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SPEAKER_10: Time to hop in the car, queue up your favorite podcasts.
SPEAKER_09: This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
SPEAKER_10: And hit the road.
SPEAKER_09: That's producer Vivian Lee, and we recently sent her on a 1200 mile road trip through the Midwest.
SPEAKER_10: And I saw a lot of things along the way. Bob Dylan's childhood home, a guitar made out of a bedpan, the inside of about 400 boxes of Chicken McNuggets, lots of horses.
SPEAKER_09: But we didn't send Vivian out to look for horses or to check a few states off her bucket list. She was on a mission that required equal parts science, philosophy and daring in search of something that's been hotly contested for decades, the world's largest ball of twine.
SPEAKER_10: I began my quest by following in the footsteps of the great Weird Al Yankovic. To a twine ball I heard about in Minnesota.
SPEAKER_09: About an hour west of St. Paul is a tiny little city called Darwin. It isn't the kind of place you'd expect to find a great wonder of the world. The population is only about 350.
SPEAKER_10: I accidentally circled the entire downtown in about two minutes while looking for parking. The main street is only three blocks long. There's a bank, a water tower and a nine ton ball of twine entombed in a plexiglass gazebo. So it says, world's largest ball of twine made by one man. It's very round, very round and nicely shaped. It's hard to get a good look from the outside because of the reflection of the glass. But once you press your face up against those windows, you'll see this enormous, perfectly round orb that's comprised of brown twine.
SPEAKER_09: The ball is the pride of Darwin. But before Courtney Johnson moved here, she had never even heard of it.
SPEAKER_05: When I first came to the area, I didn't know anything about the twine ball.
SPEAKER_10: Johnson's husband grew up in Darwin, so she asked him.
SPEAKER_05: I was like, what is this? And he's like, it's the twine ball and I kind of laughed at it because it is kind of silly if you think about it. And he's like, don't laugh because we're related to them.
SPEAKER_10: Courtney's husband is a distant nephew of Francis Johnson, the man who rolled the Darwin twine ball. And she and her husband actually inherited the Johnson family farm.
SPEAKER_09: Which is where the story of great great uncle Francis and his giant ball of twine begins. I'd like to tell you that Francis Johnson had a vision of doing something majestic,
SPEAKER_10: rolling the largest ball of twine the country had ever seen. But the truth is, he just had too much twine lying around.
SPEAKER_09: Johnson was a farmer, and his farm, like all farms really, was lousy with twine. And one day in 1950, while cleaning up after his nephew Harlan, Johnson started rolling some of that extra twine into a ball.
SPEAKER_05: So he, of course, picked up the twine yelling at Harlan that he's just young and needs to start picking up after himself. Well, before you know it, he had, you know, a six inch twine ball. Well, the six inch twine ball will get into a foot.
SPEAKER_09: And for reasons unknown even to himself, Johnson rolled that ball of twine for the next 29 years.
SPEAKER_10: The twine ball was easy enough to roll in its early stages. Johnson would work on it in the basement, but as it got bigger, he had to move the ball outside or it'd get stuck down there for good. Here's an interview with Johnson from an early 80s TV show called Real People. I had to roll it out of the basement.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I could still get it through a 30 inch door and it's been outdoors ever since.
SPEAKER_09: And it was outdoors on his front lawn that he rolled it for four hours a day, every single day.
SPEAKER_05: It became an addiction and an obsession and it was something that he wanted to do because it sparked something inside of him.
SPEAKER_09: Francis Johnson was a perfectionist and he was adamant that his twine ball should be a perfectly round sphere. As it got bigger, he rolled it around the yard to make sure he added twine evenly so it remained beautifully symmetrical. But eventually the ball got so big that he couldn't roll it around his yard anymore with
SPEAKER_10: just his body weight. And so Johnson invented an ingenious method to rotate the ball using railroad jacks. He would tuck a jack under the ball and use it to nudge the ball forward.
SPEAKER_05: And then the twine ball would roll. And of course on the other side of it, he would have something to stop the ball from rolling completely.
SPEAKER_09: He repeated this process over and over, rolling the ball, adding twine, rolling the ball, adding more twine.
