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RIP World Championship Rotary Tiller Race

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June 25, 2025: When we first wrote about the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race, we thought the tradition would last forever. Unfortunately, 2022 marked the 32nd and final PurpleHull Pea Festival and Rotary Tiller Race. That’s unfortunate because, as you can see from our write-up, it was a great reason to travel to Emerson, Arkansas.

world championship rotary tiller raceJune 25, 2016: Today is the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race, the main event of the PurpleHull Pea Festival in Emerson, Arkansas. In 1990, Emerson native and part-time newspaper columnist Glen Eades decided his hometown needed a little excitement. As he explained, “We were so boring we didn’t even have a cop.”

He approached Mayor Joe Mullins about hosting a festival to honor a southern favorite grown in many local backyards: purple hull peas. Several town meetings were held to discuss the idea, and somewhere along the way, Eades suggested a rotary tiller race. Mullins remembers thinking, “Glen, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but you need to change brands.” The plan was approved, and the PurpleHull Pea Festival became a reality.

Since then, it has grown in size and stature, winning the 2001 Arkansas Festival of the Year Award. Over the years, the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race has evolved, too. Its website proclaims:

There simply is no other event like it.  Unique among motor sports, we like to say it is the highlight of the tiller racing season. ‘Course, to the best of our knowledge, our one-day event is the tiller racing season.

Following a brouhaha cryptically referred to as the “Great Tiller Racing Controversy of ’93,” festival organizers created the World Tiller Racing Federation to write and enforce official rules governing all races. One such rule dictates that the racetrack must be exactly 200 feet in length. Another requires that racers, called tiller pilots, wear shoes. (Believe it or not, up until that point, some chose to compete in bare feet.)

The event has become so famous that The Wall Street Journal has sent a reporter to cover today’s race for its column on odd topics. In recent years, the festival’s Antique Tractor Show & Competition has held two races of its own: the Barrel Push, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the Slow Race, in which contestants try to keep the tractor running at the lowest possible speed without stalling.

The PurpleHull Pea Pageant judges age groups from 0-11 months all the way to 16 years and up. According to the signup sheet, “Contestants will be rated on Facial Beauty, Stage Presentation/Personality and overall appearance,” winners of “Side Awards: Most Beautiful, Photogenic, Fashion, Prettiest Hair, Prettiest Smile” will receive a trophy, and “All Queens will receive a Nice Crown, Sash & Trophy.”

Zero months? We’re going to go out on a limb and say that if your daughter’s too young to hold up her own head with or without a crown on it, she’s probably too young to enter a beauty contest. Your time would be better spent making sure your husband keeps his shoes on for the race.

Admission is free to the Tiller Race, Tractor Show, Pup-Pea Dog Show, Pea Shelling Competition, Big Daddy’s Hot Water Cornbread Greatrip PurpleHull Peas & Cornbread Cook Off, the Million Tiller Parade, and “Pea-tacular” Fireworks Show.

To raise money, each year festival organizers choose a group of “Tiller Girls,” teenagers who roam through the crowd watching the race. According to the site,

They’re there for two reasons.  First, for visual stimulation.  Second, to take up donations. The Tiller Girl who collects the largest total amount of donations earns points toward winning the title of Tiller Goddess.

Oh, thank goodness. We were worried it might be something creepy.

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RIP Giggin’ for Grads Night

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June 24, 2025: We wrote about Giggin’ for Grads Night back in 2016. We’ve been unable to find any information since then about subsequent celebrations. We reached out to the DeKalb County Farmers Bureau to determine if the event has indeed been discontinued and if a new event has replaced it to fund scholarships for high school graduates. As of today, we’ve received no reply, so we have to assume that Giggin’ for Grads Night is no more.

giggin' for grads night

The horror! The horror!

June 24, 2016: Today is the fourth Annual Giggin’ for Grads Night, created in 2013 by the DeKalb County Young Farmers and Ranchers Club of Smithville, Tennessee, to raise funds for agricultural scholarships. In case you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, “gigging” refers to the use of a sharpened implement, such as a pointed stick, called a “gig,” to spear fish. In this case, it refers to a bullfrog-spearing contest.

Participants pay a $15 entry fee and must hunt in teams of two to four people. First prize, for the heaviest bag of 15 frogs, is 25% of the entry fees collected. The second prize is 15%, and the third prize is 10%. Frogs are kept for a community frog leg dinner the next day.

While animal rights groups and many private citizens are appalled by this practice, it is a legal, regulated sport in Tennessee. Area game wardens supervise the tournament; giggers must have hunting licenses to participate and are allowed to kill no more than 20 frogs.

Danny Bryan, assistant professor of Biology at Cumberland University, said in an interview, “When a frog is gigged, it’s a humane way of killing the animal. Most of the time, when the frogs are gigged, that includes gigging the frog in the head, which is basically instant death,” said Bryan.

“As far as animal cruelty goes, I don’t much believe this event is any different than having some type of fishing rodeo or anything where you’re going out and catching fish to win a contest or going out to a catfish pond to catch catfish to cook for dinner.”

