June 22, 2007

By GREG JOHNSON

Frontiersman

ROBERT DeBERRY/Frontiersman Palmer Job Corp student Michael Phillips attempts to balance an egg on end as Jomel Dizon looks on. Phillips and Dizon are part of a group of students that balanced nine eggs on end as an experiement for the summer solstice.

By proving an urban myth, Alaska Job Corps teacher Stan Colegrove became a shell of the man he once was.

Colegrove has off-again, on-again tried to prove a raw egg could be stood on its end on the longest day of the year - the spring equinox. Until Thursday, the 49-year Alaska resident had no success.

“I had tried this before,” Colegrove said. “So, I Googled it this year and [he learned] the solstice was at 2:06 p.m. eastern standard time, so I took that to mean 10:06 a.m. Alaska time.”

Timing makes all the difference.

Colegrove and his students began trying to stand an egg on end at about 9 a.m. Thursday, but every one would fall over. Then, at 10:06, the first egg stood.

Then another.

Then another.

Soon the class had three quarters of a dozen eggs standing guard on the pavement at the school in Palmer. The nine eggs were still standing at press time late Thursday evening.

Other students and staff at the school though Colegrove was playing a trick on them, that the eggs were either hard-boiled or cracked on the bottom, he said.

“Nobody believed it,” Colegrove said. “A lot of the young kids had never heard of [standing and egg] and a lot of the staff didn't believe it.”

Program assistant Annette Chvastasz was one of the nonbelievers. Having lived all her life in Alaska, where residents pay more attention to the solstice than those in the Lower 48, she had never heard the urban myth about balancing an egg.

“I honestly thought it was a trick until they moved an egg afterward and it wouldn't work again,” she said. “I'd never heard about it ... but they're still standing. It is so crazy.”

Having tried intermittently over the years without getting an egg to stand, Colegrove recognized an opportunity to make learning fun for his students.

“I told them and said, ‘OK, let's go today and try to stand an egg on end,'” he said. “We could've done a hundred of them, but we just put nine up.

“Just because I'm always teaching students, I just talk trivia to [them] all the time. I told them you could balance an egg today and they said, ‘no way.' We got it at that time, 10:06, almost to the minute. We tried to balance it 30 minutes later and we couldn't do it again.”

The students “were absolutely blown away by it,” he said. “It was great to see young students who really thought it was really neat. It was a wonderful learning day.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or call 352-2268.