SPEAKER_05: He rolled it around his yard. He chained it to a tree so no one would steal twine ball. I mean, who would steal twine ball? But that was the way he was.
SPEAKER_10: The ball attracted a lot of attention both in and out of Darwin. It appeared on television, got written about in newspapers, and Weird Al would eventually write a song about it.
SPEAKER_09: The ball had made Johnson famous, even if he wasn't willing to admit it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know about that, about being famous. I'm a modest little guy from the States. They got to take me as I am.
SPEAKER_10: Francis' twine ball was absolutely massive. It had to be the largest ball of twine in the world. So that's what he called it.
SPEAKER_01: This is the biggest ball of twine in the world because there's no one come forth with a bigger one.
SPEAKER_09: Until someone did.
SPEAKER_03: I'm Linda Clover. I live in Cocker City, Kansas, and I'm the caretaker of the world's largest ball of twine.
SPEAKER_10: Cocker City is about 500 miles south of Darwin. They too have a massive ball of twine, and it's Linda's job to look after it. The Wall Street Journal called me the belle of the ball, but to some local people I think
SPEAKER_03: I'm the crazy twine lady.
SPEAKER_10: Cocker City's population is a little larger than Darwin's, but walking around you wouldn't guess it. It almost felt like an empty set of a western movie. And in some of the windows of the abandoned storefronts, there's twine ball-inspired artwork, the Mona Lisa holding a twine ball, and one of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers with the twine ball at the center.
SPEAKER_03: We have things going on, but not much. But that's okay. We have beautiful sunrises and sunsets and the wonderful lake.
SPEAKER_10: They also have an absolutely gigantic twine ball sitting under an open-air gazebo right in the center of town. And unlike its counterpart in Darwin, which is trapped behind glass, this one you can walk right up to and touch.
SPEAKER_03: We want people to be able to smell it, because twine has its own fragrance.
SPEAKER_10: It certainly does. Ooh, it's got a smell. Ooh, it smells moist.
SPEAKER_09: Linda Clover may be the caretaker of the Cocker City twine ball, but it was rolled by a man named Frank Stober. Stober started in 1953, coincidentally right around the same time that Johnson was getting going up in Minnesota.
SPEAKER_03: Amazingly, two men about the same time, one in Minnesota and one man from Kansas, did twine balls.
SPEAKER_09: Stober was a farmer, just like Francis Johnson, and he got started rolling his ball of twine in basically the exact same way that Johnson did.
SPEAKER_03: He started it because he was cleaning up his barn, and the man just was picking up the twine because it was on his barn floor, thinking he would roll it into a ball, put it into a tub to get it out of the way.
SPEAKER_10: Stober and Johnson were both raised with a Depression-era reluctance to waste anything at all.
SPEAKER_09: Except for time.
SPEAKER_10: And Stober may not have been the first person to try to roll the world's biggest twine ball, but he certainly had a talent for it.
SPEAKER_09: By 1956, just three years in, Stober's ball was already seven and a half feet tall and weighed over 4,000 pounds, nearly the size of the Darwin twine ball.
SPEAKER_04: I think it starts with people maybe making fun of them because it's such a ludicrous thing, but then you quickly realize there's something about them that, you know, it's somebody who took what should have been insignificant little pieces of twine or string or garbage and they'd made something that's essentially made them immortal.
SPEAKER_10: This is Doug Kirby, the co-founder of Roadside America, which is a website dedicated to documenting the quirky, kooky, and kitschy roadside attractions along our highways.
SPEAKER_04: The balls are pretty much a pilgrimage site for different groups now because you really can't go through Minnesota or Kansas and not detour to see those balls.
SPEAKER_10: Kirby's been tracking the status of the balls for a long time, and when I went to meet with him, he even sketched out a little cartoon timeline for me. He says that for a stretch of time, it looked like Stober's ball in Cocker City might have taken the lead.
SPEAKER_04: There's no record, and we have our speculation on the website, which was that Cocker City's hit 11 feet in 1861. By this point, Stober's ball had become a popular attraction in central Kansas.
