Nick Venetucci must have been spinning in his grave.

When someone stole pumpkins from a patch at the Ruth Washburn Cooperative Nursery School last weekend, they really took more than pumpkins. The pre-schoolers had planted and nurtured their pumpkins and then learned, earlier than they should have to, that there are nasty people in the world.

On the brighter side, they kids also know there are good and generous people in the world, too, because by midday Friday, you had to stand in line if you wanted to donate pumpkins at the school. They were rolling in pumpkins, just hours after The Gazette hit the streets with the story.

Mikki Riggin, the school's office manager, said there was such an outpouring of community support that "at this point, everybody at the school has a smile on their face."

Putting smiles on the faces of little kids was a special talent of Venetucci's. It's impossible for some of us not to think of Venetucci whenever Halloween rolls around.

Generations of kids around here have memories of going to the kindly old farmer's place off of Highway 85/87, where they could pick their very own pumpkin straight off of the vine.

Any adult who ever watched kids at the Venetucci farm remembers a little one stepping between the furrows, then struggling to lift a pumpkin that was half his or her size.

Today just north of the Pioneers Museum there is a statue of the great-yet-humble man, who died 93 years young in 2004. He is depicted handing out pumpkins to kids.

Thoughtfully, the designers built a planter around the statue and pumpkins are grown there. (Note to thieves: Don't even think about it.)

It's very cool, and if you haven't seen it you should take a look sometime. (A photo of the statue is on my blog today.)

A plaque near the statue says, most appropriately, "He sowed the seeds with tenderness and reaped the harvest with joy. It is in the tilling of the soil and his labor done with love that bound him to his fellow man and to God."

The pre-schoolers were in the process of learning about the joys of the harvest when their crop was pillaged. For the Ruth Washburn kids, all's well that ends well, perhaps.

But the rest of us may be excused to still feeling a bit outraged. No kidding: Taking those pumpkins was a really low blow.

Particularly around here.

Who knows? The pumpkin thieves may have been to the Venetucci farm when they were much younger.

Just in case they're reading: You don't take pumpkins from little kids in Nick Venetucci's town. It simply isn't done.

It's hardly a capital offense. The perpetrators, most likely teenagers, probably discarded the pumpkins quickly, totally unaware of the depth to which they had sunk.

If only we could catch them....

We could drag them from their homes and into the public square, where they could be smeared from head to toe with soggy pumpkin innards. We'd withhold Halloween candy from them; force them to take up shovels to loosen the dirt in the Ruth Washburn school's pumpkin patch for next season's planting.

Riggin joked that "we could throw cream pumpkin pies at them."

Maybe the malefactors will be haunted by their deed. Maybe the hobgoblins of Halloween future will visit them in the night, as in "A Christmas Carol."

We can only hope.

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Contact Noreen at 636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com. He appears on Fridays on KRDO radio 1240 and KOAA TV channels 5/30.