In the spirit of town-gown relations, (Grinnell) Mayor Bob Anderson acted as the city’s ambassador to Big Sandwich Night festivities on Cowles Hall’s second floor on the Grinnell College campus Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1994.
What, you ask, is Big Sandwich Night? What it boils down to is equal parts ritual, fellowship and big-time eating.
Seniors Seth Bernsen, Zack Steven and Karl Johnson and junior Brent Dexter originated the weekly feast. Since the beginning of the fall semester, those four and a growing group of converts have met Wednesdays at 10 p.m., traveled to purchase supplies, then chowed their sandwiches in the hallway of Cowles second.
And what constitutes a big sandwich? It all starts with Hy-Vee’s three-for-99-cents loaf bread. A loaf is halved lengthwise, and the doughy center is scooped out (Anderson said, “They make a ball of the bread. They pass it around and make a big ball out of the centers.”), then replaced with sandwich fillings like vegetables, meat and cheese.
“There are a couple of traditions that happen at Big Sandwich Night,” said Johnson. One tradition, he said, is the tossing of the lettuce at Hy-Vee. Everyone has to touch the lettuce before it goes into the shopping cart. It gets tossed from person to person before going in the cart, so the mayor was throwing lettuce out at Hy-Vee.
Another tradition is that the same check-out person (known to the group only as “the Big Sandwich Checker”) handles the register for the crowd each week.
Bernsen, Steven and Johnson planned last semester to live together, and during one planning session, Bernsen was eating a big sandwich. The other two asked what it was, and he told them about Hy-Vee’s bread special. “We said, ‘Next year, every Wednesday night is going to be Big Sandwich Night,’” Johnson said.
Although the three didn’t wind up living together, the oath stuck. With Dexter, they have been meeting since the first week of the semester. The crowd has grown from four to the 20s, where it hovered before break, the time Anderson visited.
“The first time, we all did what’s called ‘slamming it home,’” Johnson said, “which is when you eat the entire sandwich.”
“Whenever someone’s about to finish, we start clapping, and the clapping gets faster and faster and faster till they pop the last piece into their mouth to wild applause,” Johnson said. “Every week we try to maximize the number of people who slam it home. This past week, there were 14 people.”
Was the mayor among them? “No he wasn’t,” confessed Johnson. “He was very optimistic, though. He was trying for it.”
If you seek deeper significance in seemingly ordinary events like Big Sandwich Night, you need look no further than the first tradition the Big Sandwich crowd encounters each Wednesday — the Big Sandwich Message that they hear before entering Hy-Vee to shop. Johnson said,