SPEAKER_09: He would take it to local fairs and people would try to guess the weight. It was such a hit that town officials asked Stober if he could bring the twine ball into the town to put it on permanent display.
SPEAKER_10: And then finally, after decades of speculation, the world's largest ball of twine became official in pretty much the only way these sorts of things can.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, it was in the Guinness Book of World Records.
SPEAKER_10: Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records came to Cocker City, Kansas in 1973 and declared Stober's ball the official world's largest ball of twine at 11 feet in diameter. Unfortunately, his glory was short-lived because he died the following year in 1974. Meanwhile, up in Darwin, Minnesota, Johnson was still alive and kicking and rolling twine.
SPEAKER_09: He kept going until he surpassed Stober's ball and dethroned Cocker City for the Guinness World Record just a few years later. And without anyone left to challenge his place in history, Johnson retired from twine ball rolling. He died 10 years later from emphysema at the age of 85.
SPEAKER_05: It was a lung disease that did kill him. And you look at family history, there is no history of it. So a lot of people say it was inhaling twine and chemicals and all that throughout those years that probably was the reason of his death.
SPEAKER_09: His family contends that Johnson's lifelong passion ultimately killed him.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but I don't think he'd change anything. If someone were to tell him, you know, you're going to die from this, he'd be like, so? And he would keep doing it.
SPEAKER_10: And the story could have ended there, with two dead twine men, the largest ball of twine in the world, and the second largest ball of twine in the world. But Cocker City wasn't finished yet. Stober had left the twine ball to the city after he died, and for a few years, it just sat there in the downtown gazebo, a tribute to the second greatest twine ball roller in history. But then the town decided they didn't want to settle for second best.
SPEAKER_03: We decided, let's have some fun. And we started having what we call our annual twine-a-thon.
SPEAKER_09: Residents of Cocker City decided to jump in and start adding more twine to the Stober ball to see if they could beat the record again. But this time, it wouldn't be the product of one man, but an entire community.
SPEAKER_04: The town had what was a brilliant idea, which was, let's let the community keep rolling in.
SPEAKER_10: Here's Doug Kirby from Roadside America again. He says that Cocker City started holding twine-a-thons once a year where everyone in town would gather to help grow the twine ball. And eventually, they started allowing visitors to wrap the twine ball on a daily basis. Getting to wrap the twine ball became the reason to visit Cocker City.
SPEAKER_04: So whether it was townspeople or visitors. And let's just have the ball set up so that the spool's ready. You can add to the ball. You'll see immediately that you're adding to this world record. So it's a different approach.
SPEAKER_10: Linda Clover literally keeps spools of twine on her at all times, on the off chance that she runs into someone who wants to add to the ball. If you go to my car or my pickup truck, either one has twine that I have ready to let people
SPEAKER_03: add twine onto the ball. Now, no one else in town carries twine with them, but Linda Clover does.
SPEAKER_10: With so many people participating, the Cocker City ball continues to grow bigger and bigger. The latest estimate has it at 20,500 pounds. Over 2,500 pounds heavier than Johnson's. And when you see it in person, it's unquestionably larger in circumference.
SPEAKER_09: But not everyone agrees that rolling twine balls should be a group project. Especially in Darwin. Courtney says that Johnson's ball is particularly impressive, not just because of its perfectly round shape, but because it was the sole accomplishment of one man.
SPEAKER_05: It needed to be done by him because it needed to be perfect. It needed to be solid. It needed to be done with only a certain type of twine. He was just so particular and needed things done by himself.
SPEAKER_10: And remember, Johnson had his own special technique for rolling a perfectly symmetrical sphere. The people of Cocker City don't have that. They have no way to wrap the top and the bottom of the ball, so it just keeps getting wider and wider. In fact, it's not really a ball anymore, more an oval with a flat bottom. So Cocker City's ball might be bigger, but the Darwin ball is definitely nicer to look at.
SPEAKER_06: Darwin is by far my favorite ball.
SPEAKER_10: This is Edward Meyer, and he's currently retired, but up until a year ago, he had probably the coolest job I'd ever heard of.
SPEAKER_06: My primary focus was to buy exhibits to put in the museums, which Ripley's calls auditorium, spelled O-D-D, around the world.
SPEAKER_10: Meyer was vice president of exhibits and archives with Ripley's Believe It or Not, meaning it was literally his job to find the weirdest things in the world and put them on display. And back in the early 90s, he had his eye on Darwin's giant twine ball.
SPEAKER_06: The Darwin ball, you know, it's almost romantic. It's one man's dream, and it takes him a long time, and he has certain rules that he plays by and doesn't break. And you know, it's, you know, I'm getting silly, I guess, but you know, it's an accomplishment like climbing Everest.
SPEAKER_09: Meyer had been interested in the Darwin twine ball for years, and as luck would have it, Johnson's nephew had inherited his entire estate, including the twine ball. Johnson's nephew called Meyer up one day to ask if he wanted to come to Darwin and possibly purchase the ball for Ripley's.
SPEAKER_06: He invited me and I said, sure, I'd love to come.
SPEAKER_10: Meyer was asked to pitch the town on the idea of putting Johnson's twine ball in a Ripley's museum. And personally, he thought, what better way to honor Johnson's accomplishment than to put it on display where possibly thousands of people a week would see it?
SPEAKER_06: I gave a presentation and told them that I wanted to buy it, and the reaction was, you know, over our dead body. It was probably one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my entire life. I was literally in fear of my life. I was not sure how this was going to end. Spoiler alert, he wasn't murdered by a mob of angry townspeople, but they were pretty
SPEAKER_09: upset. For one, the people of Darwin thought the twine ball could bring in tourism to the area. But more importantly, the ball had become part of Darwin's identity. Twine ball is a good analogy, we say.
SPEAKER_08: The twine that binds, it represents not only how we support that, but our support of each other.
SPEAKER_10: This is Josh Johnson, the mayor of Darwin. The town had adopted the ball as their own so much so that they even started an annual tradition called Darwin Twine Ball Day, which includes a number of twine ball-related activities like a twine K, which is kind of like a 5K.
SPEAKER_08: It starts out with a 17,400 foot run. That's a 17,400 foot run to celebrate a 17,400 pound twine ball.
SPEAKER_10: They pass out candy to kids, roll miniature versions of the twine ball down the street, and have a parade. It probably lasts around 35 minutes, which is the right length for a parade these days,
SPEAKER_08: in my opinion.
SPEAKER_10: Francis Johnson's ball had become central to life in Darwin. And Darwin made it clear that if Meyer wanted a giant twine ball for Ripley's, he would have to get it from some other town.
SPEAKER_09: And that's exactly what Edward Meyer did.
SPEAKER_06: Well, I literally read it in an airplane magazine that this guy in Texas had been inspired as much by Cocker City as he had been by Darwin.
SPEAKER_10: As it turned out, while Darwin and Cocker City were battling it out in their public twine ball arms race, a third ball was rapidly growing in Texas at the hands of a man named J.C. Payne.
SPEAKER_09: Payne was a retired brick mason, who was the type of guy who was always in search of a new project. And in the late 1980s, he found one. Payne had read about the battle of the balls in Darwin and Cocker City, and had a clear favorite in the race.
SPEAKER_06: From the beginning, J.C. Payne did not want Cocker City to beat Francis Johnson. Apparently, Payne was not a fan of the fact that the Cocker City community effort was
SPEAKER_09: about to beat Johnson's solo project. Payne believed in the great man theory of twine ball rolling. He thought, you know, that it was a shame that Cocker City was going to soon be bigger
SPEAKER_06: than Darwin's because the whole town was involved in it. He thought that this was, you know, I use the word cheating, but that's, you know, my interpretation and said, you know, if Francis isn't going to be the world's biggest, then I'm going to be the world's biggest.
SPEAKER_10: Payne didn't start rolling his ball until 1987, a full 37 years after Johnson. But by 1992, the Guinness Book of World Records declared it the largest ball in the world. In a few short years, Payne managed to create a ball that was 42 feet in circumference, 13 feet tall, and weighed six tons.
