By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
RUMSON – The Rumson-Fair Haven football team may have experienced a tough loss against Red Bank Catholic Saturday night, but by Sunday some players couldn’t help but smile as they harvested and delivered pumpkins to Lunch Break.
“We try to have, like, the ‘next-week mentality.’ So I think we were pretty positive about helping out the community, even after the big loss,” said George Clough, a junior RFH student and center on the Bulldogs football team.
The pumpkins came from a local patch at the home of Michael Sullivan on Orchard Lane. According to his daughter, Kristen Bunnell, Sullivan started a family garden in 2014 to encourage his 10 grandchildren to give back to the community. Over the years, the family has donated all of the fresh fruits and vegetables grown in the 26,000-square-foot “Cousins’ Garden” to Lunch Break to help improve client access to fresh food.
“We, as a family, have been involved with Lunch Break a very, very long time and love the mission of Lunch Break,” said Bunnell. “So my dad had a vision of being able to provide healthy fresh foods that have been grown locally to those in need in our local community.”
This year, COVID-19 affected everything about the garden, from planting to harvesting. Concerned how the family and volunteers would have access to the garden during the pandemic, Sullivan decreased the planting area which in turn reduced the amount of food that was grown and donated.
“My dad is a very big out-of-the-box thinker,” said Bunnell. He and Gwendolyn Love, the executive director of Lunch Break, came up with the idea to plant pumpkins which could be given to the Lunch Break clients to help them celebrate the holiday. The organization helps outfit many families with Halloween costumes each year; this year those coming to find a superhero or princess or scary monster get-up will also go home with a pumpkin they can carve or decorate as they like.
Bunnell called it a “simple kindness that could really help bring some smiles to just so many families that have been harder hit through this pandemic.”
But how to get dozens of heavy pumpkins harvested in Rumson and delivered to Lunch Break’s Red Bank location? That’s where the football players, and a caravan of cars and trucks, came in.
Bunnell knew George from St. George’s-by-the-River Church. “Originally, I was gonna try to get some guys together in the spring to clean up and plant the plants,” George said. “But then the Cousins’ Garden got shut down because of quarantine and coronavirus.”
When the family contacted him about helping with the pumpkins instead, “I thought it was a pretty good idea to get some volunteer leadership hours in and so I talked to my team during practice and an offensive meeting and a lot of them seem pretty interested,” said George. The volunteers helped plant, harvest and deliver the heavy orange gourds.
George said he feels opportunities to volunteer have been scarce because of the pandemic and “recently, a lot of us are caught up in school and sports so we haven’t really gotten a good chance to help out around the community.” Growing and delivering the pumpkins was “just a great opportunity to do that,” he said.
“This felt like it was such a simple thing to do,” Bunnell said about donating the pumpkins and partnering with members of the football team. “To then see the goodness that that was giving to them, to just do a simple act of kindness for others, who knew how impactful that could be.”
The article originally appeared in the October 22 – 28, 2020 print edition of The Two River Times.
