Originally appeared in South Carolina Living in February 2012.
The Springfield Frog Jump
Milton was lean and long, roughly the size of a man’s hand, and all afternoon we kept him in an inch of pond water at the bottom of a plastic, lidded, 2-pint Pit Cooked Pork Barbecue bucket with a dime-sized hole in the top for air. I spent half the day in paternal worry—“Was he cool enough?” “Was he hungry? “Was he thirsty?” “Was he angry?” “Was he pumped up?” “Was he still alive?”—and so I would peek through the hole to see Milton squatting there, wide-eyed and patient and surely ready to set the new state record.
We bought him for ten dollars from a clan of country boys that advertised their business by draping--over the hood of their truck--a cardboard sign with green print lettering that simply read, “Frogs For Sale.” I was in the high festival spirit, asking them where they’d caught the frogs, but all I could get in response was a slow, reticent, frog-like belch: “Out…of…ponds.”
And there is, I would learn later, an important and noticeable difference between a pond bullfrog and a North Edisto river bullfrog, with the latter being leaner and darker. But they promised me I’d chosen well—the same size and spritely legs that the oldest man usually “saved for his granddaughters.” And so I’d named him Milton, after the English poet, in a similarly ironic and self-winking fashion as the writer William Price Fox, who on visiting this festival sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, named his frogs “Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.”
So we—me, Milton, and my girlfriend Lee, who had brought along a camera and a remarkable sense of resilience and belonging—waited in line for a half-hour in order to fill out the paperwork and pay the five dollar registration fee. The sun was just beginning to burn off the early cloud cover, making the air heavy with flies and late April heat, and, as usual at any festival, the crowd was proving to be more intriguing than the event. We stood in line, for instance, behind two pre-teens girls with fake Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, two cell phones tucked into the back of their jeans shorts, and five frogs waiting in their mother’s air-conditioned minivan.
And everyone had frogs on their bodies (frog earrings, frog necklaces, frog t-shirts, hands waving frog flags and frog banners) and frogs on their minds (one woman told me not to use salt when cooking frog legs because the sodium will activate the muscles and the legs will jump right out of the frying pan).
But soon enough, after filling out the paperwork (which includes questions like “Name of Trainer” and “Trainer’s Hometown”), we registered Milton as the 121st bullfrog of the 2011 Springfield Frog Jump and Easter Egg Strike, an annual contest having remarkably persevered now into its 32nd year.
~
When we first arrived in Springfield, we had looked for an official booth—a place we might find information on the history of the contest, or even a place to buy a frog (the answer, ironically: “Some guy on Facebook this morning said he’d be selling 'em”). But there was no such booth. Furthermore, everyone seemed to regard us with a kind of small-town, raised-eyebrow suspicion (especially the waitress at Goodland Barbecue, who looked at me as if I was Julius Rosenberg when I asked her if they sold beer).
Nevermind the fact that I was born and raised and still live in South Carolina. I was beginning to understand that they considered anybody outside of a thirty mile radius (Springfield, Denmark, Aiken, Neeses, Orangeburg) an intruder. Especially, we began to realize, someone like Lee, with her camera strapped around her neck, and me, with my notepad and pen sticking out of the pocket of my shirt.
Eventually, after convincing her that I was not with “the paper in Columbia,” Molly Williams agreed to talk to us. She was with the Garden Club and Country Store—a group of women selling baked goods in a gazebo near the center of the festival—and she had been coming to the Frog Jump her entire life. Someone else had pointed her out as “the lady we need to talk to if we want to know anything about anything.”
Her brother, in fact, had been the boy who won the second frog-jumping contest at the State House grounds in 1968, and who had motioned, along with mayor O.K. Furtick, to move the Governor’s Frog Jump to Springfield the following year. For a long time, she said, “the governor and all the officials had come to the Frog Jump,” but now it was hard to imagine a state politician caring much about it. Our current governor, to give you an idea, was attending the Heritage golf tournament in Hilton Head that weekend, where tournament officials were scrambling over 8 million dollars in order to keep it running the following year.
