SIU will mark a milestone this year as it hosts the 50th Great Cardboard Boat Regatta on Saturday, April 26. The races will begin at 1 p.m. at Campus Lake’s Becker Pavilion.

The event first launched in May 1974 as a challenge for students in Design 102 — then called Design Fundamentals. According to longtime regatta organizer and current SIU chemistry professor Mary Kinsel, the course’s instructor, Richard Archer, asked students to build boats using only cardboard, tape and other basic materials that could carry them across the lake.

Advertisement

“We are now celebrating the 50th running of the Great Cardboard Boat Regatta,” Kinsel said. “It’s been 52 years since the first event, since we took breaks during COVID because students weren’t here in 2020, and we were only partially back in ’21.”

Larry Busch hasn’t missed a single regatta and can regale you with tales from his memory bank of a half-century of races. A retired faculty member, Busch helped coordinate the event for decades.

“A design faculty member went on sabbatical, which required us to move teaching positions around, and the regatta started in class I taught for several years, but I moved on to teach somebody else’s classes,” Busch said. “And Archer, who was also a very young faculty member, moved in to teach my class, and he and I conferred on, what are you going to do? And so forth and so on. He came up with the idea of challenging students to build cardboard boats.”

Advertisement*

It began as a simple class assignment, never intended to become a campus-wide event.

“We agreed this would be a worthwhile project, and didn’t ask permission, because we didn’t know what it was going to be, and just did it,” Busch said.

What started as a class project for first-year design students quickly grew beyond expectations.

“This was just a class project for three or four dozen students who were first-year design students. And it came off extremely well,” Busch said. “It worked very well, but obviously it was meant to be a one-time deal. The guy from sabbatical was coming back, and everybody was going to go back, and we were all happy before, but Archer and I afterwards were talking. He asked me, ‘That was a lot of fun. Do you think you’ll do it again?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, we’re going to do it again.’”

With the regatta’s return, they made adjustments that helped it evolve into an institution.

“I…defined what we meant, wrote the rules, and interestingly, that is what you copyright. You do not copyright ideas, not even an event,” Busch said. “Anybody can build a cardboard boat, but we wrote the rules.”

Eventually, other universities began replicating the idea.

“After a while, we became famous enough that we invited the University of Illinois design department to come and take the challenge. They came and liked it so well, they went home and started their own cardboard boat regatta, which is high praise,” Busch said.

Over the years, other races have taken place that have rules similar, or even identical, to Busch’s. 

“The rules have been plagiarized, and I’m delighted,” he said. “I’ve gone to the University of Illinois and read my rules. I wrote those and it’s on their bulletin.”

As the race’s reputation grew, so did its cultural presence.

“We came up with the Titanic Award, and it was a little plastic cup, and ironically, it leaked,” Busch said. “Over the years, people have competed for their Titanic Award. ‘I want to get the Titanic Award. I want the best sinking.’”

He recalled one student that he thought was going to win the Titanic Award, but the judges didn’t go for it. 

“He paddled out to the middle of the lake and had his boat rigged with some sort of minor explosive charges,” Busch said. “He stood up in his boat. Was jumping up and down, yelling ‘Damn it. Damn it,’ and out went the bottom of this boat. The crowd went crazy.”

In the early years, Busch and Archer even joked that the race could determine final grades.

“Archer and I jokingly called this the final exam, but it was just another project, a group of projects for the semester, and we somewhat tongue-in-cheek said, ‘If you win the race, you get an A in the class,’ right?” Busch said. “Which was true, but if you could win the race, you were already an A student. You didn’t know how to do it, but you were a proven problem solver.”

The objective of this project and other interactive activities in the design class was not just to have fun.

“It can be silly. It can be fun, but if you build a good boat, you really have done something,” Busch said.

Students had the chance to prove their creativity, teamwork and problem-solving skills — using nothing more than cardboard, tape and a little determination.

“Part of going to college is having fun. I don’t know why some of my stuffy professor friends go ‘You’re here to sit in the library and read,’” he said. “You can do that at home. You’re here to socialize, meet people, so forth and so on. And if you can build a good cardboard boat, you’ve done something fun.”

Though Busch retired 25 years ago, his work with the regatta and its educational model has continued to make an impact.

“I still am giving lectures on what we did in that class where people pay me to come in, take their class and do what I did here,” he said. “I’m an old man, and I’ve had at least 100,000 people in these workshops, from third grade to graduate school to corporation to the military.”

Busch credits Archer for helping bring national attention to the race.

“He called up ‘Good Morning America’ and said, ‘You have funky presentations. I’ve got a spot for you,’” Busch said. “They came here with the entire crew and their star cast got in cardboard boats and broadcast ‘Good Morning America’ from Campus Lake… now that’s entrepreneurship from your professor.”

The class that started it all no longer exists in its original form.

“The day I walked out of Art and Design, everybody’s very pleasant. The class died, the race, everything was put in the dumpster, moving on,” Busch said. “Fortunately, a chemistry student had done the boat race and went to Mary (Kinsel) and said, ‘The students need something fun. I’ve got a suggestion,’ and they took it over brilliantly.”

That’s where Kinsel, longtime regatta organizer, stepped in.

Boats still follow many of the original rules, but Kinsel said organizers have made adjustments for safety and competition.

“Modern boats are constructed of cardboard, tape, and students can use, like, cups. They can paint the boat,” Kinsel said. “There was a time in the…early ‘90s, like 1991, that we had 58 students in a boat,” she said. “So we had to impose a rule: a maximum of 10 students in the boat.”

The racecourse spans about 300 yards, starting at Campus Beach and ending at the Buchanan Pavilion. There are five competition classes, with trophies awarded for time and creativity.

Kinsel, like Busch, sees the regatta as something bigger than a quirky race.

“What did I get out of this personally?” Busch said. “It is an immense amount of work… but 100,000 people came to workshops that were built around this. I had 25,000 students sign up for an elective class… and my favorite comment…was ‘this is the first class I’ve had in which I had to think.’”

Busch said, “It started with a design program, and it can be viewed as a serious academic undertaking, or it can be viewed as a fun day. Both are true.”

For more information visit the SIU Cardboard Boat Regatta website. 

Staff Reporter Annalise Schmidt can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date on all your southern Illinois news, be sure to follow The Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Instagram @dailyegyptian.

Advertisement