Building A Name Cookie-Piling Contest Tests Kids’ Steadiness, Patience - And Stacks Up Well As Promotion For Oreos

Sun., May 24, 1998

Luke Timmerman Staff writer

Some leaned like the Tower of Pisa.

Others stood with the posture of skyscraping architectural marvels.

It was pretty impressive considering the building blocks were Nabisco’s iconic concoction of cookies made of sugar, enriched wheat flour, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cocoa and nine other ingredients.

One by one, kids filtering into the Valley Wal-Mart on Saturday were attracted to the table for the nationwide promotion, a sweet snack and a shot at glory. Two pallets containing 108,120 cookies were impossible to ignore.

The rules were simple. Stack as many Oreos as possible in a single steady pile in 30 seconds, without holding the pile for balance. Towers had to stand for at least 3 seconds. Cheaters couldn’t get away with much.

“Some of the kids treat this like a science,” said Dennis Standbridge, Wal-Mart food department manager.

Kids in two age groups, under 7 and 8-12, were vying for the top 10 spots in the West region, which would give them a trip to Universal Studios Florida. The nationwide grand prize is a $20,000 college scholarship.

With chunks of cookies wedged between their teeth, most contestants couldn’t have cared less what was at stake.

Olivia Hammond took it seriously. The 5-year-old Post Falls girl had a rapid-fire, two-hand stacking style in the beginning, but a quick fall taught her to slow down and focus on balance. She ended with 14.

Some of the best stacks stood 20 or 21 cookies high, or about 16 inches.

Mac Martin, a Spokane 10-year-old, had big ideas about taking the lead. His pile of 20 cookies came tantalizingly close, but it crashed with a couple of seconds on the clock.

Balance was the key, and his intuition told him that it wasn’t quite going to make it.

“It just fell down,” Martin said. “But I had a lot of them there.”

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