SPEAKER_06: Part of it is that he had a tool, used technology to add the string to it. He had a tractor, he had a hook type implement that, you know, prevented him from getting his hands wrecked, that he wasn't literally even touching it at some point. Part of it was that he, you know, used whatever he could get in terms of string, nylon specifically.
SPEAKER_09: Which bothered a lot of twine ball purists who like to think of twine in the more traditional, more natural sense.
SPEAKER_03: I've seen the pile of plastic.
SPEAKER_10: Here's Linda Clover from Cocker City again.
SPEAKER_03: We're talking apples and oranges. You know, something completely different.
SPEAKER_10: The main gripe about J.C. Payne's ball was that he used artificial colored nylon twine, while Johnson and Stober both used sisal twine. Sisal is an earthy colored plant-based material and has that classic farm look.
SPEAKER_09: Whereas nylon just looks like city slicker twine.
SPEAKER_10: Nylon also weighs less, making Payne's ball much lighter than both Cocker City and Darwin's. The end result was a multicolored, artificial, lighter weight monstrosity.
SPEAKER_09: And Edward Meyer from Ripley's had to have it.
SPEAKER_06: My buying it was a backhanded, you know, I'll buy this because, you know, I missed out the one I really wanted, but I can still get one.
SPEAKER_10: So he flew to Valley View, Texas to meet Payne in person and see the ball for himself.
SPEAKER_06: Nice man, salt of the earth. A little bit on the competitive side. But you know, just a basic farm type guy. And his ball, when I first saw it, looked pretty darn good.
SPEAKER_09: But it didn't look good for long. Pretty soon they realized that they'd have to move this six ton ball to a new Ripley's museum being built in Branson, Missouri.
SPEAKER_06: Well, we dragged it out of the barn and that messed it up a little bit. And then we had to lift it by a crane, which messed it up more. And then it was dropped onto a flatbed truck that flattened the bottom part of it.
SPEAKER_06: And then it was driven, you know, the roughly thousand miles to Branson, Missouri from Denton, Texas.
SPEAKER_09: Still, this misshapen monster of a ball was going to be the piece de resistance of the new Ripley's museum. And the ball was so huge that the building had to be constructed around it. If for any reason they ever need to move it out of there, they'll either need to take the roof off or blast a hole in the wall.
SPEAKER_10: Oh wow, so, wow. Yeah, it's huge. I went to see Payne's Twine Ball for myself at the Ripley's in Branson. In person, it's a little blobby looking, like a ball of cookie dough that's been sitting out for too long. And it's comprised of shiny nylon strands every color of the rainbow. It's pretty impressive. But it sits on display between an ornate miniature palace carved out of camel bone and a six-foot ship made entirely of jade. And honestly, both are so beautiful that they make the ball look a little pedestrian. Not to mention something else I noticed. So I'm just noticing something right now, which is that on this sign, it doesn't say the world's largest twine ball. It says world's largest string ball. So it's not even technically designated as twine here at Ripley's. And this might be why the great American Twine Ball Contest or String Ball Contest is never going to get a satisfying clear-cut winner. Because no one is ever going to agree on the rules of the contest. And at this point, all of the contestants seem to be okay with the version of the story where everyone wins. Each town has the largest twine ball, depending on what you mean by that. Darwin's is the largest twine ball rolled by one man. Cocker City's is the largest ball of sisal twine. And J.C. Paine's is the largest nylon string ball. It's a three-way truce. Except... Hi! JFK? Is it okay if we come over? This is very impressive.
SPEAKER_11: This is the biggest ball of twine in the world.
SPEAKER_09: Of course it is.
SPEAKER_10: Yep, there's a fourth ball. And this one is in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The man who's rolling it is named James Franko Tara, but he prefers to go by JFK. I visited him at the end of my road trip, and he doesn't talk a whole lot, but he has handmade signs posted all over his property with the story of his ball. He writes that one night, in 1975, God came to him and told him that he was going to stop drinking, turn his life around, and become the world-famous twine man. And that's more or less what he did. Does anybody help you with it at all?
SPEAKER_11: No one ever helps you. Just one person. That's JFK.
