My moment of triumph is at hand. I am seated, hands behind my back, at a cherry-red tabletop, staring down my adversary: a single slice of cherry pie, standing on its edge, atop a white paper plate.
“Get ready,” says the chipper judge at the microphone. “Get set…GO!”
The crowd roars. Like one of those perpetual drinking bird toys, I bob my head downwards, eyes on the pie, calculating in real time the lateral distance between my eyeballs and my gaping mouth. My baseball cap sits backward on my head, shielding my bald pate from the brutal early July sun. But I’m not breaking a sweat. I can do this…I can do this…
By most calculations, I am competing in the 99th annual cherry pie eating contest at the 99th Annual National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan. One year hence (presumably, at the time you are reading this), in July 2026, the festival – first mounted to celebrate America’s 150th anniversary – will celebrate its centennial, offering a uniquely Midwestern old-school mix of parades, pageants, air shows, midway rides, big-name music concerts, and races.
Also, cherries. Lots and lots of cherries. All grown at local cherry orchards, brought here in local cherry trucks by real-life cherry farmers. Cherry snacks and cherry hats. Cherry refrigerator magnets. The souvenir sunglasses are not rose-colored. They’re cherry red.
Michigan, a vendor’s sign tells me, grows about 75 percent of America’s tart cherries – up to 300 million pounds (including pits, I assume).
How central are cherries to the culture of Traverse City? The local minor league baseball team is called the Pit Spitters. When you arrive at the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired air terminal, you disembark at Cherry Capital Airport. Before you’ve even reached the baggage carousel, you’ve passed the Cherry Country Gift Shop and the Cherry Country Café.
“Yep,” says a young woman named Cassie, awaiting her suitcase. “I guess we love our cherries here, all right.”
It’s after dark when I drive my rental car into town and park at the Hotel Indigo, a few feet from the southern tip of Grand Traverse Bay, the finger of Lake Michigan that gives Traverse City its name. There are lots of hotel choices in and around Traverse City, from airport-area bargains to lush accommodations like the waterfront Beach Haus and Baywatch resorts.
I’m going with Indigo because it is smack in the middle of town. In fact, from my second-floor room I have a panorama from the lakefront to the midway, winking and blinking with rides and games of supposed skill.
It’s also just a short stroll, the next morning, to my first Cherry Festival event: The Very Cherry Flying Pancake Breakfast. The concept is pretty basic: Customers stand 15 feet or so from a table laden with pancakes, and spatula-wielding local luminaries attempt to flip said pancakes onto your paper plate. It’s okay for you to move the plate around to capture errant pancakes, and that’s all for the good, as it turns out pancake flipping is an imprecise science, at best.
I’m lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a pancake flip from Tessa Nico, the reigning National Cherry Festival Queen. She’s been on the job for a year now, and will relinquish her crown to one of the young women now flanking her at the flipping table. Still, 12 months on the job have clearly not diminished Tessa’s cherry flipping skills. Plop! She nails it.
The pancakes (with cherry syrup, natch) are delicious, but if you think I’m going to wait until lunch time to eat again, then you are missing much of the point of the National Cherry Festival. To walk the festival’s main venue at Open Space Park is to be tempted at every turn, in every red-bannered tent, by a literal Cherries Jubilee: Cherry Jam, Chocolate Covered Cherries, Cherry Malted Milk Balls, Dried Cherries, Cherry Sundaes, Cherry Wine, Cherry Salsa, Cherry Barbeque, Cherry Coffee, Cherry Crisp.
All those cherries; what do they do with the pits?
A partial answer to that question unfolds at the east end of Open Space Park, where the Adult Cherry Pit Spit Contest is about to begin. It may interest you to know that the Guinness World Record for cherry pit spitting was won by one Brian “Young Gun” Krause, who sent the thing flying 93 feet 6.5 inches (including final roll) way back in 2003 at the International Cherry Pit-Spitting championship at Tree-Mendus Fruit Farm in Eau Claire, Michigan (“Young Gun” is the son of Rick “Pellet Gun” Krause, who was a 19-time champ). That event ran from 1974 to 2019, leaving Traverse City’s competition to stand alone in Michigan’s Pit Spit Hit List.
The rules for pit spitting could not be simpler: You stand flat on your two feet, face the long, long plastic measuring mat that has been rolled out before you, and spit that sucker as far as you can. (“Freestyle” pit spitters can take a running start, but that variation is frowned upon by true aficionados of the sport.)
Highlights from the pit spitting contest (Video by Bill Newcott)
Fifty-eight hopefuls are lined up at the municipal dock, awaiting their chance at pit spitting immortality. One by one as they toe the line, they are handed three cherries from which they dutifully chew the skin and meat. They then let loose with a mighty “puh-TUUU!”
