Easter bunnies by the dozens toiled away all day Saturday in Charlie Keller's backyard to get 25,000 eggs ready for the Easter Egg Hunt the following day at Governor's Field.
These Easter bunnies, many also coincidentally members of the Carson City Junior Chamber of Commerce - Jaycees for short - manned huge pots and dying vats for some six hours to transform normal white eggs into colorful, even magical eggs.
Twenty specially marked eggs were magical enough for kids to cash in for a bicycle. Ormsby House General Manager Bob Cashell donated the 20 bikes, which were this year's grand prize.
Hundreds of other eggs won their possessors baskets filled with some 600 pounds of chocolate. Another 500-600 eggs got the child a certificate to a local restaurant.
"It will be the largest Easter Egg hunt west of the Mississippi, to our knowledge," Carson City Jaycees President Mark Jacoby said. "With 25,000 eggs, we have the largest Easter Egg hunt of all the 800 or 900 Jaycees in the country."
The Jaycees got a deal from Smith's Food and Drug to buy eggs for 37 cents a dozen. The Easter Egg hunt costs the Jaycees about $4,000 with some $3,700 raised by the time the kids were let loose on the eggs.
The labor intensive activity of the weekend was boiling, coloring and distributing the eggs. Before then already, Jaycees John Daines and Wendy Keller-Smith had delegated duties for recruiting prizes and boiling and dying duties for the 40 members of the Carson City Jaycees.
Some 80 volunteers put in six hours Saturday at the Easter Egg factory in Keller's yard. This included 30 Jaycees, five students from the Carson Middle School Honor Society and eight members of the Keystone Club at the Boys and Girls Club of Western Nevada
Fifteen to 20 dozen eggs at one time were put into chicken wire baskets by the Keystone Club kids and then boiled in eight huge pots, some owned by the Jaycees, some borrowed from the Nevada Air National Guard.
"I'm 6-6 and 350 pounds and I can fit in those pots," Jacoby said.
Once the eggs were hard-boiled, they headed to the three or four 33-gallon trash cans. No, they weren't getting thrown away. The trash cans served as dying vats.
Eggs were dyed blue, red, yellow, green, purple, peach and brown or a mix of two. How did three or four trash cans handle seven colors? All the eggs destined for one color were dyed and then a new color was put in the can.
Jaycees and other volunteers 120 strong headed out early Sunday for the grueling task of placing 25,000 eggs on the playing fields at Governor's Field. The grass had not been mowed in a while so eggs vanished at a distance, at least giving the illusion of a hunt for hidden eggs.
"It takes about five hours to spread the eggs out and four minutes for the kids to pick them up," Jacoby said.
The Carson City Jaycees have put on the local Easter Egg Hunt for 24 years.
"I think what we're missing today is tradition," Jacoby said. "What we've done here for 24 years is continue a tradition."
