COURTESY OF MIKE EVANS Navy Petty Officer Mike Evans holds the giant Chee-to his son found last week which caused a worldwide commotion on the eBay auction site.

Frenzy erupts over
Oahu sailor’s big
Chee-to find

By Pat Gee
pgee@starbulletin.com

After finding a Chee-to the size of a small lemon in the bag, Mike Page Evans said he thought, How revolting.

But the Pearl Harbor Navy petty officer said he thought Americans could use a good laugh to ease tensions due to talk of war.

So on Feb. 26 he put it up for bid on eBay, an online auction service, as possibly the world's largest Chee-to after his son, James, 3, spotted the big cheese ball.

Then things became cheesy.

Evans submitted it under eBay's category for "off-the-wall stuff."

Evans thought he would get "maybe $10, $20 for it," but he was offered $10,000 for the crunchy orange snack food. Evans said he was inundated with offers from all over the world, as far away as Russia.

"I had no inkling it would go this far. A thought I'd get maybe a few snickers, and people would move on ... but it's time for a lot of people to release their tension and laugh," said the 41-year-old naval supply officer, who has lived on Oahu for 24 years.

After receiving a quarter-million hits and an offer from two Indianapolis men of $10,000 -- "which would make my bank book look real good" -- eBay canceled the auction, dismissing it as a joke, he said. Evans listed it again and eBay canceled it once more.

COURTESY OF MIKE EVANS The giant Chee-to is shown next to a quarter and a regular-sized Chee-to. He was offered $10,000 for it on eBay, but donated it to a small town in Iowa instead.

In the meantime, radio disc jockeys around the country inundated him with e-mailed bids. One of the bids was from deejay Bryce Wilson, of Algona, Iowa, a farming community that had raised $180.

Evans told Wilson he wanted to donate the Chee-to to the town, which plans to shellac it, lay it on plush velvet and put it under Plexiglas as a tourist attraction.

Wilson told the Associated Press that he wanted it as a tourist attraction for the tiny town, whose current claim to fame is the annual display of a wooden Nativity scene carved by German prisoners of war during World War II.

Evans told Wilson to give the $180 to the local food bank, and mailed the Chee-to Iowa on Tuesday, priority class with delivery confirmation.

"I did what I felt was the right thing to do. ... I couldn't do any otherwise. $180 for a Chee-to is pretty expensive!" he said.

Evans added that turning down $10,000 was the "honorable thing" to do vs. "the greedy thing."

Some good things came out all this, Evans said.

One of the men who offered him $10,000 donated $2,500 to the March of Dimes in Iowa. Frito-Lay, which manufactures the popular snack, donated $1,000 and other promotional materials to raise money for the town's food bank, he said.

Frito-Lay, whose spokesman from Dallas contacted him, also promised to send him a free bag of Chee-tos, he said.

CNN featured the story on its Web page yesterday and quoted a Frito-Lay official as saying the big Chee-to may have been due to "seasoning accumulation," in which the cheese ingredients build up in the machines and result in a big blob being processed.