SPEAKER_10: And JFK's ball is a little different from the rest. He takes small segments of colorful twine and weaves and tucks the individual pieces into the ball so the surface resembles a net. It's also a lot harder for him to reach the top, so the ball's a lot wider than it is tall. It almost looks like a modern art sculpture. Or a multicolored funfetti potato.
SPEAKER_11: Well, try it and make it as long as you can, but it's hard.
SPEAKER_10: And JFK claims that his ball is the largest by using a different metric. Weight.
SPEAKER_11: Twenty-three thousand, three hundred and seventy-five pounds.
SPEAKER_09: JFK thinks that his ball is about twenty-three thousand, three hundred and seventy-five pounds, based on his calculations. Nearly three thousand pounds heavier than Cocker City's. He says he knows this because before adding twine to the ball, he puts it in a garbage bag, weighs it, and then adds the total to his overall measurements. If he's correct, his is definitely the heaviest of the four twine balls.
SPEAKER_10: But JFK's not looking for official records. He doesn't need some outsider to come in and tell him what he already believes. Have you heard of the Guinness Book of World Records? Are you interested in having them come to measure it at all?
SPEAKER_11: No, no, I do it myself.
SPEAKER_10: So you don't really care about what they have to say? This is mine. This is just for you?
SPEAKER_09: Right. So for now, a careful balance is intact. The four largest twine balls exist peacefully, alongside one another, each content with their own version of superiority.
SPEAKER_10: Because there are so many ways to have the biggest ball of something. Like the largest ball of stamps in Boys Town, Nebraska. Or the largest ball of VHS tape in Kansas City. Or the world's largest disco ball in the UK.
SPEAKER_09: Let it go, Vivian.
SPEAKER_10: But what about the world's largest ball of paint in Indiana?
SPEAKER_09: It's time to come home. I talked to Vivian about other roadside attractions on her Death Define Midwestern tour after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Sign up today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or new newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website, or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
SPEAKER_09: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. So I'm back in the studio with Vivian Lee. And in addition to seeing many, many balls of twine, when we were following along, we were deeply concerned about your safety and well-being. I was actually very, I was very concerned about my safety and well-being at the same
SPEAKER_10: time.
SPEAKER_09: And it's not because of twine. It was because of the weather. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: So apparently, if you're going to plan a reporting trip to a part of the country called Tornado Alley, you should probably check when tornado season is. Because I happened to be there during the peak of tornado season, and there was the most tornado activity since 2011 or 2012 or something. So that was...
SPEAKER_09: So yeah, so tornadoes were landing all around you. Yeah, I was... You didn't see a tornado.
SPEAKER_10: I did not see a tornado. I had three weather apps on my phone open at all times. And I was tracking the storm and being the exact opposite of Bill Paxton in the movie Twister. So I would track the storm and then go as fast as I can the opposite direction. But it was a bummer because I figured I've never been in this part of the country before. So I could see... I can make a list of all these roadside attractions that I wanted to see along the way. So I really wanted to see the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station in Minnesota. And yeah, and I wanted to see the world's biggest banjo, but I just couldn't. I was rushing from place to place trying to just seek out shelter the entire time because there's thunderstorms and wind. It was terrifying. But one of the places that I really, really wanted to see, but just could not get to in time, it was in Lucas, Kansas, and it's called the world's largest collection of the smallest versions of the world's largest things. Okay. You said the world's largest collection of the smallest versions of the world's largest
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_09: things.
SPEAKER_10: And it takes a second to really understand, but everything you need is in the title. So there's a lot of different types of roadside attractions, but probably the most popular and the biggest category is like world's largest things. So this is basically a collection of miniaturized versions of all the world's largest things in the country. So there's probably around 400 in the United States. And this woman named Erica Nelson has been basically traveling around and making small versions of all the world's largest roadside attractions that she's seen. And she's an independent artist and educator in Lucas, Kansas. So I was like so fascinated by this that I decided to call her and ask her a little bit about how it works.
SPEAKER_02: I go to a world's largest thing, photograph it, gather its background story. Then I make a world's smallest version of that world's largest thing and add it to my collection. And since I've been doing this for 15 years now, I now have the world's largest collection of those world's smallest versions of the world's largest things. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, I like her. She's great. So why in the world did she start doing this?
