Our News is Written in Stone™

Photo 1 of 1 | Zoom Photo +

Tom Herman of Warwick, John Madura of Pine Island and Wayne Halleck of the Village of Florida compete in the onion-eating contest during the Pine Island Summer Fest on Saturday.Times Herald-Record/DOMINICK FIORILLE

PINE ISLAND — We've come to find the champion.

Somewhere within the Pine Island Summer Fest is the man who ate an entire, 8-ounce onion in 75 seconds. For the uninitiated, this is a festival record. The fastest any man had eaten an entire onion was 1 minute, 55 seconds before Saturday. They say he quartered it with a knife first and smiled as he swallowed the pieces.

"He looked really happy," Russell Kowal says. "Everybody there knew what they were getting into. He looked confident."

Cheetah Haysom da Parma saw him too: "He was a big guy."

We learn from photographs he had a mustache and teased out the finish with the last piece of raw onion on his tongue. Style points. Rumor has it he won a pie-eating contest a dozen years ago. We'd like to meet him.

Can't. He's gone now. J.R. Kuka, of Hamburg, N.J., stepped beyond the confines of Summer Fest with the $100 prize put up by the Orange County Vegetable Growers Association and disappeared. Haysom da Parma suggests speaking to last year's winner and the previous record holder.

"Ask him how it feels to lose his title," she says. But he's gone too. Haysom da Parma doesn't see anyone from the competition now that she looks around. They've all taken the goodie bags full of antacids and breath mints and split.

These onions they ate are the famed Pine Island onions, grown in the black dirt of the region. They're said to be more powerful than regular onions — makes them good for cooking or chopped up and tossed in a salad but hot when taken raw and in bulk. One imagines it would be overwhelming.

"I've eaten my share of raw onions," says Kowal, who grows them, "but never that size."

The site of the onion-eating contest has been taken over by a band covering a Janis Joplin song, and festival goers lounge on picnic tables in the pavilion. A car show is under way nearby on the grass.

It's hard not to feel the champion's absence. Would he have shared the secret to his accomplishment? Could he have described the feeling of biting into that final, pungent piece? The answers are gone with the champion. Well, maybe.

The guy working the firefighters' food stand turns his back after handing over a plain cheeseburger. There, on the table, is a tin full of sliced, Pine Island onions. There's gotta be at least 8 ounces there, easy.

dmurphy@th-record.com

posted by Don "Moses" Lerman  # 7:26 PM