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For more than 20,000 youngsters in Southwest Washington, a visit to Jack-o-Lantern Valley northwest of Centralia proved a highlight of the Halloween season during the 1970s and 1980s.
Children from Aberdeen, Centralia, Chehalis and elsewhere piled onto buses that carried them to the Curfman farm near Oakville where Roby the Robot greeted them in a recorded voice. They huddled together to learn from Avis Curfman how seeds planted in May grow into pumpkins by October.
Then they walked through a fairytale wonderland of painted pumpkins resembling Snow White’s seven dwarfs, Humpty Dumpty, Charlie Brown with Snoopy on his doghouse, E.T., Garfield, Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, Mickey Mouse, Cabbage Patch kids, teddy bears, clowns, ghosts, Willy the orca whale, Disneyland’s It’s a Small World exhibit and other favorite childhood characters before scattering into the field to pick the perfect pumpkin to take home.
Even often-ignored zucchini squash stood erect as Mr. and Mrs. Penguin, and a friendly alligator greeted children. Some displays included songs playing from recorders.
“Thousands of schoolchildren came to their farm by busloads to look at all of the characters Avis had created out of pumpkins,” said Don Tapio, Washington State University Extension specialist emeritus. “It was extremely popular at the time and provided a wonderful experience for children.”
Indeed, each fall for 17 years, between 1,000 and 1,500 preschoolers, kindergartners and other children visited the farm, offering $1.50 for the fantastical experience of wandering down a flower-lined path of carved pumpkins into Jack-o-Lantern Valley and picking the perfect pumpkin from the Curfman Farm fields.
“There are thousands of adults who carry the precious and fond memories of their school visit to the Curfman Pumpkin Farm to see all the creative and artistic pumpkin displays,” Tapio said. “I really believe that if Hollywood had ever seen the pumpkin displays Avis created, they would have hired her to do their movie sets.”
They could select any pumpkin they wanted as long as they could carry it back to the bus. Even residents of adult nursing homes visited for pumpkins.
“We kind of started this tour business,” she said. “I had never heard of anybody doing it, but I thought, ‘oh, what fun to decorate.’”
The artist behind the storybook characters, Avis (MacRae) Curfman, now 95, was born in Seattle in June 1930 to immigrants — her father, Alexander MacRae, arrived from Scotland as a teenager and worked on the railroad while her mother, Lillian Taylor, was a native of London, England. The couple met in Montana, married in 1918, and moved to Seattle where her father worked in the shipyards. They raised five children — two daughters and three sons, Anna Rose, Alastair, Donald, Colin, and Avis, the youngest.
She grew up embracing her Scottish heritage, learning at a young age to dance as her brother played the bagpipes. All the children in her family danced, and her brother played the pipes or drums while wearing traditional plaided kilts. They traveled to Highland festivals, and her father was among those who started the Washington Scottish Pipe Band in 1938. Four years later, the pipe major title went to her brother, Alastair MacRae, who placed second in his first competition at the age of six and performed on the bagpipes when Prince Phillip visited Seattle in June 1962 for the World’s Fair. When Alastair stepped down, his nephew Colin Jr. assumed leadership of the band until 2000.
Because Britain was engaged early in World War II, people in Seattle held fundraisers on street corners for them.
“They were raising pennies for Britain,” Avis recalled. “They’d have people on the streets entertaining, selling stamps and things. So I danced and my brother played the pipes. You could walk around town and be safe.”
She remembered hearing about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while riding a bus, and she noted that afterward, people “used to wear little pins with a pearl on them.”
Her brothers and her mother worked for the Merchant Marines during World War II. Her brother Colin, the MacRae family historian, organized a trip to their ancestral homeland in Scotland in 2000. They stayed in Inverness with cousins, saw the 13th century Eilean Donan Castle where their father had played in the ruins as a child, and stopped in London to see where their mother had grown up.
Avis, who graduated from West Seattle High School, met Clifton Curfman in Seattle just after he was discharged from the Coast Guard. He was born in Mount Dora, New Mexico, moved to Washington with his family during the Dust Bowl, and served at the Point No Point Lighthouse on the Kitsap Peninsula. She had just left the Presbyterian church service.
