Mark Twain started it..

Press, 27 August 1980, Page 21

Mark Twain started it..

From

JOHN HUTCHISON

in San Francisco

Maybe it was Mark Twain’s frog that started it all — the effort of so many small towns in this part of California to stage at least one bizarre event each summer. Twain achieved his original fame when his short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” was published in 1865. It was the tale of a contest which the odds-on favourite failed to win because a crooked gambler poured it so full of “shot” that it could not budge from the starting line. The town of Angels Camp has sustained some shreds of fame by re-stag-ing the competition annually since 1928. .. .The experience is not one to which a frog can look to with' much enthusiasm, with or without a meal of shotgun pellets; • it . is • fraught with the perils of heatstroke-, and sunburn. Yet the lunatic event draws crowds and publicity to Calaveras County and to Angels

Camp, and many California communities strive for similar attention. There are, for example, the annual Kenwood Pillow Fights; and the summer Bathtub Regatta has just been held in an estuary of San Francisco Bay. Several hundred tubs, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, took part in a soggy race marked more by hilarity than navigational skill.

Then there is the annual Chicken Flying Contest in Sonoma County. Each contestant in turn is placed on a high perch and suddenly nudged rudely from behind with one of those rubber suctioncup “plungers” used to unclog stubborn household drams.. The chicken’s trajectory is said to be in direct ratio to its indignation. The small city of Petaluma, which should bg sat-

isfied with the renown produced by its status as the world centre of wristwrestling, has just conducted its Ugliest Dog Contest The winner appeared to have been parented by a rabbit and an alligator. A modest crowd attended the event. So did the press and television. The town of Gilroy recently attracted tens of thousands of visitors to its annual Garlic Festival,

complete with its garlicgarlanded queen and offerings of garlic delicacies stopping just short of garlic ice cream. Gilroy is serious about garlic, it produces 90 per cent of the commercial supply for America. One of the growers there is harvesting nearly 300 hectares of it. There are unconfirmed reports that a strong television signal cannot penetratq the Gilroy atmos-

phere in August and that the average Gilroy resi» dent can produce distortions on a radar screen at distances up to 40 kilometers. Even so, the visiting celebrants had a grand time at the festival.

A small, damp community on the Russian River, north of San Francisco, is noted for its infestation of “Banana” slugs — sonamed for the approximate shape, if not for their size. To a New Zealander who has never encountered one, a glistening, green-and-yellow fourinch banana slug may be

accurately described as far more repulsive than a weta. A bold weekly newspaper sponsored an event earlier this year which may, or may not, have enhanced the lustre of its village among _ tourists. The event has since been referred to ,as the First (and Last) Banana Slug Cooking Contest. Not even Mark Twain could have made it funny<