Here in Springfield, where everything is slower and poorer, the prize is 750 dollars and a sponsored trip with your frog to Calaveras County. For who cannot think of frog-jumping without thinking of Mark Twain’s seminal 1865 short story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—one of the first truly American stories of our national literature? The story is a remarkable example of literary style, with the narrator acting as a sort of informal reporter who sets off, on the suggestion of a friend, to ask “a garrulous old Simon Wheeler” about a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Then Wheeler narrates most of the story, or what the narrator calls the “monotonous narrative which follows,” about Jim Smiley and his frog that could go “whirling in the air like a doughnut.”
The story is a classic of the Southwestern humor genre—full of hyperbole and regional dialect and a trope right out of old native trickster cycles. For Jim Smiley, so cocksure about his frog’s abilities, bets “a feller—a stranger in the camp” that his frog will out-jump any frog he can find. The stranger, of course, sends Jim Smiley off to find another frog, and Simon Wheeler then tells how the stranger “got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail-shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin.” And thus the frog doesn’t jump, the narrator grows tired of listening to Jim Wheeler, and the story comes to an abrupt and interrupted end.
But it is because of this little story that the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog jubilee began in 1928. Now the fair hosts 50,000 visitors each spring—a kind of national championship of frog-jumping. Springfield, one might then conclude, is the state championship of frog-jumping, and it is not hard to envision little regional, backyard contests all over the state. (Nor is it hard, if one keeps thinking in the embellishing fashion of Twain, to imagine the state champion frog riding first-class out to California, getting his legs massaged by the stewardess, ordering a pond-water on the rocks.)
Molly Williams, who was short and squat and dressed in a frog-green blouse, also told us that this was the first year the regular Jump Master was absent. He had “grown up in Springfield but had gone off to Lexington to become a lawyer” and was “sponsoring a baptism” that very afternoon. It was interesting how she said it—not that he had gone off to New York, or even Charleston or Columbia, but to Lexington, South Carolina, as if even that was a sprawling metropolis of corrupt values.
Her brother, however, would still be here running the Egg Strike contest, which was an “art form” he had been preparing for by “roaming the countryside looking for the perfect hen eggs” that he would dye in vinegar. The point of the Egg Strike is to knock your vinegar-dyed hen egg against someone else’s vinegar-dyed hen egg until one of the vinegar-dyed hen eggs breaks. In this year’s contest, the winner of the senior division (Kathy Williams, who beat her son-in-law) beat the winner of the junior division (Daisy Young—Kathy Williams’ granddaughter), with the emcee joking that “Grandma wins every time!”
And even though the Jump Master this year was a rookie, he still arrived to the contest fashionably late in a golf cart, greeted by the heat-muffled applause of the crowd, signaling that the frog-jumping was now ready to begin.
~
A frog jump may not be exactly what you envision. Before I’d done any research, I’d pictured racing lanes, set off by cardboard, on a dirt floor in the kind of open-air structure that you would see at a county fair. But the goal of frog-jumping is not, like swimming or running, about who crosses the finish line first. Frog-jumping is like discus-throwing or javelin-throwing, and is all about the length.
At the Springfield Frog Jump, when it is your turn, you step onto a grassy, fenced-off, rectangular yard that the town has obviously constructed for the contest. On three sides of the fence are wooden bleachers, where spectators sit casually cross-legged, gossiping, enjoying the deep-fried decadence, oohing and aahing, perhaps placing a few five dollar side bets.
When it is your turn, you set your bullfrog on a small, rubber lily-pad. You cannot touch the frog or the pad. You will hear this repeated by the lanky emcee, who walks around and calls out on his cordless microphone, “Don’t touch the frog. Don’t touch the pad. Don’t touch the pad. Don’t touch the frog.”
You can, however, yell at the frog. You can throw grass on the frog. You can pour water on the frog. You can blow on the frog.
And, indeed, anyone you ask will offer some insider advice. The clerk at Kent’s Corner, where we bought three tall cans of Coors Light, told us that you have to keep the frogs in a dark closet for a month before you bring them out. The point, she said, was that the light releases the endorphins, which makes the frogs jump.
The woman who sold us a deep-fried Twinkie told us to put a little hot sauce on Milton’s butt. The man at the boiled peanut stand told us to feed Milton one of his Cajun peanuts. A man standing next to me said you had to hold the frog underwater until it starts kicking, and then you bring it out with its legs already pumping.
And while watching the 120 frogs that came before us (with names like Spongebob, Frogger, Hopper, Peanut Butter, Jelly, etc.), we saw the whole gamut of strategy: wiping the frog off with a towel, pulling on the frog’s legs, kissing the frog, whispering into the frog’s ear, shaking the frog like locked a doorknob.
Because as soon as the frog is placed on the lily pad, it has thirty seconds to jump. The rules allow for the frog to jump three times, including what the emcee repeatedly calls “stutter steps,” before the Jump Master, trailing with a rollout tape measurer, marks the spot of landing and records it on the registration papers.
Some frogs leap immediately. Some don’t budge. Most, after an initial period of hesitation, take off for a modest five to ten yards.
This is not to say, however, that the frog simply stops after three jumps. One of the sheer pleasures of the contest occurs when the frog eludes the young frog-catchers—a gang of athletic twelve year-olds who look like your normal ball boys or bat boys, only more provincial—and wriggles through the fence and into the stands, where the crowd squeals and scatters as if from a fire.
When this happens, the emcee will try to calm everybody down and remind them that “It is only frog, and we don’t want anybody going to the hospital over a little old frog, now do we?” Nevertheless, it happens every fifth frog or so, and each time it produces the same squeals of delightful fear, the same scrambling of the boys under the bleachers.
~
Around 4:30 in the afternoon, after the emcee had already confessed his fatigue and thus been brought a plate of hot fries and a bottle of water, the registration reached triple digits. This meant that Lee, Milton and I were supposed to line up along the gate and wait for our number to be called.
There was no real fanfare for our entrance, and by that point we were exhausted. Still, we had high hopes for Milton. Earlier he had startled me by jumping up and down in his bucket, as if he were ready to take us all the way to California, and I was sure that I had picked an excellent frog.
The emcee announced our names. I took Milton out of the bucket. It was the first time I had held him all day. I squeezed him as tightly as one might squeeze a tennis ball before a serve. I shook him a little bit. Lee patted down his legs with a leftover Subway napkin. I put him on the lily-pad.
He didn’t budge.
I stomped. I yelled. I threw grass. I spit. I prayed. I did all of those things twice.
And still he didn’t budge, as if, indeed, someone had snuck a teaspoon of quail shot into his mouth while we were busy munching on a corndog.
Time was called, and it was a sad mixture of relief and shame. I felt, with the heat and the eyes of the crowd bearing down on me, truly like an outsider. Why hadn’t I stretched his legs a little like I’d seen the young boy do on Youtube? Was Milton simply as tired as we were?
There were no modest five feet for Milton, nor any wriggling through the fence and scaring up the crowd, nor any pampered trip to California.
And it occurred to me later that, yes, of course, Milton’s stubborn refusal was a metaphor for any small town like Springfield, with its annual festivals, where, in the leisurely pace of the pre-noon parade, Mayor Marilyn McCormack will ride past in a white Ford F150, yelling “Hi Y’all!” and throwing candy.
And so we put Milton back in the bucket and shuffled to the car, unsure about what we would do with this bullfrog that, like a child, we loved but were disappointed with. Perhaps we could try to keep him in my mother’s koi pond in Columbia.
It all seemed like Twain’s story, with its abrupt and interrupted end. Even though there were forty more frogs left to jump, I was pretty sure that Frogger had won at 16 feet 11 inches. His trainer was a previous winner and went about the whole thing with a seriousness that we hadn’t prepared for. We were, as I overhead someone else say, plum wore out, and we decided to skip the street dance and the Dirt Road Band.
The drive back to the city was sleepy and beautiful, the flat farmlands stretching out before us. I kept scanning the roadside for ponds that we might release him into, and then we crossed the North Edisto River, and Lee told me to pull off on the shoulder. We walked back down the highway, to the bridge, where I opened up the barbecue bucket, expecting Milton to sit there with his usual complacence. But not now, not this frog.
He finally jumped three times: once out of the bucket and onto my shoulder, again from my shoulder onto the ledge of the bridge, and a third time into the river—a good twenty two or twenty three feet—surely the new, unofficial, never-to-be-broken-again state record.
The Springfield Frog Jump and Easter Egg Strike takes place every Saturday before Easter in the town of Springfield, South Carolina.
