The 35-Year-Old Doughnut (Greensboro, NC)

If you venture down to the basement of Jackson Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, weave your way through the rooms and halls, you'll come across Preservation Services, the people responsible for repairing general collections and the conservation and restoration of items from the special collections and archives.

You'll also find a thirty-five-year-old doughnut.

The doughnut is a cake doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts. Audrey Sage, who has worked alongside the doughnut for the last twenty-four years, gave us a brief history of the doughnut:

In 1980, as the story goes, which is before I came here, there were two fellows that worked down here. Being in the basement and desperate for music, they were trying to get the campus radio station to come in on their clock radio. They had strung a bunch of wires up hoping to pick up the signal which was coming from the building next door. Meanwhile, there had been a staff orientation in here. Doughnuts were served and there was one doughnut left on the plate. Being the good housekeepers that they were, it sat around for a while on the plate. At the event, from what I was told, everyone was too embarrassed to be the pig that ate the last doughnut. One day while trying to pick up the radio station, Jack came in and he said, "I bet if I hung that doughnut up there were could get the radio to come in." He hung the doughnut from the wires and the radio station came in clear as a bell.

It hung up there and after five years Jack said, "We need to have a party for the doughnut." They had a big party. So every five years, there's a party for the doughnut. There have been doughnut hat contests, poetry contests, best first line of a novel contests, song lyrics.

How awesome is this doughnut? It's kept behind glass: