It’s not easy being Greene
But frog jumping contest makes holiday a labor of loveBy BILL RODGERS Tribune Chronicle
Article Photos
Fact Box
Old Home Day
- 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at Maplewood Elementary School.
- Parade begins at 10 a.m.
- Frog jumping begins shortly after the parade
- Frog distance jump begins at noon.
- Mark Roper and the Mosquito Creek String Band performs throughout the day.
- Chicken dinner featured, along with other food and activities.
GREENE - It was well past dark and the group had been walking through waist-deep water for a few minutes, searching the banks of a Mosquito Lake feeder creek with their flashlights.
Chad Hurlbert waded up to a fallen tree that lay across the creek. He lifted his bag out of the water, popped his flashlight between his teeth and sloshed under it.
Another hunter with a flashlight, Jimmy Finch, pointed to a two-foot-long black snake swimming through the lukewarm, muddy water and everyone splashed away from it. Later, from somewhere in the dark someone said: "I got one!" Then there was a pause before they said: "Don't get a picture of it. It's small."
The group of about a half-dozen young people are the friends, relatives and former scouts of the Finch brothers, who, every Labor Day weekend, have the job of supplying the bull frogs for the annual frog jumping competition at Greene's Home Day celebration. The people at the Finch family bonfire fill up on hot dogs then split into groups and wade through the creeks in search of frogs around the brothers' boyhood home. Some years they hunt until 1 a.m.
Bill Finch said the brothers were the right men for the job because they lived in the area their entire lives.
"There were two summers when I was a kid when I didn't stay home at night," Bill Finch said about all of the camping and swimming they did near the creek.
The job of frog-hunting was passed onto the Finch brothers after changing hands a few times since the 1970s. It was the four brothers' job to keep the little kids supplied with bullfrogs so they could pay a few bucks to see which frog can jump the farthest in the competition.
And the brothers take their job seriously, right down to keeping records of each year's contest. However, now that he's in his 50s, Tim Finch said the brothers have more managerial duties regarding the hunt: They drop their nephews off in the creek and go back to the bonfire to play euchre.
"Those rocks are getting slippery," Tim Finch said.
After dark, Bill Finch loaded a group into the bed of his truck; a length of rope where the tailgate should be. They pulled away from the bonfire and drove along roads lit only by the lights from nearby farms.
Bill Finch pulled to the side of the road where there was a large red gate separating a field from the creek bank. The group, lead by nephews like Jimmy Finch, climbed over the fence with their bags and flashlight and walked right into the water while they were wearing hooded sweatshirts, jeans and sneakers.
Tim Finch said the neighbors hear their dogs barking over Labor Day weekend and assume it's the "froggers" - as they're called - wading through the stream. He said the people living near the creek were OK with this.
"We got stopped by a game warden once," Bill Finch said. "We told him what we were doing and he said 'Sorry, have a good time.'"
But that doesn't protect the kids from practical jokes. On Friday night one neighbor snuck out to the creek bank and blew an air horn while the group waded past.
Kyle Macintosh, wearing an old Cub Scout sweatshirt and a headlamp, waded through water that was higher than his waist to a large, fat bullfrog sitting by itself on a bare patch of the bank. To catch the frog, Macintosh kept his flashlight shining directly into the frog's eyes. This "zombie-fied" the frog, who stared at the light long enough for Macintosh to reach out and snatch it from the bank. The frog went into the bag with the others, and Macintosh grinned as everyone else looked at the largest bullfrog to be caught that night.
The Finch brothers say they catch more than 100 frogs this way every year. According to their records, up to 128 people have participated in the jumping contest, and the longest series of jumps were more than 190 inches about five years ago. The Finch brothers are masters of ceremony for the contest.
"We're going to be doing (professional) wrestling announcing this year," Tim Finch said about this contest, scheduled for high noon today.
Bill Finch worries, though, that the event is getting too popular.
"Once the frog jump is over, everyone goes home," he said.
That includes the frogs, which are released near one of the bridges by the creek.
