This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Here's a question: What do you call a line of 3,841 Utahns wearing bunny ears and hopping in unison?
A. Crazy
B. Saturday night at Donny Osmond's house
C. A new world record
As the proud folks in Delta will tell you, the correct answer is C. Residents of the west desert town learned this month that they'll be featured in the 2009 edition of the Guinness World Records book, out this fall. The category: "Largest Bunny Hop."
Didn't think people keep records on this kind of stuff, did you?
It all started early last year when Delta community leaders, looking for a special event to commemorate the city's centennial, decided to take aim at the world bunny hop record, set in 2006 by 1,880 people in Lake Geneva, Wis. Organizers chose the bunny in honor of Delta High School, whose mascot is the rabbit. (Not the most fearsome animal to name your football team after, but hey, the track team must love it.)
Organizers set the hop - essentially, a conga line of people hopping along to the '50s novelty hit, "The Bunny Hop" - for the morning of Delta's annual Fourth of July parade, when many former residents return to town to take part in the festivities.
"We knew that would be our best chance to get a lot of people here," said Bonnie Shamo, chair of the Delta Centennial Committee. She submitted an application last spring to the people at Guinness, who approved the attempt under the following conditions: 1) organizers document the hop with photos and video, 2) participants hop for at least five minutes, and 3) they wear rabbit ears.
Uh, okay. So Shamo went online and ordered 3,000 sets of paper bunny ears. They looked sort of like the Burger King paper crowns and said, "Happy Easter" on them, but oh, well. The committee also printed hundreds of T-shirts that said, "I Hopped on the Fourth of July."
Two days before the Big Hop, however, only 1,500 people had signed up. Folks must have just been waiting until the last minute, because by the next evening another thousand-plus stragglers had registered and Shamo had run out of bunny ears.
The morning of July 4, Delta closed its Main Street and invited everyone on hand to line up behind the school's rabbit mascot. Organizers parked cars along the street, tuned their radios to KNAK (540 AM) and cranked up the volume as the station broadcast the "Bunny Hop" song. Each hopper placed his or her hands on the shoulders of the hopper in front of them, forming a line that stretched for seven blocks through the heart of town.
A few grizzled ranchers balked at first but after some coaxing agreed to channel their inner wascally wabbits. Some tourists from Florida, passing through town on a Western road trip, even joined in.
"A lot of people jumped in who thought they wouldn't," Shamo said. "People were just laughing. It really drew our community together."
Participants ranged in age from about 7 to 70, but nobody got hurt. Some people hopped earless, but, fortunately, Guinness let that slide.
"I was tired by the time it was over," said Delta Mayor Gayle Bunker. But like everyone else in town, he's pretty tickled about Delta hopping its way into the record books. "It was amazing. I haven't people [here] get so excited about anything in a long time."