It’s been one of the best foliage years on record, and a great year for cider press parties.
Recently, reporter Erica Heilman had the chance to visit a "one-lunger" engine cider party in Johnson. A one-lunger is an antique, single-cylinder gas engine that used to be prevalent on Vermont farms back at the turn of the century.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Dan Noyes: It's called a hit-or-miss engine. If you listen to the motor, right, you'll hear it. So that's the hit, and then miss, miss, miss. So it's not requiring any power or energy to run the grinder. So then it just uses the momentum that's stored in the flywheels to keep going, and then when it needs more speed, it will start firing again.
You know, back in the day when you had a farm, this was the piece of machinery used to run corn choppers, or you know any sawmills, water pumps. You know, it's a little stationary engine, and they made millions of them. They made some of them in Morrisville. There was a foundry in Morrisville that made one-lunger engines. They're not necessarily safe.
Erica Heilman: Dan Noyes is one of a few people who keep this one-lunger running once a year in a barn on a farm on a spectacular stretch of dirt road in Johnson. Neighbors and friends had brought apples of all kinds in five-gallon buckets. Runty little wild apples and big, beautiful orchard apples lined up and ready for feeding into the grinder.
Erica Heilman: It does look like a torture device.
Howard Romero: It does. This is not something you want to get your necktie caught in. And then the press itself is nothing more than a big screw squeezing up apple pomace. And we put the pomace into flats, stack them up one over the other.
Erica Heilman: So the pomace goes into burlap sacks.
Howard Romero: And that makes it so that it can be squeezed.
Erica Heilman: So we're talking about a big snow shovel, digging into pomace. And then getting dumped into burlap sacks, and then put on a massive, very medieval-looking screw, a press.
Howard Romero: Yes. That's pretty much it. That hasn't changed since the days of Archimedes.
Norm LaRow: I restored one of those and I got it running in the garage. My wife came out. She said, "Boy, that looks dangerous.” And I said, "Yeah, you ever heard worse than a kid running around a buzz saw? You get tangled up in that belt, it's not gonna stop.” It's dangerous, you know. Over at the field days, a lot of those guys are missing a couple fingers, you know.
Erica Heilman: That's Norm LaRow. He was sitting outside drinking a beer with his neighbor, Paul Warden.
Norm LaRow: This is it. It's like sugaring. It's almost over. All the seasons, like picking ramps in the spring and all those seasonal things, you know.
Erica Heilman: Do you come to this every year?
Norm LaRow: Yeah, I live up at the end of the road as far as you can go. 31 years, happy Johnson taxpayer.
Erica Heilman: Around on the other side of the house were about 60 friends and neighbors having a deeply uncomplicated good time.
Kids were running around in that way that kids run around when parents aren't watching. There was a massive cauldron hanging over a fire, brewing soup comprised of leftover vegetables from people's gardens, and a bottle of whiskey that people manning the soup took swigs of on the down low.
Finally, there was a commercial pizza oven which Mark Woodward picked up at an auction 10 years ago, churning out the best pizza that I have ever had, and in countless numbers, like the miracle of loaves and fishes.
Mark Woodward: Oh, look at that kid's gonna lock his sister in the toilet.
Erica Heilman: That's Mark Woodward, one of the people who started this party decades ago.
Erica Heilman: What happens at cider parties?
Mark Woodward: Well, all our friends and people we don't know show up here. I married some people here. Lots, you know. So it's 32 years. It's been really a wonderful thing. Nobody's been hurt. Nobody's been poisoned. I mean, that's a lot of unpasteurized cider going down the hatch.