The Springfield Frog Jump
Milton was lean and long, roughly the size of a man’s hand, and all afternoon we kept him in an inch of pond water at the bottom of a plastic, lidded, 2-pint Pit Cooked Pork Barbecue bucket with a dime-sized hole in the top for air. I spent half the day in paternal worry—“Was he cool enough?” “Was he hungry? “Was he thirsty?” “Was he angry?” “Was he pumped up?” “Was he still alive?”—and so I would peek through the hole to see Milton squatting there, wide-eyed and patient and surely ready to set the new state record.
We bought him for ten dollars from a clan of country boys that advertised their business by draping--over the hood of their truck--a cardboard sign with green print lettering that simply read, “Frogs For Sale.” I was in the high festival spirit, asking them where they’d caught the frogs, but all I could get in response was a slow, reticent, frog-like belch: “Out…of…ponds.”
And there is, I would learn later, an important and noticeable difference between a pond bullfrog and a North Edisto river bullfrog, with the latter being leaner and darker. But they promised me I’d chosen well—the same size and spritely legs that the oldest man usually “saved for his granddaughters.” And so I’d named him Milton, after the English poet, in a similarly ironic and self-winking fashion as the writer William Price Fox, who on visiting this festival sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, named his frogs “Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.”
So we—me, Milton, and my girlfriend Lee, who had brought along a camera and a remarkable sense of resilience and belonging—waited in line for a half-hour in order to fill out the paperwork and pay the five dollar registration fee. The sun was just beginning to burn off the early cloud cover, making the air heavy with flies and late April heat, and, as usual at any festival, the crowd was proving to be more intriguing than the event. We stood in line, for instance, behind two pre-teens girls with fake Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, two cell phones tucked into the back of their jeans shorts, and five frogs waiting in their mother’s air-conditioned minivan.
And everyone had frogs on their bodies (frog earrings, frog necklaces, frog t-shirts, hands waving frog flags and frog banners) and frogs on their minds (one woman told me not to use salt when cooking frog legs because the sodium will activate the muscles and the legs will jump right out of the frying pan).
But soon enough, after filling out the paperwork (which includes questions like “Name of Trainer” and “Trainer’s Hometown”), we registered Milton as the 121st bullfrog of the 2011 Springfield Frog Jump and Easter Egg Strike, an annual contest having remarkably persevered now into its 32nd year.
~
When we first arrived in Springfield, we had looked for an official booth—a place we might find information on the history of the contest, or even a place to buy a frog (the answer, ironically: “Some guy on Facebook this morning said he’d be selling 'em”). But there was no such booth. Furthermore, everyone seemed to regard us with a kind of small-town, raised-eyebrow suspicion (especially the waitress at Goodland Barbecue, who looked at me as if I was Julius Rosenberg when I asked her if they sold beer).
Nevermind the fact that I was born and raised and still live in South Carolina. I was beginning to understand that they considered anybody outside of a thirty mile radius (Springfield, Denmark, Aiken, Neeses, Orangeburg) an intruder. Especially, we began to realize, someone like Lee, with her camera strapped around her neck, and me, with my notepad and pen sticking out of the pocket of my shirt.
Eventually, after convincing her that I was not with “the paper in Columbia,” Molly Williams agreed to talk to us. She was with the Garden Club and Country Store—a group of women selling baked goods in a gazebo near the center of the festival—and she had been coming to the Frog Jump her entire life. Someone else had pointed her out as “the lady we need to talk to if we want to know anything about anything.”
Her brother, in fact, had been the boy who won the second frog-jumping contest at the State House grounds in 1968, and who had motioned, along with mayor O.K. Furtick, to move the Governor’s Frog Jump to Springfield the following year. For a long time, she said, “the governor and all the officials had come to the Frog Jump,” but now it was hard to imagine a state politician caring much about it. Our current governor, to give you an idea, was attending the Heritage golf tournament in Hilton Head that weekend, where tournament officials were scrambling over 8 million dollars in order to keep it running the following year.
