Twine Collector Achieves His 15 Minutes of Fame

Well, it's a dream come true for Jim Kotera, who began wrapping his twine into a ball in 1979. According to a AP story that circulated the Net in mid-November, Kotera was driven by the same competitive spirit that drives the world's fastest runners and other athletes. He heard there was someone with a bigger ball of twine and he wanted to beat them. The ol' competitive spirit...

Purportedly the ball weighs just under 20,000 pounds and has enough string to reach from his Lake Nebagamon home to the Wyoming border. So, does this mean he's headed for the Guinness Book of World Records? (See Jim's AP photo here.)

Actually, in a Ripley's Believe It Or Not book called Planet Eccentric, there is a whole volume of stories with photos of people doing bizarre things or carrying out totally obsessive hobbies. And on page 41 we find Francis A. Johnson of Darwin, MN spent all his lunch hours adding twine to his own ball, which ended up 17,400 pounds when he died. Not sure how many twine ball makers they have in these parts, but no doubt Johnson was one of the people Kotera had in mind when he got to aiming for the world record.

Johnson died in 1989, which means Kotera had a real possibility of beating the guy if he just stayed with it and kept breathing. Clearly Kotera had a ball with this project, which proves that people can accomplish almost anything with enough patience and motivation.

You don't have to just collect twine to get your name in lights, however. Mike Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana, added a coat of paint to a baseball for so many years that his baseball is now 1100 pounds with 17,000 coats of paint.

And Lyle Lynch got his long overdue recognition for making the world's largest ball of barbed wire, 5,000 pounds worth. Lyle began in 1970, the same year I started college at Ohio University. Other kids were smokin' dope or protesting the war, or both, but not Lyle. He was the quiet good kid parents all admired. They believed he would make something of his life. And sure enough, he did. He's featured on page 40 of the aforementioned Ripley book, just below Mike's ball of paint.

So, what are your obsessions? I'd like to hear about it. I like to write, and make art... and am hoping my writing will make a difference in the world somehow. But at the end of the day I may just be making my own large ball of twine... out of words, words and more words.

Hmmm... I'd better not think too hard on that one.