That first year, activists called club members, went on the news, and posted the local school principal’s number on social media in an effort to get Giggin’ for Grads canceled. As anyone who’s lived in a small town could predict, their approach backfired. The community responded to the outsiders’ efforts by digging in their heels and throwing their support behind the event.

People from nearby counties sent donations, bringing the scholarship total to over $1,000. The number of contestants grew from the expected twenty or so to nearly 100. As a result, many more frogs were killed—harvested, in gigging parlance—and fried the next day. The event has gained notoriety since then.  Peaceful protestors return every year and are, by all accounts, treated well by the townsfolk.

One online petition circulating today has garnered 136,543 signatures. It includes this oft-repeated statement: “Bullfrogs are cold-blooded and have slow metabolisms, so it takes them a long time to die after being stabbed.” Requiring less energy to survive is a useful environmental adaptation, but it doesn’t slow the effect of a fatal stabbing. It doesn’t create Frankentoads or an amphibian GITMO in the gigger’s sack. Dead is dead. But this argument should at least prompt game wardens to remind everyone that the frogs they kill must be fully dead, sooner rather than later, because hunting isn’t about torture.

The petition also states that, in the darkness, participants kill other frogs and toads that may be endangered. The flashlights they carry, the incentive to get large bullfrogs, and the team aspect help reduce the likelihood of rogue giggers exterminating entire species or spending their time putting frogs in stress positions. Also, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has no record of any endangered frog species in Tennessee. If there are any, they are likely to be endangered because they took a left turn in Florida and ended up in Tennessee.

Giggin’ for Grads may be a terrible idea for a fundraiser. It has resulted in the death of thousands of bullfrogs. But perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from a mathematical standpoint. Aside from today’s event, there is a legal hunting season in which a licensed gigger can harvest up to 20 bullfrogs per day, every day…and yet they never run out. Maybe that shouldn’t matter, but think for a moment of another cold-blooded creature. When was the last time you cared if a cockroach suffered?

Have a happy Giggin’ for Grads Night, unless you don’t want to. No pressure!

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Pink Flamingo Day

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pink flamingo day

Today is Pink Flamingo Day, founded on June 23, 2007, by Mayor Dean Mazzarella of Leominster, Massachusetts, to honor the 50th birthday of the iconic lawn ornaments that have happily survived despite homeowners’ associations’ attempts to hunt them to extinction.

In 1957, art school graduate Don Featherstone was tasked with creating a pink flamingo for his employer, Union Products, located in Leominster, often referred to as the “Plastics Capital of the World.” Using National Geographic photographs as reference material, Featherstone sculpted two pink flamingos. They were meant to be a festive way for homeowners to personalize the identical yards of postwar suburban subdivisions.

Featherstone would go on to create 750 items for Union Products and become the company’s president in 1996. His flamingos were popular but eventually became a target of derision, a symbol of tackiness. Many fans remain loyal in defiance of their neighbors’ plot to eradicate them under the guise of lawn beautification. (If we’re going there, let’s talk about how many seasonal flags a community needs.)

No history would be complete without mentioning John Waters and his 1972 movie, Pink Flamingos. An enthusiastic proponent of all things kitsch, camp, and lowbrow, Waters helped bring the decoration to a new audience, one that reveled in irony. It’s clear that pink flamingos continued to sell. So many knockoffs were produced that in the late 1980s, Featherstone added his signature to the molds to identify the real thing.

Featherstone retired in 2000. Union Products closed its doors in 2006, after producing more than 20 million flamingos. Cado Company in Fitchburg, MA, bought the rights a few years later and now manufactures birds with the inventor’s signature on the bottom.

Featherstone passed away on June 22, 2015, at the age of 79, one day shy of the 28th annual Pink Flamingo Day. Claude Chapdelaine, VP at Cado, told Boston Magazine,: “He was just a really nice guy, never took himself seriously. Throughout his career, he made all kinds of lawn and garden ornaments. A lot of people referred to them as being kind of kitsch. He said, ‘You know what? It makes people laugh and brings a smile to everybody’s face’ and that’s what he liked.”

Bring a smile to everybody’s face today by planting some pink flamingos of your own. If you have some already, display them prominently: no hiding them behind shrubbery allowed! Even if the closest thing you have to a yard is a plant on your windowsill, there’s always room for these Lilliputian versions.

pink flamingos planted in houseplant

Happy Pink Flamingo Day!

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National Onion Ring Day

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national onion ring dayToday is National Onion Ring Day.

The first known iteration of the onion ring appeared in the 1802 cookbook “The Art of Cookery.” The recipe for Fried Onions with Parmesan Cheese called for onions to be sliced into 1/2 inch rings, dredged in a batter of flour, cream, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese, then deep-fried in boiling lard.

For recipes and more information about onions than you might ever want to know, read the National Onion Association’s blog, written by the mononymous “Onionista.” There you will find a post describing how to cut onions in a way that will elicit fewer tears.

Have a happy, dry-eyed National Onion Ring Day!

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