Here in Springfield, where everything is slower and poorer, the prize is 750 dollars and a sponsored trip with your frog to Calaveras County. For who cannot think of frog-jumping without thinking of Mark Twain’s seminal 1865 short story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—one of the first truly American stories of our national literature? The story is a remarkable example of literary style, with the narrator acting as a sort of informal reporter who sets off, on the suggestion of a friend, to ask “a garrulous old Simon Wheeler” about a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Then Wheeler narrates most of the story, or what the narrator calls the “monotonous narrative which follows,” about Jim Smiley and his frog that could go “whirling in the air like a doughnut.”
The story is a classic of the Southwestern humor genre—full of hyperbole and regional dialect and a trope right out of old native trickster cycles. For Jim Smiley, so cocksure about his frog’s abilities, bets “a feller—a stranger in the camp” that his frog will out-jump any frog he can find. The stranger, of course, sends Jim Smiley off to find another frog, and Simon Wheeler then tells how the stranger “got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail-shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin.” And thus the frog doesn’t jump, the narrator grows tired of listening to Jim Wheeler, and the story comes to an abrupt and interrupted end.
But it is because of this little story that the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog jubilee began in 1928. Now the fair hosts 50,000 visitors each spring—a kind of national championship of frog-jumping. Springfield, one might then conclude, is the state championship of frog-jumping, and it is not hard to envision little regional, backyard contests all over the state. (Nor is it hard, if one keeps thinking in the embellishing fashion of Twain, to imagine the state champion frog riding first-class out to California, getting his legs massaged by the stewardess, ordering a pond-water on the rocks.)
Molly Williams, who was short and squat and dressed in a frog-green blouse, also told us that this was the first year the regular Jump Master was absent. He had “grown up in Springfield but had gone off to Lexington to become a lawyer” and was “sponsoring a baptism” that very afternoon. It was interesting how she said it—not that he had gone off to New York, or even Charleston or Columbia, but to Lexington, South Carolina, as if even that was a sprawling metropolis of corrupt values.
Her brother, however, would still be here running the Egg Strike contest, which was an “art form” he had been preparing for by “roaming the countryside looking for the perfect hen eggs” that he would dye in vinegar. The point of the Egg Strike is to knock your vinegar-dyed hen egg against someone else’s vinegar-dyed hen egg until one of the vinegar-dyed hen eggs breaks. In this year’s contest, the winner of the senior division (Kathy Williams, who beat her son-in-law) beat the winner of the junior division (Daisy Young—Kathy Williams’ granddaughter), with the emcee joking that “Grandma wins every time!”
And even though the Jump Master this year was a rookie, he still arrived to the contest fashionably late in a golf cart, greeted by the heat-muffled applause of the crowd, signaling that the frog-jumping was now ready to begin.
~
A frog jump may not be exactly what you envision. Before I’d done any research, I’d pictured racing lanes, set off by cardboard, on a dirt floor in the kind of open-air structure that you would see at a county fair. But the goal of frog-jumping is not, like swimming or running, about who crosses the finish line first. Frog-jumping is like discus-throwing or javelin-throwing, and is all about the length.
At the Springfield Frog Jump, when it is your turn, you step onto a grassy, fenced-off, rectangular yard that the town has obviously constructed for the contest. On three sides of the fence are wooden bleachers, where spectators sit casually cross-legged, gossiping, enjoying the deep-fried decadence, oohing and aahing, perhaps placing a few five dollar side bets.
When it is your turn, you set your bullfrog on a small, rubber lily-pad. You cannot touch the frog or the pad. You will hear this repeated by the lanky emcee, who walks around and calls out on his cordless microphone, “Don’t touch the frog. Don’t touch the pad. Don’t touch the pad. Don’t touch the frog.”
You can, however, yell at the frog. You can throw grass on the frog. You can pour water on the frog. You can blow on the frog.
And, indeed, anyone you ask will offer some insider advice. The clerk at Kent’s Corner, where we bought three tall cans of Coors Light, told us that you have to keep the frogs in a dark closet for a month before you bring them out. The point, she said, was that the light releases the endorphins, which makes the frogs jump.
The woman who sold us a deep-fried Twinkie told us to put a little hot sauce on Milton’s butt. The man at the boiled peanut stand told us to feed Milton one of his Cajun peanuts. A man standing next to me said you had to hold the frog underwater until it starts kicking, and then you bring it out with its legs already pumping.