SPEAKER_10: So she would visit these roadside attractions and a lot of times they wouldn't have a gift shop to bring home a souvenir. So she started making her own souvenirs in the form of these miniaturized versions of these world's largest things. Just for herself. Just for herself. She just made her own thing. Yeah, just to remember the trip by. So now she has over 200 miniatures in her collection and she's still doing it.
SPEAKER_09: She's still doing it. So she still goes to world's largest things and still makes new ones.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so she's hoping to see all 400. But she has a process where she goes...
SPEAKER_09: All 400, like that's the number of world's largest things inside of America?
SPEAKER_10: It fluctuates. So there's always more popping up and there's some that are just kind of disappearing from lack of care or people just don't want to maintain them anymore. So Nelson has like a special affinity for the world's largest things like these types of roadside attractions. But she's also fascinated with roadside attraction culture as a whole. And she was telling me that, you know, if you look at it from a historical standpoint, you could see the ways in which infrastructure and a push towards car culture have created this environment for roadside attractions to really flourish.
SPEAKER_02: In the 1950s, 1960s, it was also not just our good roads policy, but this interconnectedness that we suddenly felt with our automobiles. And that was really sold to us as this is how you get your own personal freedom is by having this machine that can take you as far as you're willing to take it. So all these little towns popped up in just the right distance to fuel up again or get water again or use the bathroom again or sleep again. But then the interstate system kind of bypassed everything and all these small towns who had sort of become dependent on slow travel were being bypassed. And I think those roadside attractions were that way to get people to stop again. So basically, if you don't need to stop in a town for gas or water or to use the bathroom,
SPEAKER_09: you have to create something for the reason why people stop. That's why you create the world's largest Paul Bunyan statue to pull people off the road.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, exactly. Like if people, you would normally just be completely bypassed. So it's just a way to keep your economy alive.
SPEAKER_09: I'm actually kind of curious about this world's largest phenomenon. Is this just an American thing that we like to make the largest thing possible?
SPEAKER_10: It does seem very distinctly American. Like when I think of the world's largest ball of twine, I don't think I could make anything more American than that. Right.
SPEAKER_09: And you don't think I'm going to go to Switzerland to get the world's largest ball of twine. And our portion sizes are very big, so I would assume the same thing.
SPEAKER_10: But I actually asked Nelson about this. And she says it's not specifically like an American thing, but it's kind of like a New World countries thing. I think part of that love of superlatives does seem not just an American thing, but
SPEAKER_02: a very young country kind of thing. Because Australia and Canada also have that sort of need to make a mark. Because we're kind of lacking in that old, old, old history of our built environment. Because everybody who is here was much more in tune with nature and didn't make giant monuments to themselves. So once we started making our own history, we realized we don't have much. So we started doing these superlative things to kind of loudmouth, showoffy, say, hey, we're here. This is, look at our chicken. Oh my God, look at our chicken.
SPEAKER_09: So it's because we don't have something like the Pantheon. We have the world's largest frying pan or something like that.
SPEAKER_10: Just as good as the Pantheon. What I think I like most about the world's largest collection of the smallest versions of the world's largest things as a project isn't just that it's a catalog of the biggest things. It's also a way for Nelson to really explore the stories behind these small town monuments that aren't traditionally valued from an academic standpoint.
SPEAKER_09: Matthew Feeney Right. I mean, I guess there isn't the same sort of like academic rigor applied to roadside attractions as there is other forms of vernacular architecture, but there's no reason why not. Jessica Vinas-Nelson Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: And Nelson actually says that this attitude is kind of shifting lately. Mary Lee Sargent I think there's a growing number of people
SPEAKER_02: who are taking them seriously and have had those debates since learning from Las Vegas came out and ended up being such a tome for architects. They address that very thing of when is kitsch okay? When is populist architecture okay? And so with that introduction into scholarly debates, people started looking at them again, all of these things that they'd grown up around the built environment and reevaluating them in the lenses that they were taught to look at more serious things. Matthew Feeney And we covered a lot of this stuff in a story
SPEAKER_09: Avery did about Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi about learning from Las Vegas. I mean, this idea that, you know, they became really advocates for the architecture of Las Vegas, that most people and even people like I performed in Las Vegas for the AIA conference and somebody wrote me to say, I can't believe we're doing it in Las Vegas. There's nothing of value there. And I was like, there's like a whole book about it.
