99% Invisible - 362- Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for decades: the world's largest ball of twine. Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We are a waste deep in summer right now, which is a great time of year if you're in the podcast business. Because it's road trip season. Time to hop in the car. Cue up your favorite podcasts. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And hit the road. That's producer Vivian Lee. And we recently sent her on a 1200 mile road trip through the Midwest.

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 macknuggets, lots of horses. Horses! But we didn't send Vivian out to look for horses or to check a few states off her bucket list. chicken McNuggets, lots of horses. Oh, horses! 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. I began my quest by following in the footsteps of the great Weird

Alliankovik. To a twine ball I heard about in Minnesota. 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. 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 9 ton ball of twine entombed in a Plexiglas Casibo. So it says, uh, 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. The ball is the pride of Darwin. But before Courtney Johnson moved here, she had never even heard of it. When I first came to the area, I didn't know anything about the twine ball. Johnson's husband grew up in Darwin, so she asked him.

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. 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. 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, rolling the largest ball of twine the country'd ever seen. But the truth is he just had too much twine lying around. 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. So he, of course, picked up the twine yelling at Harlan that he's just young and needs to start picking up at 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. And for reasons unknown, even to himself, Johnson rolled that ball a twine for the next 29 years. 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 gets 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

while I could still get it through a 30 inch door and it's been out doors ever since. And it was outdoors on his front lawn that he rolled it for four hours a day every single day. It became an addiction and obsession and it was something that he wanted to do because it sparked something inside of him. 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 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. 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. He repeated this process over and over. Rolling the ball, adding twine, rolling the ball, adding more twine. He rolled it around his yard, he chained it to a tree, so no one would steal the twine ball. I mean, who would steal the twine ball, but that was the way he was. The ball attracted a lot of attention both in and out of Darwin.

It appeared on television, got written about newspapers, and Weirdau would eventually write a song about it. The ball had made Johnson famous, even if he wasn't willing to admit it. The ball had made Johnson famous, even if he wasn't willing to admit it. Well, I don't know about that. About being famous, I have other modest little guy from the schick. They got to take me this I have. 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. This is the biggest ball of twine in the world because there's no one to come for it for the bigger one. Until someone dead. I'm Linda Clover. I live in Cochars City, Kansas, and I'm the caretaker of the world's largest ball of twine. Cochars 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 bell of the ball, but to some local people, I think I'm the crazy

twine lady. Cochars 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'Keefe's flowers with the twine ball at the center. We have things going on, but not much, but that's okay. We have beautiful sunrises and sunsets

and the wonderful lake. 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 in touch. We want people to be able to smell it, because twine has its own fragrance. It certainly does.

Ooh, it's got a smell. Ooh, it smells moist. 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. Amazingly, two men about the same time, one in Minnesota and one man from Kansas, did twine balls.

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. 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. Stober and Johnson were both raised with a depression error reluctance to waste anything at all.

Except for time. And Stobler may not have been the first person to try to roll the world's biggest twineball, but he certainly had a talent for it. By 1956, just three years in, Stobler's ball was already seven and a half feet tall and weighed over four thousand pounds, nearly the size of the Darwin twine ball. 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. 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. 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. 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 Stobber's Ball and Cawker City might have taken the lead. There's no record and we have our speculation on the website, which was that Cawker City's hit 11 feet and 8.61. By this point, Stobber's Ball had become a popular attraction in Central Kansas. 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. 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. Yes, it was in the Guinness Book of World Records. Officials from the Guinness Book of World Records came to Cawker City, Kansas in 1973. And declared Stoper'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. He kept going until he surpassed Dauber's Ball and dethroned Cawker 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 infosima at the age of 85. 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. His family contends that Johnson's lifelong passion ultimately killed him. Yeah, but I don't think he'd change anything. If someone were to tell him, you know, you're gonna die from this, you'd be like, so, and you'd keep doing it. In 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 Cogercity 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. We decided let's have some fun. And we started having what we call our annual Twineathon.

Residents of Cawker City decided to jump in and start adding more twine to the Stobber 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. The town had what was a brilliant idea, which was let's let the community keep rolling in. Here's Doug Kirby from Roadside America again. He says that Cocker City started holding twineathons 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. 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 Cawker City. So whether it was townspeople or visitors and let's just have the ball set up so that the spool is 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. 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 add twine onto the ball. Now no one else in town carries twine with them, but Linda Clover does. 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. 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. 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, you know, he was just so particular, it needed things done by himself. And remember Johnson had his own special technique for rolling a perfectly symmetrical

sphere. The people of Cocharsity 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 Cocharsity's ball might be bigger, but the Darwin ball is definitely nicer to look at. Darwin is by far my favorite ball. 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. My primary focus was to buy exhibits to put in the museums,

which Ripley's calls Auditorium, spelled ODD, around the world. 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.

