Banana Miscellanea

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Floral Decoration for Bananas

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won’t do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched...
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

—Wallace Stevens

Eat The Banana

This article originally appeared in the Tampa Tribune in 1982.

Words to Live By from Al McGuire

By Tom McEwen
Tribune Sports Editor

      Now hear these declarations:
      • Ralph Sampson of Virginia will displace Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the greatest of basketball players.
      • Virginia is the best team in the country right now and should win it all.
      • The upset of Virginia by Hawaii’s Chaminade came in large part because Virginia came from Japan, against the clock, a mortal sin.
      • Recuiting violations are not so widely spread as is believed.
      • After five years, if a new contract is negotiated, the coach should have some kind of tenure.
      • There is too much college basketball on television, so much it could be ruinous.
      • Two nights a week should have no college basketball on television, to protect the high school programs
      • Rules should be uniform, and not gimmicky.
      • Don't forget to eat the banana.
      Such were the points slam-dunked by a former national champion coach turned television commentator over lunch and afterwards noon Tuesday.
      Such were the fastbreak opinions of Al McGuire, the visible, hyper, imaginative, successful ex-coach of Marquette University, now a lead college basketball commentator for NBC.
      McGuire was the speaker the Miller Brewing Company flew in to address a press-players-coaches luncheon Tuesday at the Green jacket room in the Sun Dome, where Tuesday night the Miller High Life Classic began before a good crowd. It continues tonight.
      McGuire charmed the standing-room-only audience with his mixture of wit and wisdom, woven neatly into his brief talk. He charged the players from the four participating teams to live for the moment, to dive for the ball, and if “you do not get it, come up with a strawberry on your forehead.”

      He told them to “eat the banana,” or, grab the moment. Go fishing when you can, for a trout or for a marlin, but go.
      Eat the banana, like he did not do once, he said.
      It was a story of his childhood when his grandmother fixed him a fried tripe sandwich and then offered him a big banana. Though he wanted it, he turned it down because he wanted to return to the beach near his home on Long Island and body surf some more. The banana might be too filling. At the beach the weather had turned windy and cold. He could not swim.
      “I should have eaten the banana,” he philosophized.
      “Eat the banana. Enjoy the moment. Make no excuses for what happens.”
      He said he discovered that in his youth.
      “I’m from New York City. If you fall down, I pick you up by your wallet.
      “Play hard. Play hard from the start. Don’t wait. A writer told Joe Louis once after he had won 16 fights in a row that he was going to lose someday.
      “ ‘Yes,’ said Joe, ‘but not tonight.’
      “Never lose tonight. Never think you will lose tonight.”
      McGuire wowed the audience.
      And now, he said, he takes time, as everyone should... to eat the banana.

Al McGuire

This article originally appeared in Sports Illustrated
many years ago, exact date unknown.

FRUITFUL ENDEAVORS

Addressing a recent conference of the Boys’ Clubs of America, Raier Marens, a sports psychology professor at the University of Illinois and director of the Office of Youth Sports in Urbana, Illinois, offered his views on the value of awards in sports programs. Given the choice, Marens asserted, children overwhelmingly prefer to play on a team that’s a loser, rather than to sit on the bench of a winner. And he fears that rewards such as excessive praise, medals, trophies and trips to faraway places can undermine this desire to participate, win or lose.
“I’ve seen 8-year-olds at wrestling matches wearing so many medals they can barely stand up,” he said. Instead of trophies and medals, Marens suggested bananas. “If you leave a banana on the mantle three or four days, you know what happens to it. So you’re best off to eat the banana when you get it. That’s my message.”

A Short History of Bananas

(Coming Soon)

Old Banana Postcards

(Coming Soon)

The International Banana Festival in Fulton, Kentucky

International Banana Festival

The small town of Fulton, in western Kentucky right on the southern border of Kentucky and the northern border of Tennessee, used to have a big (for a small town) International Banana Festival every year. Why Fulton, you ask? Because a long time ago before everything went by air or trucks on the Interstates, Fulton was a major crossroads where trains came through loading, unloading, and transfering the majority of bananas that came into the U.S., bound for the breakfast tables and lunch sacks of hungry Americans all over the country.

The festival was a typically great small-town event with a parade and a Festival Princess, art exhibits, amusement park rides, and the centerpiece of the parade and the whole festival, a gigantic clear plastic container holding a one-ton banana pudding. The parade ended in a city park and the pudding was served to long lines of people. Representatives from both Chiquita and Dole handed out thousands of bananas on the streets for free, everyone in sight was either eating a banana or had one in their hand, and a good time was had by all. The festival was an annual event for thirty years but sadly eventually went the way of a lot of small-town America and faded away, the last event being held in 1992.

For a page full of pictures taken at the 1981 festival, click the little magic banana:

Bibliography

(Coming Soon)

Banana Recipes

(Coming Soon)

Miscellaneaous

I have no idea what newspaper this very old photo and article
originally appeared in. Judging from the picture my guess is it
dates from the 1940s.

“A BUNCH OF BANANAS”

A new organization has been formed in New York called the “Order of the Bananas.” Its members comprise men of every line of endeavor and all that is necessary for membership is a sense of humor. The lodges are called “plantations” and the members are known as “The Bunch.”
Here are officials of the new club, at the “Shrine of the Banana.” Left to right: George Clark, secty.; Frank E. Campbell, President. He is incidentally an undertaker, with a sense of humor; Henry Brenwasser, treas. and seated, Roy Sly, Sergt. at Arms. All are of New York.

Life is like a banana.

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