Getting inside the real pumpkin head

It was not at all what I expected. No spidery overgrown landscape and squeaky screen door. No old codger greeting me with a sharp knife. You might expect someone who is nationally known as a professional pumpkin carver to be eccentric, perhaps unorganized, with 12 cats and an analog phone. Someone who at least displays his best work in his living room.

But Gene Granata was none of these things. I approached his tidy tract house in Foothill Ranch, Calif., which is painted beige, with a red door and a few flowers in the front, and was greeted by a regular guy. He’s married with two daughters in school, and is an engineer by day — who carves pumpkins in his spare time.

But spare time might not be the best description. Granata is swamped with pumpkin orders, especially now with Halloween on the horizon. Requests are rolling in from Hollywood celebs, giant hotels, show producers who want pumpkins on their sets, and everyday people who put in an order last year for a custom pumpkin this season.

Granata works in his garage, and it is as organized and professional as any serious work space, including the tidy and labeled tool organizers. Pumpkins to carve are stacked neatly on one side, pumpkins to ship on the other and his carving space consumes the middle area. Naturally, there is no room for a car.

What’s so special about what Granata does with pumpkins? He can do just about anything. His latest pumpkin-incarnation is a Jack Sparrow silhouette, popular for pirate fans. He’ll also carve school logos, scary ghosts and seasonal motifs. Pleasant pumpkin faces are a perennial favorite, while wedding centerpieces are a growing part of his business year round.

The carving started when Granata was 5 years old. It’s not that he wanted to grow up to be a professional pumpkin carver.

But he was good at it when the rest of us were not.

While most of us struggled with the basic triangle, Granata was experimenting with complex faces and ghostly forms.

He carved around the family table the week before Halloween. It wasn’t until his teens that he explored the possibilities beyond the basic pumpkin face. Then came the comments, then came the requests from friends and family.

“When people told me I could make a business out of carving pumpkins I thought, who would pay me to do this?”

Turns out, lots of people with famous names such as Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise.

“I never thought my pumpkin carving would amount to much,” said Granata, who makes the bulk of his living on inartistic pursuits such as technical support. But learning Web development was key to going pro in the 1990s.

“It wasn’t until I built pumpkinmasters.com that my business really took off.”

That and the fact that This Old House magazine ran a feature about him. His phone rang off the hook and still does today.

There is a small community of pumpkin carvers worldwide and they keep in touch. Granata says there are only a handful. If you do the math — population almost 7 billion divided by six pumpkin carvers — you can imagine the demand. Granata carves year round to keep up.

He chooses the classic jack-o’-lantern form — round, symmetrical, the size of a basketball. He looks for his flat-bottomed pumpkins at pumpkin patches just like the rest of us. Lately he also has been carving synthetic pumpkins because they are available all year. But the secret to his success is a simple, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that technique.

“The deep, dark secret is that most people don’t scrape enough out of the inside, or thin the pumpkin wall sufficiently to be able to carve intricately,” he said.

Duh!

But he does have a few more pumpkin tricks up his sleeve. He carves the “hole” in his pumpkin from the bottom and creates only a small vent hole on top. That way he can set the pumpkin over the light source and not reach inside.

And he uses only the simple pumpkin carving kit that he sells on his Web site — a series of small precision saws that he developed. Granata’s latest and greatest technique though is to simply “etch” an image in the pumpkin skin, leaving a thin layer of the core.

“You can still see the light through this layer, but the advantage is the pumpkin stays fresh longer.”

Pumpkin season is here and Granata is carving around the clock. Last year “Good Morning America” called, and so did Rachael Ray and Ellen DeGeneres. He carves to keep up, and naturally things get messy.

“Someone in Hollywood, I won’t say who, had a pumpkin-carving party a few years ago. They ordered the pumpkins from me, but they wanted them scooped out before delivery. I hired every teenager in the neighborhood to scoop pumpkins. You know what happens when you get pumpkin goo and teenagers together? They had a ‘food’ fight. We still get pumpkin seeds sprouting in the yard every year.”

Another Hollywood mishap involved a custom pumpkin for Nicolas Cage. Let’s just say he dropped it when he was due to deliver. Granata called his brother-in-law to drive the car while Granata carved another pumpkin on the road.

“The car was a mess,” he said.

In October, there is no food in the Granata house, the refrigerators are filled with pumpkins. His schedule is hectic. Pumpkins are stacked to the ceiling, Granata’s eyes are red.

So I wonder as I look at hundreds of pumpkins waiting for his handiwork if there is an order in the mayhem from Martha Stewart.

“She called, but we never followed up.”

That’s it then, for me. If Martha called, Granata is certainly at the pinnacle of the pumpkin world.