And while watching the 120 frogs that came before us (with names like Spongebob, Frogger, Hopper, Peanut Butter, Jelly, etc.), we saw the whole gamut of strategy: wiping the frog off with a towel, pulling on the frog’s legs, kissing the frog, whispering into the frog’s ear, shaking the frog like locked a doorknob.
Because as soon as the frog is placed on the lily pad, it has thirty seconds to jump. The rules allow for the frog to jump three times, including what the emcee repeatedly calls “stutter steps,” before the Jump Master, trailing with a rollout tape measurer, marks the spot of landing and records it on the registration papers.
Some frogs leap immediately. Some don’t budge. Most, after an initial period of hesitation, take off for a modest five to ten yards.
This is not to say, however, that the frog simply stops after three jumps. One of the sheer pleasures of the contest occurs when the frog eludes the young frog-catchers—a gang of athletic twelve year-olds who look like your normal ball boys or bat boys, only more provincial—and wriggles through the fence and into the stands, where the crowd squeals and scatters as if from a fire.
When this happens, the emcee will try to calm everybody down and remind them that “It is only frog, and we don’t want anybody going to the hospital over a little old frog, now do we?” Nevertheless, it happens every fifth frog or so, and each time it produces the same squeals of delightful fear, the same scrambling of the boys under the bleachers.
~
Around 4:30 in the afternoon, after the emcee had already confessed his fatigue and thus been brought a plate of hot fries and a bottle of water, the registration reached triple digits. This meant that Lee, Milton and I were supposed to line up along the gate and wait for our number to be called.
There was no real fanfare for our entrance, and by that point we were exhausted. Still, we had high hopes for Milton. Earlier he had startled me by jumping up and down in his bucket, as if he were ready to take us all the way to California, and I was sure that I had picked an excellent frog.
The emcee announced our names. I took Milton out of the bucket. It was the first time I had held him all day. I squeezed him as tightly as one might squeeze a tennis ball before a serve. I shook him a little bit. Lee patted down his legs with a leftover Subway napkin. I put him on the lily-pad.
He didn’t budge.
I stomped. I yelled. I threw grass. I spit. I prayed. I did all of those things twice.
And still he didn’t budge, as if, indeed, someone had snuck a teaspoon of quail shot into his mouth while we were busy munching on a corndog.
Time was called, and it was a sad mixture of relief and shame. I felt, with the heat and the eyes of the crowd bearing down on me, truly like an outsider. Why hadn’t I stretched his legs a little like I’d seen the young boy do on Youtube? Was Milton simply as tired as we were?
There were no modest five feet for Milton, nor any wriggling through the fence and scaring up the crowd, nor any pampered trip to California.
And it occurred to me later that, yes, of course, Milton’s stubborn refusal was a metaphor for any small town like Springfield, with its annual festivals, where, in the leisurely pace of the pre-noon parade, Mayor Marilyn McCormack will ride past in a white Ford F150, yelling “Hi Y’all!” and throwing candy.
And so we put Milton back in the bucket and shuffled to the car, unsure about what we would do with this bullfrog that, like a child, we loved but were disappointed with. Perhaps we could try to keep him in my mother’s koi pond in Columbia.
It all seemed like Twain’s story, with its abrupt and interrupted end. Even though there were forty more frogs left to jump, I was pretty sure that Frogger had won at 16 feet 11 inches. His trainer was a previous winner and went about the whole thing with a seriousness that we hadn’t prepared for. We were, as I overhead someone else say, plum wore out, and we decided to skip the street dance and the Dirt Road Band.
The drive back to the city was sleepy and beautiful, the flat farmlands stretching out before us. I kept scanning the roadside for ponds that we might release him into, and then we crossed the North Edisto River, and Lee told me to pull off on the shoulder. We walked back down the highway, to the bridge, where I opened up the barbecue bucket, expecting Milton to sit there with his usual complacence. But not now, not this frog.
He finally jumped three times: once out of the bucket and onto my shoulder, again from my shoulder onto the ledge of the bridge, and a third time into the river—a good twenty two or twenty three feet—surely the new, unofficial, never-to-be-broken-again state record.
The Springfield Frog Jump and Easter Egg Strike takes place every Saturday before Easter in the town of Springfield, South Carolina.