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, you know, I'm getting silly, I guess, but you know, it's an accomplishment like climbing Everest. Meyer had been interested in the Darwin twine ball for years, and his 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 purchased the ball for Ripley's. He invited me and I said, sure, I'd love to come. 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. I gave a presentation were possibly thousands of people a week would see it. 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 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 it's. The twine that binds, it represents,. It represents not only how we support that, but our support of each other. 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 Twineball Day, which includes a number of twineball-related activities, like a twine K, which is kind of like a 5K. It starts out with a 17,400 foot run. That's a 17,400 foot run to celebrate a 17,400 pound twine ball. 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, in my opinion. 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. And that's exactly what Edward Meyer did. Well, I literally read it in an airplane magazine that this guy in Texas had been inspired as much by Cawker City as he had been by Darwin. As it turned out, while Darwin and Cawker 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 JC Payne. 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 Cawker City and had a clear favorite in the race. From the beginning, JC Payne did not want Cawker City to meet Frances Johnson. Apparently, Payne was not a fan of the fact that the Corker City community effort was about to beat Johnson's solo project.

Pain believed in the great man theory of toy ball rolling. He thought that it was a shame that Corker City was going to soon be bigger than Darwin's because the whole town was involved in it. He thought that this was, you know, I used 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. Paintings 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, pain managed to create a ball that was 42 feet in circumference, 13 feet tall, and weighed six tons. 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

prevented him from getting his hands wrecked that he wasn't literally even touching it at some point. Part of it was that he used whatever he could get in terms of string nylon specifically, which bothered a lot of twine ball purists who like to think of twine in the more traditional, more natural sense. I've seen the pile of plastic.

Here's Linda Clover from Cocker City again. They're complete. We're talking apples and oranges. You know, complete and something completely different. The main gripe about JC 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. Whereas nylon just looks like city-slicker twine.

Nylon also weighs less, making paintball much lighter than both cocker city and Darwin's. The end result was a multicolored artificial lighter weight monstrosity. An Edward Meyer from Ripley's had to have it. was a multi-colored artificial later weight monstrosity. An Edward Meyer from Ripley's had to have it. My buying it was a backhanded, you know, all by this because, you know, I missed out the one I really wanted, but I can still get one. So he flew to Valleyview, Texas to meet pain in person and see the ball for himself.

Nice man, salt to 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. 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. 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. And then it was driven, you know, the roughly thousand miles to Branson, Missouri from Denton, Texas. Still, this misshapen monster of a ball was going to be the piester 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. Oh wow, so cool. Yeah, it's huge. I went to see Paine'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 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. But 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 cities is the largest ball of sysil twine, and JC Payne's is the largest nylon string ball.

It's a three-way truce. Except... Hi! JFK? Hi! Is there a cape we come over? This is... This is very impressive.

This is the biggest ball that've seen in the world. Of course it is. Yep, there's a fourth ball. And this one is in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The man who's rolling it is named James Franco Terra, 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? No, no. No, no. No one ever helps you. Just one person. That's J.F.K. And J.F.K'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 multi-colored fun-feddy potato. J.F.K. claims that his ball is the largest by using a different metric. Wait. largest by using a different metric. Wait. 23,375 pounds. J.F.K thinks that his ball is about 23,375 pounds based on his calculations. Nearly 3,000 pounds heavier than Cawker cities. 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. But JFK is 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? No, no, I do it myself. So you don't really care about what they have to say.

This is mine, mine. This is just for you. 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. Because there are so many ways to have the biggest ball of something, like the largest ball of stamps in Boyz Town, Nebraska, or the largest ball of VHS tape in Kansas City,

or the World's Largest Disco ball in the UK. Let it go, Vivian. But what about the World's Largest Ball of Pain in Indiana? It's time to come home. I talked to Vivian about other roadside attractions on her death-define Midwestern tour after this. 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 concerned about my safety and well-being.

I was actually very concerned about my safety and well-being at the same time. And it's not because of twine, it was because of the weather. Yeah, 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 happen to be there during the peak of tornado season and there was the most tornado activity. Yeah. Of like since like 2011 or 12 or something.

So that was- So yeah, so tornadoes were landing all around you. Yeah, I was- You didn't see a tornado. 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 like track the storm and then go as fast as I can, the opposite direction. But it was a bummer because I've never been in this part of the country before, so 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.

Yeah. And yeah, and I wanted to see like the world's biggest banjo, but I just could, I was like rushing from place to place to try to just seek out shots at the entire time because there's thunderstorms and wind and 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 things. And it takes a second to really understand, but like everything you need is in the title.

Yeah. So there's all these, there's a lot of different types of roadside attractions, but probably the most popular in the biggest category is like world's largest things. Right, right. So this is basically a collection of miniaturized versions of all the world's largest things in the country. Mm-hmm.