The newly crowned Queen of the Cherry Festival, Ainslee Hewitt, goes first, and even with her white gown and sash constricting her movements, she still manages a respectable 27 feet (she confesses she practiced all week). Those who follow enjoy varying degrees of success (if your pit rolls off the measuring mat, that try is disqualified).
At last, the new Pit Master is announced: a gentleman named Oscar, who managed to launch his pit a very decent 43 feet, 4 inches.
“I’ve never spit a pit in my life,” Oscar confessed to me in an exclusive post-event interview. “I knew I had to come deep from the diaphragm. It was all from the hip movement.
“You thrust forward as you spit.”
Oscar shares broad smiles with the granddaughter he’s got riding on his right hip.
“I didn’t even know this thing existed!” he laughs.
The National Cherry Festival runs for a full week, always incorporating the Fourth of July, when the annual fireworks show is presented by the Traverse City Boom Boom Club. (If you think that show is spectacular, come back in September for the annual World International Fireworks Championship.)
The highlight of the weekend is the National Cherry Festival Air Show, featuring military and unique private aircraft that take off from the nearby Traverse City U.S. Coast Guard Air Station, then fly low (and mostly slow) before circling back to base. The shoreline is mobbed a hundred feet or so deep; still, everyone gets a good look at the lumbering C-130J Super Hercules transport, the zippy jet-powered gliders, a Russian MiG, a rare Boeing P8-A Poseidon submarine hunter, and, in a dramatic stop-and-go performance, one of the last in-service Harrier jets.
Highlights from the National Cherry Festival Air Show (Video by Bill Newcott)
Night has fallen on the Cherry Festival, and I’m looking out my hotel room window at the midway. The lure is irresistible. I head downstairs and across the parking lot to take in the lights and sights up-close.
By day, even the most upscale carnival attractions seem hopelessly tacky. But under the curtain of night, blazing like Oz under a pitch-black sky, the magic of the midway is undeniable. I take silent inventory of the promised thrills: the stomach-wrenching human centrifuge called “OMG,” the canopied diagonal Ferris wheel called “Paratrooper,” the suspiciously Dumbo-like “Jumping Jumbos.” All are owned and operated by Arnold Amusements, a nationwide carnival show operator that had its 1980 start right here in Traverse City, making the annual Cherry Festival gig something of a homecoming.
I’m tempted to step up to the ticket booth and buy my way onto a ride, maybe the 65-foot-high Giant Wheel that, if I squinted, would give me a peek into my hotel window. But I decide to keep my thrills earthbound on this night. There’s thumping boom box music barging through the night air as I wander among the rattling, whooshing rides, but it takes no imagination at all to wish that sonic imposition away and instead imagine the sound of an old-timey calliope, bells ringing and tin drum pounding, rising above rides that, for all their paint jobs and pop culture updates, have not really changed all that much since I was a kid.
And now it has all come down to this. I resisted the pit spitting. But finishing a slice of cherry pie before this panel of clearly rank amateurs could? A piece of cake.
GO!
First bite, even I am impressed. As I pull my head back up, I can see my gaping maw has already made a good one-third of the pie disappear. I’m quietly thankful to the young woman next to me, who advised me to stand the pie on its long side.
“If the pie is flat,” she said, “You’ll never get through the crust.”
Second bite, I am the god Chompus, Destroyer of Pies. It’s clear that in two more passes this thing is going to be good and over.
Bill Newcott participates in the pie eating contest (Video by Bill Newcott)
Third bite, something seems wrong. The pie was not where I expected it to be. Oh no! I realize. The pie plate is sliding away from me on this stupid plastic tablecloth!
I’m panicking. My eyes catch my official Cherry Pie Eating Contest entry form, just lying there. Why did I not think to place it under this slip-sliding plate? Rookie mistake!
I desperately want to steady the plate with my hands, which is, of course, against the rules. I find myself rising off my folding chair, trying to leverage my face back onto the plate.
“You gotta remain seated!” a judge shouts. “You gotta be on your butt!”
Now I’m annoyed. Who died and made you the pie eating expert? I think. Then I feel bad, because maybe someone actually did die and make him the pie eating expert.
But miracle of miracles, I raise my head and see my plate is empty! I’ve still got a chance! I just have to swallow these last few morsels of…
“We’ve got a winner here!” the judge shouts. And it’s not me.
I’ve watched a video of this event, and I must say I’m not proud of the look of somewhat bitter disappointment on my face, my mouth hanging open to show the judges that I had, indeed swallowed that last morsel, only about two seconds too late.
But I am pleased that the young woman next to me, the one who’d offered such sage cherry pie eating advice, was victorious.
I congratulate her heartily. The Spirit of the National Cherry Festival would expect nothing less.
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