T-shirt record

With 117 T-shirts covering his 111-pound frame, 12-year-old Austin Crow compared the experience to wearing a body cast. A little later Wednesday, as he closed in on his effort to wear 168 T-shirts and earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, he had more to say.

Donning 168 T-shirts and breaking the record took nearly three hours and gave the sixth-grade boy the look of a sumo wrestler. Once he had more than 100 T-shirts on, Austin could no longer walk by himself and his mother had to feed him sips of ginger ale.

At 150 T-shirts, he couldn't make it through a door frame he was so wide.

To make the Guinness Book, the entire event was documented on a video camera. A fan was brought in to keep the boy cool. The T-shirts bigger than 5X had to be special ordered from a company in California.

One of Austin's friends, C. Cameron Zawacki, also 12, was on hand to watch the effort.

"It's cool. I don't know anybody who has tried to break a world record before so I thought I'd come and see," Cameron said. "He's double huge," Cameron said. "I don't believe how many shirts he's got on. It's going to take a long time to get all those shirts off," McKeon T. Midland, 8, of Easthampton, as he watched and ate popcorn.

Getting out of the T-shirts was a somewhat less demanding task. Austin's parents and Robbins used scissors to cut through the mountain of shirts.