Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 24, 1990 TAG: 9007240103
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM AUCHMUTEY COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: PLANO, TEXAS LENGTH: Medium
One wall of the store in suburban Dallas is the stuff of nightmares, with scorpions and fire ants and brown recluse spiders frozen in Lucite. The back room has an aquarium crawling with Madagascar hissing roaches, who make a sound like an aerosol spray can when touched.
But the oddest sight is the floor. It's covered with dead roaches - big ones - some arranged in slapstick scenes worthy of a Raid commercial: three roaches at a microphone like a doo-wop act, a bug spray-painted gold and labeled "Roach Broach," a roach on a tiny boat in a bowl of cream, with the lyrics Row, row, row your roach, gently through the cream, verily, verily, verily, verily, life is but a scream.
This real-life roach motel is where entries go for the Great American Roach-Off, the fourth annual search for the world's largest American roach. Since organizers of this insect Super Bowl have added a category for best presentation, people are doing everything but teaching their roaches to tap dance.
"I hear we have a version of the Last Supper coming in, with 12 dead roaches posed at a table," says the shop's proprietor, Michael Bohdan, who conceived the contest. "I hope no one will be offended."
Probably no more than are offended by the idea of adults stalking roaches, gently killing them (no squishing) and mailing the crunchy little corpses to a Texan who measures them, head to wing tip, with a digital micrometer.
"It's like a beauty contest in reverse," says Sally Love, director of the Smithsonian Institution's insect zoo. "You can't beat roaches, so you might as well take a sick pride in their size."
The Smithsonian showed its sick pride by hosting the first roach awards ceremony in 1987, at which the munchies included bittersweet chocolates shaped like you-know-what. The winner - a 2-incher from New York City - was enshrined as if it were a moon rock.
The roach-off skittered from the same well of American boosterism that holds women are prettier in Mississippi, apples are tastier in Virginia and business is better in Georgia. In this case, the culprit is that old brag about things being bigger in Texas.
As Bohdan tells it, exterminators are like fishers, always talking about some lunker that escaped behind the baseboard and must've been the size of a baby's shoe. He was standing in line at a post office a few years ago when he noticed a wanted poster. The spirit of Barnum siezed him: What if boosterism and professional bluster were joined in a contest? Wanted: Dallas's Largest Cockroach.
As soon as Bohdan rented billboards to announce the competition, the novelty-loving national media were on the story like, well, stink on a roach.
The contest drew special attention in Florida, where roaches known as palmetto bugs inhabit everything from orange groves to rental cars. Outraged that Texas would claim bigger bugs, Orlando Sentinel columnist Bob Morris asked readers to send their whoppers. The winner, at more than 2 inches, came from a woodpile in Apopka. It was christened Longfellow, enthroned on a red wagon and declared grand marshal of the Queen Kumquat Sashay, a takeoff on the Citrus Bowl parade.
"To this day, pathetic, deranged people still send me a roach or two a month," Morris says. "I'll be going along having a nice day, opening my mail, and out comes a cockroach. I never want anything to do with cockroaches again."
This year's winner will be announced Sept. 25. The first three annual winners included a Floridian and two from New York.
by CNB