Ed & Beth Harvey

Ed & Beth Harvey
The Namesake of Our Group

Saturday, January 17, 2009

World's Largest Ball of Twine Located!!!!

Bob found it!!!! He and I both noticed the gleam in Perry's eye when he mentioned visiting the World's Largest Ball of Twine. He tried to play it off, but I am a keen observer! We surfed the web until our fingers were bare to find it. So here it is, just off of our path to Sturgis, in Cawker City, Kansas. The folks in the picture look super excited to be there.....imagine how jacked up Perry would be!!! I'm just saying.........

World's Largest Ball of Twine

Field review by the editors.

Cawker City, Kansas

When exactly did the citizens of Cawker City bug out on their big ball? We're not sure. But one thing is certain -- what started as one man's convenient storage of scrap twine has mutated into a community project, binding together the whole town.

The World's Largest Ball of Twine endures as a paragon of strange US tourist attractions. Uttering the phrase instantly conveys core roadside values -- the mind-boggling achievement, the one-track obsession, the over-the-top silliness. For us, visiting a Twine Ball is a religious pilgrimage. That's why we feel bad we're two hours late....

Tourists add to the Twine Ball.
Jack Clover briefly relinquishes control of the twine unspooler to tourists Stephanie Kawachi and Christian Cerrito,

The Twine Ball story began in 1953, when farmer Frank Stoeber, like thousands of his rural brethren, found it tidy and efficient to roll spare bits of sisal twine into a small ball in his barn. But over the years, instead of re-using or disposing of the twine, Frank kept rolling. By 1957, his twine ball weighed 2 1/2 tons and stood 8-ft. tall. By 1961, when he turned it over to the town, Stoeber had over 1,600,000 feet of twine rolled into a sphere 11 feet in diameter.

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