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Bananas for Spider spirit

The phrase “creative thinking” took on new meaning when Spiders in the 1970s attempted to build the world’s largest banana split — and later the largest sub sandwich — inside the Robins Center.

After the Robins Center was built in 1972, one question was how it could be used for student life besides basketball games. In March 1974, the University Student Union had an answer: Host the construction of the world’s largest indoor banana split.

Ty Braswell, R’76 led the charge. “There was a priority to see how to engage the student population not just during the week but also on the weekend,” he said. “The administration wanted students to think outside the box.”

The 600-foot banana split was just one of the ways students thought outside the box. It was the penultimate event for three days of social activities ranging from an all-night dance party to a mudslide, which USU organized with Braswell serving as chair of events. The first-ever event of its kind, they called it Dutch Chaos Weekend for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Richard Mateer, dean of students and eventually of Richmond College, led the administrative side of it. Using donated ingredients, including 800 pounds of bananas from Chiquita, the banana split was constructed in 21 minutes and consumed by the community in about 17 minutes.

It didn’t break the Guinness world record, but it didn’t break students’ spirits either. The next year, Braswell planned the construction of the world’s largest submarine sandwich for 1975’s repeat weekend.

The university empowered students to have “creative courage,” as Braswell described it.

The 796-foot sandwich tested the limits of students’ ingenuity. For the bread, they borrowed an oven that could bake 40-foot loaves from a local bakery and transported those loaves via tractor-trailer trucks. To connect the loaves, they cut off the ends of each one, added more dough, and baked the segments using an infrared oven designed by the chemistry department.

Despite their efforts, the sandwich was unfortunately also not Guinness-worthy. Still, these events showed how the university empowered students to have “creative courage,” as Braswell described it.

“[The weekends showed] the sheer delight of people trying stuff, and if it didn’t work, not giving up,” he said. “We didn’t fail. We learned, and the university was 200% behind us.”