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By Cynthia Bates, Class of  2016

In the fall of 1999, I was working at ad agency Hal Riney & Partners, in the beautiful Railway Exchange Building at 224 S Michigan Ave — home of the (then) Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Every year at Halloween, the building management held a pumpkin carving contest, and with depressing regularity, celebrity tenant Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s impressive architectural pumpkins would win.

However, for this year, we at Riney decided to go all out.  While we weren’t an architectural powerhouse, we were creative, hip and smart. So we did something clever, creative, highly original and different.

We decided to make a film — a parody of cult horror classic released that year — The Blair Witch Project. (In case you don’t remember, it features black and white photography with a shaky hand held camera and a bunch of clueless teens lost in a scary forest coming to assorted bad ends). We used pumpkins and squashes to create an all gourd (or all Gored, as we joked) cast. It was brilliant.

But a day or two before the deadline, we looked more closely at the contest guidelines and realized to our horror that they required actual physical carved pumpkins to be submitted, so our film would probably be disqualified.  We needed a new concept using a real live pumpkin, brilliantly executed.

At that time I was the Director of Consumer Insights, and I turned to the Western cultural canon for the iconic pumpkin — the Cinderella coach! The art department began carving windows, doors and ornamentation on a suitable pumpkin. I visited toy stores and found a nice sized plastic Cinderella coach drawn by white horses. We removed the plastic coach body, dropped our carved pumpkin onto the chassis and added a cute little vanity license plate I had designed which said “Cyndi 1”.

We submitted the coach along with the film in the nick of time. To our amazement, we won first prize!  Although we never found out if building management had viewed the film.

But there on display in the atrium (this was before the model of the city was installed), beside magnificently carved and no doubt architecturally significant pumpkins, was Cyndi’s coach with a blue ribbon.

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