SPEAKER_10: For a long time, we've turned around this thinking.
SPEAKER_09: And in general, we should think about what people go to, because that's worth evaluating why they want to be in places like Las Vegas. I mean, really does teach us something. Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: Like that demand is there for a reason. And you know, like a giant fiberglass pheasant or a twine ball might it I mean, yes, it's silly and it comes off as silly. But people are drawn to these stories and stories behind them and the people who've made these objects because it tells you a lot about, you know, the region and the people who live there.
SPEAKER_09: Right. I mean, since they were a reaction to the way that we travel and as we were beginning to bypass a lot of these towns, and they became attractions for those reasons, are roadside attractions continuing to evolve as travel evolves? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And I asked Nelson this question because, you know, we're not in like the rapid expansion phase of road travel anymore. You know, for the past few decades, we've been doing air travel. And you know, with climate change, we're kind of more aware of our carbon footprints. And also, we're a little more aware of our carbon footprints.
SPEAKER_10: We're trying. But like, yeah, the world's largest ball of carbon.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, we've got that.
SPEAKER_10: We definitely have that. But yeah, I asked her about this because, because I was kind of curious and it's still it's still a little bit of a question mark. I'm not sure yet.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, will there be a whole new set that's around mass rail or artwork in airports has really exploded to artwork has happened in that controlled environment. Roadside attractions don't really have an inlet there yet because they're they're so controlled. So no, would there be a slow version in cities that's just alleyway embellishments that the new roadside is the sidewalk? A little tiny thing on your path to the next Starbucks?
SPEAKER_09: I think that that's right on the money. I mean, just because like, there's all these types of little artistic interventions and urban landscapes. And maybe they've always been there. I don't know if they they function as attractions exactly. But they are about embedding art in the built world. And that seems like that impulse is there. But she's definitely right about airport art. Like I travel a lot these days. And airport art is really good. Exhibits at SFO and exhibit in the mural at the Oakland Airport are just stunning. I love them. And I look forward to seeing them. For a while there was like, old board games. And it was just like an exhibit of old board games and SFO. And I would totally stop at that museum. Yeah, I would. Yeah. And it was you know, like on the side of the road in Kansas, I totally would go to the old board game museum. Yeah, Kansas. Well, that's great. I'm glad you didn't die.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_10: I'm really glad I didn't die too. Thank you for saying that. But one last thing about the world's largest version. Oh, wait, the world's I don't think I could do this. The world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things is that they have a theme song. And I would love to play that. Oh, let's do it. We'll go out on this.
SPEAKER_09: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a traveler down the road and what do I see but a giant ear of corn and a bigger strawberry. I'm not hallucinating and I'm not crazy but this giant talking cow is talking to me. I'm decisive, obviously, in the world's largest collection of the world's largest versions
SPEAKER_06: of the world's largest things traveling roadside attraction.
SPEAKER_09: And see them. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Lee, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Truffle, Joe Rosenberg, Delaney Hall, Sophia Klatsker and me Roman Lars. A very special thanks to Josh Johnson, John Dixon from Ripley's Believe It or Not in Branson, Missouri. Special thanks to Grace Lee, that's your sister. That's my sister, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And to Andrew Zilch for tipping us off to that story of large twine bites. You can find out more about the world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things on Facebook or by going to worldslargestthings.com. The world's largest things theme song is by BOMB, Big One Man Band, which is a project of artist Bruce Humphries. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. You want to do this with me? In beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Nice.
SPEAKER_09: 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too, but we got big pictures of giant balls at 99pi.org. Can I do a giant balls joke there? Yeah. I think it's required, right? Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_10: We made it most of the piece without making a giant balls joke, so I think we deserve it.
SPEAKER_09: That's right, we've earned it. Okay. Radio Topia from PRX. eBay
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SPEAKER_07: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops, the same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.
