Is Ore. Apple World's Biggest?

HOOD RIVER, Ore. - Richard Hanners thinks the apple he picked in his orchard in September, weighing nearly 3 1/2 pounds with a circumference of nearly 19 inches, could be one for the record books.

The current edition of the Guinness Book of Records lists a 3-pound, 2-ounce apple grown in 1992 as the record holder.

Hanners' apple was weighed by the Oregon State University Experiment Station at precisely 3 pounds, 4.14 ounces, and measured at 18.94 inches around.

Hanners sells about 8,000 pounds of big apples in a specialty market every year.

The apples, a blush called Eve's Delight and a red apple called Eve's Choice, are bred from an accident nearly 40 years ago.

In 1958, Hanners' father, Dan, noticed some oversized apples growing on a limb mutation on a Spokane Beauty Stripe. He grafted the limb onto Malling 9 rootstock and did severe pruning and overwatering.

Among the first crop was a giant apple that wound up on the back cover of the quarterly report for U.S. National Bank of Oregon. The publicity brought a call from Pennsylvania, where a man said he wanted it.

"It seems President John Kennedy was on his way through Pittsburgh, and the caller wanted Kennedy to get the apple, and he did," Dan Hanners said.

That apple weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces, he said.