With Pressure and Perseverance, Pumpkins Do Fly

Tolson may look like the native Culpeper boy he is when he is scurrying around on the "big gun," but he's hardly small-town. As the top service engineer for the U.S. office of Kaeser Compressors Inc., he is sent worldwide to troubleshoot on the company's devices, which use air power in manufacturing.

Always a problem solver, Tolson was spending his free time fixing the home he built and toying with cars back in 1997 when he was asked to join a Michigan-based team that was building a Punkin Chunkin gun and wanted his expertise with the science of air power. He was hooked.

The team of nine people, including Tolson as air tech, won the world championship in 2002 and 2003 with a 20,000-pound gun called the Second Amendment. The 2003 record still stands.

Two years ago, Tolson began working on the Second Amendment Too. And while he has let his cars and his lawn go, he said, the sport has inspired him to bring the joys and challenges of Punkin Chunkin to today's youth. He has helped some budding engineering students and is hoping to start a more regular project with a high school class, so students can enter the event and learn everything from metalworking and physics to T-shirt design.

"If I can take one kid who might have been a bad apple and turn him around ... I've accomplished a lot; I've given something back," he said.

Keeping things simple and fun has become increasingly difficult. With some people holding pseudo-Punkin Chunkin events and not donating the money, the group has hired an attorney, and Shade said the organization is in litigation over the trademark of its name. The list of safety rules gets longer every year, and last year after a barrel made of PVC pipe exploded, the group banned all substances but metal.

But at their essence, chunkers are innovators. They train not only with pumpkins but also with melons, bowling balls and frozen turkeys. On the ground in Tolson's yard was a pile of basketballs he filled with water and fired for practice toward the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.

While Tolson will talk generally about the skills involved in becoming a world champion -- meteorology, proper pumpkin selection, thousands of hours of mechanics -- there is a limit to how much he will say.

He won't say the precise pressure in his air cannon, nor the velocity of the fruit. The secret is a cocktail of air and pressure. "I'll just say it's controlled power."