One runs across more than a few balls on the obsession landscape -- balls of stamps, or of barbed wire. But special tribute must be paid to the Mother of all moss gathering pursuits -- the giant twine ball. These balls have become symbols of civic pride for a few lucky communities.
Francis A. Johnson was a quiet man who spent his entire life in Meeker County. For reasons that are lost to time, he began rolling a ball of twine in 1950. Francis rolled twine four hours a day, every day. He lifted it with a crane to continue proper wrapping. For 39 years, this magnificent sphere evolved at Johnson's farm, and eventually moved to a circular open air shed on his front lawn.
Francis Johnson's original Twine Ball shrine, with the 6-Foot Tall Hinged Man (seated).
Johnson didn't stop until 1979. By then it weighed almost 9 tons and was 12 feet wide. Ten years later he died, and the town of Darwin, proud of what he had accomplished, somehow moved his massive ball next to the water tower. It's known as "The Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man" because a rival twine ball in Cawker City, Kansas, is regularly added-to by visitors and townspeople. Darwin feels that this is cheating.
The World's Largest Twine Ball Rolled By One Man is enclosed in a plexiglass and wood gazebo, with the plexiglass barrier providing the usual challenges to photography. You have to crouch close to a vent for a good whiff. Signage around the ball sometimes simply refers to it as "The World's Largest Twine Ball," leaving out the clarifying coda. It's not quite as round as it once was, and it now has it's own souvenir stand. If the stand is closed when you visit, walk across the street to the Twine Ball Inn -- someone there may be able to alert someone else to open the stand for you.
A gray-haired local woman approached us when we visited. "Are you here to see our Twine Ball?" she asked. "You know, Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song about it. He's even been here to visit." A staunch Darwinian, she proudly announces, unprompted, that this twine ball was rolled "by ONE man." And she adds, "We don't have much of a town left, but the twine ball really draws 'em in."
Cawker City's Community Project.
The town's "Twine Ball Days" festival is the second Saturday in August.
Frank Stoeber of Cawker City, KS, saw Johnson's twine ball as a challenge. He started amassing his own ball, and soon had over 1,600,000 feet of twine rolled into a sphere 11 feet in diameter -- only a foot shy of the Darwin champion. Success seemed inevitable. Then, in 1974, Frank Stoeber died.
Cawker City, in a touching tribute, built an open-air gazebo over his ball and set it up on Highway 24 in town, where it can still be touched and whiffed by travelers.
The Cawker City ball has become a community project, where locals and visitors can add twine. Every August at the Twine-a-thon, locals celebrate Frank's legacy. As of 2003's Twine-A-Thon, total twine length was recorded as 7,049,191 feet of sisal twine, over 17,000 lbs, giving Cawker City twine ball supremacy. But it is no longer the work of a lone fanatic.
Ripley's Believe It Or Not joined the big ball fray when they purchased a bruiser for one of their museums.
In their Branson, Missouri location, they host a six-ton plastic string ball discovered in Mountain Springs, Texas. In 1992, owner J.C. Payne, a 71 year old rancher, asked Guinness and Ripley's to declare him the new king of string. His multicolored ball of string sat in his barn, had a 41.5 ft circumference, 18 inches greater than the largest on record. It stands 13 feet, 2.5" tall. Officials at Darwin maintain this is another "group effort" -- not the work of one man. And Cawker City twine scholars note that the Branson ball uses "plastic string," bloodlessly procured, applied, and displayed -- no lifelong labor of love there.
A relatively unknown twine ball, rolled by James Frank Kotera at Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin since 1979, threatens upset with its claim as the heaviest. No puffy cotton candy effort like the Ripley's string ball, or group-hug like Cawker City's, JFK's solo project tips the scales at over 19,336 lbs., by his calculation. And he's still rolling....
