
DATE: Sunday, May 25, 1997                  TAG: 9705250045

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   90 lines

READY, SET -- SUMMER!: LOCALS IN A FESTIVE MOOD

Ben King lived here for two decades before he moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida several years ago. But on vacation to his hometown, he still subscribes to the customs of this resort city.

Come Memorial Day weekend, the Beach gives over its beaches to the tourists. And the locals head to beautiful downtown Pungo to eat strawberries.

Which is why King, his wife, Kimberly, and their two children were standing under the canopy of a Davis Farm Produce tent Saturday afternoon munching the juicy red berries and smiling delightedly at a fresh treat they'd been too long without.

``We've really been looking forward to this,'' Ben King said.

The Kings were among a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd clotting Princess Anne Road on Saturday for the 14th annual Pungo Strawberry Festival. Organizers expect more than 120,000 people to have turned out by the time the festival concludes today. They plan to donate the net proceeds, which last year totaled $32,000, to community-service organizations.

In a weekend packed full of local events, including A Faire for the Arts in Portsmouth and the Afr'AM Fest in Norfolk, Pungo's stands out as unabashedly unrefined.

This gateway to Virginia Beach's dwindling agricultural community gives over its main street to people who sell paper-towel racks painted with daisies, play songs like ``The Electric Slide,'' and proudly show off the latest in farm equipment and monster trucks.

And festivalgoers eat it up.

Speaking of which, one musn't forget the strawberries.

Choose your confection, from shortcakes to sundaes, and you can have it with strawberries - then wash it down with a strawberry-flavored lemonade.

A daiquiri instead? Sure.

But hold the rum. Festival organizers won't allow alcohol to be served, and even Pungo's 7-Eleven shuts down its beer case during the event.

Call him old-fashioned. But Jake Jacocks, a Virginia Beach police captain who's serving his third year as the festival's volunteer chairman, said alcohol and family fun simply don't mix.

Jacocks, decked out in a strawberry-red golf shirt, is one of a long line of festival organizers who have been happily unswayed by opportunities to make their festival ``big time.''

They said no when beer companies dangled lucrative sponsorships that would help pay for big-name entertainers. And they said no when some city officials proposed several years ago to move the whole festival to the Boardwalk to give tourists another entertainment option.

``It would take away from the country atmosphere of the festival,'' Jacocks explained.

Nope, this festival belongs to Pungo, still stubbornly rural in its outlook while ``civilization,'' in the form of shopping centers and quick-dry housing developments, keeps marching toward it.

The only big worry Jacocks had this year was the weather. ``We don't use the `R' word around here,'' he said, happily pointing to the cloudless sky.

The weather was, of course, the strawberry growers' main concern, too.

Dean Davis, owner of Davis Farm Produce, said the last few years have been terrible for local growers.

``Last year, I lost $17,000 on strawberries. The year before, hail hit us, and I lost $40,000 in two minutes - my whole crop,'' he said.

This year's cooler-than-normal spring set the start of his strawberry-picking back to May 16, almost a month later than usual. And the May 1 hailstorm, though it missed his farm, worried him half to death. ``If we had hail like they had up around Windsor,'' he said, ``I'd have been wiped out.''

Instead, he's harvesting sweet, plump berries - 3,500 quarts alone for the festival.

On Saturday, they flew off his makeshift wooden counter at $2.50 a quart - and right into the tummies of folks like little Christopher and Caitlyn King.

The two of them, ages 5 and 3, were tossing berries like popcorn into their mouths. As their mother Kimberly explained, they came by their infatuation honestly.

``The whole time I was pregnant with them,'' she giggled lovingly, ``I craved strawberries. I just couldn't get enough of them.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

GARY C. KNAPP

The Virginia Beach Fire Department's monster fire truck was a big

part of the Pungo Strawberry Festival parade Saturday.

Color photo

L. TODD SPENCER

Edgar A. Reims sits with his paintings as people admire the artwork

at A Faire for the Arts in Portsmouth.

GARY C. KNAPP

John Lennon - better known as Tim Beasley - put in an appearance at

the Pungo event. Beasley got quite a bit of attention, including one

5-year-old who told his mother, ``Look, it's one of the Monkees.''