An A-Peeling Display of Lunacy

Isuppose one might describe members of Ken Bannister’s club as a fun-loving bunch.

Bannister, 56, is Top Banana in the International Banana Club and curator of the Banana Museum in Altadena, which houses a boatload of banana-ania--banana ears, a banana umbrella, a plastic banana split, a sequined banana, a banana yo-yo.

One of the first things Bannister wants you to know about himself is that he’s “mentally stable. To a lot of people, the word bananas means ‘a little touched.’ ” As in “going bananas.”

Another is that he’s not going to bore you with banana jokes. “There aren’t any funny banana jokes.”

He’s serious about all this? Well, Bannister says, seated on a banana-yellow vinyl sofa near a desk lighted by a banana lamp and equipped with a banana stapler, banana pens and a banana phone, “The Banana Club is essentially an attitude adjustment device. People don’t smile enough these days.”

And, hey, if you hold a banana just so, he points out, it is a smile.

Bannister, in real life a sales rep for companies that sell professional photographic equipment, spends 15 to 20 hours a week directing his banana republic from his storefront museum--the world’s only banana museum, he notes--and corresponding with Banana Club members.

He tallies 8,700 members, about half of whom have actually paid the $10 lifetime membership fee. They’ve sent him banana-shaped sponges, banana slippers, banana car wax, banana toothbrushes, banana earrings, banana popcorn. And--the item he most treasures--a petrified banana, black and shriveled, mounted impressively on a wooden plaque. “It’s 15 years old,” Bannister says reverently.

He stopped counting at 16,000 contributions.

Now, Bannister didn’t just wake up one day and say, “I’m going to start the world’s largest banana collection.” It began in 1972 when his secretary, who was married to a stevedore, presented him with a big roll of banana stickers that had arrived with a Dole shipment. “Ken,” she said, “you’d know what to do with these. . . .”

For laughs, he handed them out at a trade show. Before long, people began calling him the “banana man.” Then, “People started sending me all this stuff.”

In 1980, he opened the doors (by appointment only, [900] BANANAS), to the Banana Museum. “Before that, [the collection] was split--no pun intended--between my home in Arcadia and my office in Fountain Valley.”

After 23 years, he has yet to figure out what it is about bananas that fascinates. Maybe, he reasons, it’s that cheerful color. Or maybe it’s that the banana “is the first fruit you eat when you come into the world, and the last fruit you eat.”

Maybe Maria Milia, 13, of Athens, Greece (one of 21 countries in the Banana Club network), summed it up best in a recent letter to Bannister: “I haven’t heard about anything so strange. . . . How can I become a member?”

He has just opened a package from member Jeanette Grzeszczak, 32, a hairdresser in Holbrook, N.Y. It includes a banana-shaped canteen, banana jelly beans and a recipe for ham and bananas with hollandaise sauce.

An imaginative selection. “I’ll give her 75 banana merits for these,” he decides. That means she’ll be only 25 banana merits shy of earning her master’s degree in bananistry. Bannister confers these degrees as much by whim as by worthiness: “Anything that’s sent, I decide how much it’s worth. If they don’t agree with my figure, I just give them what they want.”

A doctorate in bananistry (500 banana merits) carries with it an impressive golden medal on black-and-yellow grosgrain. “I used to wear one on airplanes and people would wonder, ‘Who is this guy? What did he do?’ ” Bannister says.

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Membership entitles one to carry a banana-yellow ID card and to choose a title. “Any title they want,” Bannister says, “so long as it’s not lewd, crude or lascivious.”

In the Bannister family, “Right after they are baptized, we give them a banana title,” he says. Sunday, grandson Kyle Erickson of Thousand Oaks will become “Grandson Banana III.”

There’s an Anna Banana in Vancouver. An FAA official is Top Flight Banana.

The club newsletter heralds events such as the annual banana picnic and games in Arcadia. A few years back, Hollywood stuntman Lee Waddell earned his master’s degree there by turning himself into a banana flambe. (He wore a flame-retardant suit).

This year’s games, in early September, will feature such traditional events as the “Draw and Peel” competition for fastest banana in the West. There will also be a banana eating contest. (The world record is held by Lori Hill, 32, of San Mateo, one of Bannister’s three daughters. She once downed 16 in two minutes.)

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Poking through the curious clutter at the Banana Museum, Bannister zeros in on a can of banana slice repellent spray for golfers. “It doesn’t work,” he says, having tried it while on the links with his friends the Insurance Banana, the Financial Banana and the Legal Banana. On the other hand, the putter with the banana-shaped head “messes up other people’s concentration.”

Even the most devoted banana man has to scratch his head over some of the items he is sent. “Can you imagine anyone coming up with this?” he asks, picking up a yellow banana-shaped device for slicing a banana into little rounds. As for the banana tobacco, he smoked some in the banana pipe and reports, “It does taste a little strange, but then it has been here a couple of years now.”

The dancing banana is still in its box, to be returned to sender. Anything slightly suggestive is banned at the Banana Museum.

As yet, there is no official Banana Club song, though there have been numerous submissions, among them “I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones.”

And “Yes, We Have No Bananas” is a solid contender.