“I started walking home, and he came running up to me and slid on the ice,” she said. “He always told me he fell for me.”
They married in September 1954, and he worked for Boeing Co. They bought 10 acres in 1958 near Marysville, Wash., where they farmed crops, including cucumbers, strawberries, and 100 tons of large pumpkins, and raised laying hens.
But Clifton and Avis Curfman wanted more room, so they moved south in 1969 to 65 acres near Oakville near the Black River, where the soil provided ideal conditions for growing green beans, carrots, peas, cucumbers, sweet corn, cauliflower, broccoli, and pumpkins. The only drawback was occasional flooding, including one year in the mid-1970s when floodwaters swept pumpkins from the fields and floated them miles away to rot. Another time they lost 7,000 chickens to flooding.
The Curfmans planted 20 to 25 acres in pumpkins and grew other crops on another 75 acres on their own and leased property. They also raised 100,000 fryers every year for Lynden Farms and later Foster Farms. They harvested 200 tons of large pumpkins and hauled them north to Bellingham and south to Longview and to cities between those points.
One particular Sunday, they returned home from services at the Centralia Church of the Nazarene only to discover somebody had stolen their largest-ever pumpkin, which weighed 104 pounds. Clifton tracked it down.
“He went out looking around, and he found who stole it,” she said. A kid told him he saw the pumpkin on his way home from church and took it.
They grew Christmas trees for a time and, in 1972, transported the White House Christmas tree to Washington, D.C. The family attended the Centralia Church of the Nazarene.
One of her husband’s brothers farmed at Toppenish in the Yakima Valley, where his family still operates Curfman’s Massive Corn Maze in the fall.
They quit harvesting pumpkins in the early 1990s, after her husband suffered the first of his heart problems. “We almost lost him 10 times,” she said.
But even years later, Avis said she’d run into clerks at grocery stores or elsewhere who remembered visiting their pumpkin farm.
Clifton and Avis quit farming in 2003, but their son Larry took over raising fryers until 2008.
Clifton passed away on March 10, 2011, at 84, surrounded by his family. He and Avis, who had been married 56 years, raised four children on their Oakville farm — Laurie Jacobsen in Stanwood, Wash.; Kevin, a longtime Chehalis firefighter; Larry, a photographer who lives next door; and Debbie Rademaker in Michigan. Avis has nine grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
“We wouldn’t have made it without the kids,” she said. “They worked hard.”
For years, Avis ran the crew, did the bookkeeping, started the Acorn Valley 4-H group and served as a leader of the youth development program. Her children were also involved in the Future Farmers of America. She and her husband employed several hundred young people each year to help in the fields, and for their work, they’ve been honored by both the FFA and the Future Business Leaders of America. Avis was inducted into the Grays Harbor County 4-H Hall of Fame in 2000. And she and Clifton were designated as grand marshals for Oakville’s 2007 Independence Day parade.
Her sons Larry and Kevin, who married sisters Ann and Julie Galyean, respectively, live close — Larry near the farm and Kevin in Chehalis — and Avis speaks with her daughters every week.
“I wouldn’t have stayed here if he wasn’t next door,” she said of Larry.
They hold large family gatherings in Kevin’s shop.
The Curfmans took family vacations to New Mexico to see where Clifton grew up, and after retiring, the couple drove to Alaska through Canada. She and Clifton also visited Scotland together before she traveled there again in 2000 with her siblings.
She’s had two hip replacements, so she doesn’t dance anymore, and survived two bouts with breast cancer.
At her most recent checkup, the doctor gave Avis another five years, so she can start planning a 100th birthday celebration. Her brother Donald in Des Moines, Wash., is 102. Her father lived to be 96.
“I think it’s all heredity,” she said. “Well, I never drank. I never smoked.”
Her daughters recently gave her a dot project that required adding tiny beads to a tapestry to bring a picture to life.
“Oh, this was a challenge,” she said. It took about 10 months to complete. “A friend of Laurie’s had done it, so they decided they’d go together and get it for me.”
She’s working on another one now of a peacock.
“I’m not very far along with that,” she said. “I was having an eye problem, so I couldn’t do it. I don’t know if I’ll try it again.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