So there's probably around 400 in the United States. And this woman named Eric 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. 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 have the world's largest collection of those world's smallest versions of the world's largest things. Oh my goodness.

Oh, I like her. She's great. So why in the world that she started doing this? 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, like she just made her own thing.

Yeah, just to remember the trip by. Okay. So now she has, you know, over 200 miniatur in her collection and she's still doing it. She's still doing it. So she still goes to world's largest things and still makes new ones. Yeah, so she's hoping doing it. She's still doing it. So she still goes to world's largest things and still makes new ones. Yeah, so she's hoping to see all 400.

But she has a process where she goes. All 400, that's the number of world's largest things inside of America. 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, 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. In the 1950s, 1960s, it was also not just our good roads policy, but this inner connectedness that we suddenly felt with our automobiles and that was really sold to us. 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 pops 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 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 a bathroom, you have to create something for, you know, the reason why people stop, that's why you create the world's largest ball bungees that year.

Exactly. Yeah, I should. To pull people off the road. Yes, exactly. Like, if people, you'd normally just be completely bypassed. So it's just a way to keep your economy alive. I'm actually kind of curious about this world's largest phenomenon. Like, is this just an American thing that we like to make the largest thing possible? It does seem very distinctly American. Like, when I think of the world's largest ball of twine,

I don't think I could think of anything more American than that. Right, and you don't think I'm gonna 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. 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 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 was 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 show off and say, hey, we're here. This is, look at our chicken. Oh my god, look at our chicken. So it's because we don't have something like the pantheon. We have So it's because we don't have something like the pantheon. We have the world's largest frying pan or something like that. Yes, just as good. It's 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. Right, I mean, I guess there isn't the same sort of academic rigor applied to roadside attractions as there is other forms of vernacular architecture, but there's no reason why not. Yeah, exactly. Nelson actually says that this attitude is kind of shifting lately. I think there's a growing number of people who are who are taking them seriously and have

had those debates since learning from Las Vegas came out and ended up being such a tone for architects. They address that very thing. When is, when is Kitch 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 re-evaluating them in the lenses that they were taught to look at more serious things. And we covered a lot of this stuff in a story Avery did about Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi about learning from Las Vegas. I mean, this idea that they became really advocates for the architecture of Las Vegas, that most people, and even people like I performed in Las Vegas for the AA 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. And it's like a long time we've turned around this thinking and you know in general we should think about what people go to, you know, because, you know, that's worth evaluating why they want to be in places like Las Vegas. I mean, it really does teach us something. Yes, exactly. Like, that demand is there for a reason. And, you know, like a giant fiberglass fesant or a swine ball might, 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. 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, our roadside attractions continuing to evolve as travel evolves right now. Yeah, and I asked Nelson this question because we're not in the rapid expansion phase of road travel anymore. For the past few decades we've been doing air travel and with climate change we're kind of more aware of our carbon footprints

and also the little bit of more, a little more aware of our carbon footprints. We're trying. But like, yeah. The world's largest ball of carbon. Okay. We've got that. We definitely have that. But yeah, I asked her about this because I was kind of curious.

And it's still a little bit of a question mark. I'm not sure yet. I mean, will there be a whole new set that's around mass rail or artwork in airports has really exploded too? Artwork has happened in that controlled environment, roadside attractions that really haven't inlet area because they're so controlled. I don't know. Would there be a slow version in cities that's just alleyway embellishments at the new roadside just the sidewalk? A little tiny thing on your path to the next Starbucks? I think that that's right on the money. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Like I travel a lot these days and Airport Art is really good. The exhibits at SFO and in the mural at the Oakland Airport are just stunning. I love them and I look forward to seeing them for a while that was like old board games and it was just like a exhibit of old board games in SFO And I would totally stop at that museum. Yeah. I would. If it was, you know, like on the side of the road in Kansas,

I totally would go to the old board game museum in Kansas. Well, that's great. I'm glad you didn't die. I'm really glad I didn't die too. Thank you for saying that. But one last thing about the world's largest version, 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 over with this. Oh, let's do it. Let's do this. We'll go out on this. So thank you so much for that. Thank you.

Thank you. And... Zee-oh! 99% invisible was produced this week by Vivian Lee, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed in tech production by Sriviusif, music by Sean Riyal. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colestay, 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 her sister. Yes, my sister. And to Andrew Zilt for tipping us off to that story of large Twine Bands. 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 worldslarchestings.com. The world's largest things theme song is by B-O-M-B, 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 wanna do this with me? In... In beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. Nice. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRXF, fiercely independent collective of

the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But we got big pictures of giant balls at 999PI.org. Can I do a giant balls joke? I think it's required, right?

Yeah, I think so. We made it most of the piece without making a giant balls joke, so I think we deserve it. That's why we've earned it. People, we've earned it. We're good. our day. Radio Tapio. From PRX.