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Sunday, February 13, 2000
By Marilyn McDevitt Rubin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
I went to Punxsutawney for Groundhog Day. I drove up Tuesday, Feb. 1, for the banquet and started back the next day after lunch at First English Lutheran Church.
At 5:30 Wednesday morning, Groundhog Day, dressed in the warmest clothes I own -- three pairs of socks inside heavy boots, mittens inside my mittens, wool pants, sweaters, scarves, down-coat, wool hat -- I started out for Gobbler's Knob. It was 10 degrees above zero and pitch-dark. At the mall where I went to catch a bus to the top of the hill, hundreds of people, mostly college students from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, were milling around.
In Punxsutawney, Groundhog Day is a school holiday, and fleets of school buses are requisitioned to transport visitors to the event, $1 for a round-trip ticket. The kids in front of me had been on the bus for an hour. Not understanding that they'd reached the Knob, they had already made one round trip.
This is my second visit to Gobbler's Knob. I like the idea of going so much that I forget the reality. Why would I want to get up at 5 a.m. just to hear what I know already, that there will be six more weeks of winter? Because it seems to me so American a festival. This year it was estimated that 10,000 to 12,000 people attended. A generous guess, I thought. When Groundhog Day falls midweek, crowds are smaller. Next year, when the event falls on a Friday, more people will attend.
As the crowd on the Knob waited for daybreak, fireworks rained down. Falling out of the dark sky onto this surreal setting, they were splendid and diverting. After fireworks and before the pronouncement, there was an opportunity to stomp feet and throw arms in the air to the rhythm of popular songs played at full blast on the speaker system. At 7 a.m., members of the Inner Circle, a tuxedo- and top-hat-clad bunch of successful Punxsutawney businessmen, dedicated to preserving Groundhog Day and promoting their community, marched onto the podium. At around 7:20, daybreak, the fat, furry groundhog was lifted from its hollow log to cast a shadow. The crowd cheered wildly and left enthusiastically. Back onboard the bus, headed for hot coffee, I thought the blowing snow looked pretty and the whole experience seemed wonderful again.
The night before, at the Groundhog Banquet for 400, I had time to reflect on my attachment to Punxsutawney. I'd been a chronicler here. My friend Lester Pete died two years ago. I wrote a column about his funeral. Two years before that, I'd written about his 80th birthday party, which he'd celebrated with Punxsutawney friends, Ed Snyder, Ted Swartz and Matt Tibby, who were 70, 90 and 100 respectively. Last year, Tibby had won the Punxsutawney Man of the Year Award. This year, at 104, he presented the new awardee. As he explained, he'd lost most of his vision and was losing his hearing, but his spirits were still intact. He thought the invitation to appear at the banquet confirmed that he "hadn't disgraced himself in any way during the past year."
They are long-lived in Punxsutawney. Ten minutes after I arrived, sitting in my friend Shirley Pete's living room, I'd received a call from Ted Swartz, now 94. A golfer, who was on the course 100 times last summer, often with his wife, Louise, he wanted to talk.
"How did Ted know I was here?" I asked Shirley.
"In Punxsutawney, everybody knows everything."
It's true. If you ask about someone, you get his life story, the successes and the scandals, the good stuff and the other stuff.
On the night of the Groundhog Banquet, guests hear a brief biography before they hear the names of the persons to be honored as man and woman of the year. A few words into each introduction, everyone around me knew it was Marjorie Null and, then, Terry Fye. You could hear the names being whispered and the choices being praised.
I was in the auditorium the year Lester Pete won man of the year. He was totally surprised. At the podium, when he'd recovered his voice, he started telling jokes, some of them naughty. The audience, loving it, egged him on. After half an hour, toastmaster Jeff Lundy wrestled away the microphone. Lester didn't want to let go.
It's a small town, shrinking. Population in Punxsutawney has dropped to 6,000. If it weren't for Phil, no CNN, no BBC (London and Scotland), ABC, CBS or NBC.
The Inner Circle is charged with keeping the myth alive. You have to forgive how goofy they get doing it.
"Welcome to the theater of the absurd," toastmaster Jeff Lundy said to all the folks in the Punxsutawney high school cafeteria who'd paid $20 for dinner.
"Terrible dinner," I made the mistake of saying.
"Was it?" the woman sitting next to me asked, surprised.
She made me realize that criticism is not what you bring to Punxsy on this occasion.
Subtlety is out of place. To have fun, and make new friends is what this is about.
At the community center, we were told of a woman from Chicago who had won a trip to anywhere in the USA and had chosen Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day. Can you believe it? We believed it.