in part, from far-flung exploits reported in the now-defunct Heave magazine. Not a journal devoted to regurgitation, Heave was the official publication of the International Hurling Society, an organization based in Fort Worth, Texas, dedicated to the art, science, and sport of throwing things.

The topics in Heave ranged from the origins of the mounted crossbow to the use of armadillos for trapshooting. By the mid-1990s, Heave engineers had allegedly designed a catapult capable of pitching a Buick across two football fields.

Brown first flipped his gourd in 1999 after attending the world championships with neighbor Chris Gerow, a retired I.B.M. computer engineer. Gerow had built his own weapon of mash destruction, a wooden catapult that could throw a gallon jug of water 120 feet.  

At the '99 Punkin Chunk, Brown and Gerow watched dozens of fruit-flingers assemble in a soybean field with their homemade hurling devices to vie for supremacy. Veteran chunkers called the sport "poetry in commotion."

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