HOT SPRINGS VILLAGE — Linus van Pelt should camp out at Jack Newman’s house on Halloween.
The Hot Springs Village man has 330-plus jack-o’-lanterns in his ever-growing outside display.
Newman, 75, said he got the idea more than 10 years ago when he lived in Illinois and worked in Chicago, delivering movies to theaters.
“I was making a late delivery, and I had to go around the block, and out of the corner of my eye, I see all these lights,” he said. It was October and close to Halloween. “There were all these jack-o’-lanterns lined up in a row, and I said, ‘Holy cow!’”
Newman mentioned the display to someone, who told him that the man bought pumpkins, passed them out to neighborhood children to carve, then displayed their work.
“I wasn’t going to go that far; that’s expensive,” Newman said. “I started collecting them. I said, ‘I’m going to go the artificial route.’”
Before Newman retired and moved to Hot Springs Village in 2006, he started buying pumpkins at after-Halloween sales at the big-box stores, flea markets and yard sales.
“I started collecting more and more, and now it’s out of hand,” he said. “I’m lucky my home has a basement. I have over 330 of various shapes, sizes and textures.” He said a few of the jack-o’-lanterns are antique, but he doesn’t know how old they are.
He starts hauling out the jack-o’-lanterns in September, but he said it might take him a couple of weeks to get them all on display. “I don’t make an eight-hour day of it,” he said. “Maybe I’m not in the mood or something.”
Placing the jack-o’-lanterns is easy; it’s lighting them that’s the trick. “I’ve got a maze of extension cords,” he said, laughing.
A couple of years ago, Newman happened to notice a Halloween shop in Benton, and he saw a crop of jack-o’-lanterns sitting outside. “I said, ‘Whoa!’ Just by good fortune, some lady was selling everything she had. She wanted to rid herself of them. A lady in the Village gave me a bunch a couple of years ago. She said, ‘I’m tired of putting these out every year.’ That leapfrogged the amount.”
Newman, whose first name is just a happy coincidence, bemoaned the fact that there seem to be fewer jack-o’-lanterns for sale at many of the big-box retail stores.
He also has in the display seven inflatable jack-o’-lanterns, including one with Snoopy sitting on top of it and another with Mickey Mouse. He said he tries to rearrange the jack-o’-lanterns each year to make the presentation a little different.
Although Newman said the neighborhood doesn’t get many trick-or-treaters, he has people who look forward to driving by his home each year at 1 Del Camino Lane, which is particularly spooktacular at night.
“People will stop and say, ‘What do you do for Christmas?’ I say, ‘I don’t do anything for Christmas. This is enough.’”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.