Thursday Open Line

While Halloween is more than a month away, the folks in Barnesville, Ohio are staging their 49th annual Pumpkin Festival beginning today and running through Sunday. Some 100,000 people are expected to see parades, a car show, banjo and fiddle contests, and, of course, the queen’s pageant. One major event will be the King Pumpkin Contest, where giant home grown pumpkins ride by on pickup trucks. Just over a billion pounds of pumpkins are grown in the U.S. annually. Illinois is the top producer, growing 427 million pounds a year. California, New York, and Ohio are also major producers. You can find more facts about America’s people, places and economy from the American Community Survey at <www.census.gov>.