Ragbrai Week

     The acronym, RAGBRAI, first appeared in print in the Sunday Register's Iowa Living section on Jan. 5, 1975, in a brief story I wrote announcing that The Register had decided to sponsor another cross-Iowa bicycle ride, the third annual.
     The acronym came about this way. The first ride was called simply the Great Six-Day Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. All of us assumed at the time that the first ride also would be the last. How wrong we were. Popular sentiment -- in the form of a flood of mail to The Register -- demanded at least a second ride, which was called the Second Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, or SAGBRAI. Again, the public response called for another and it became obvious by the third year that the event was going to have a much longer life than any of us had expected. This raised the prospect of a TAGBRAI and even a NAGBRAI.
     Something, obviously, had to be done. So I determined to make up an acronym that could go the distance, whatever that distance turned out to be, by simply tacking Roman numerals on it in each succeeding year. Further, as noted in the introduction to this book, I wanted it to be so long and ludicrous that everyone would think of it as a good-natured joke (which didn't work, alas, people took it seriously).
     And finally, Michael Gartner, then the editor of the Register and Tribune Company, suggested (actually, he told me to), "Get The Register's name in it, for crying out loud." He might not have said, "for crying out loud," which I did.
     The result in 1975 was the title we've used ever since: RAGBRAI (the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) with a Roman numeral.



John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong