Odd this day
Today, in some of the most important historical news this vital resource has brought you, it is the 60th anniversary of the day Mike Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana, first set out on his quest to apply many, many coats of paint to an otherwise unremarkable baseball.
The baseball, and Mike’s obsession, burgeoned, and he is now the owner of the official, record-holding World’s Largest Ball of Paint. I think. His website may be defunct (although you can still see most of it on archive, of course), but he still seems to be getting five-star ratings on Trip Advisor, so I think it’s still a going concern. (Sadly, budgetary constraints prohibit a research trip for the purposes of independent verification.)
You may currently be thinking that that doesn’t look like a very big ball, but that’s because it’s not the biggest — it was merely the beginning of Mike’s marvellous mission. It was the prototype, the ur-ball. The World’s Largest Ball of Paint currently looks something like this:
This is the most recent photo I could find, taken in the last few months, and — as you can see — the ball is now preposterously vast. Taller than most of the people who visit, it lives in a specially constructed barn, suspended from a metal beam, covered in somewhere in the region of 30,000 coats of paint, and weighs over 4 tonnes.
But, as Mike’s dead website says, the story began many years earlier…
This ball is not the first one I made. In the 60s when I was in high school I was on the varsity high school baseball team. I was also working in the summer time in a paint shop. A friend (Oscar Sparkman) and I were throwing a baseball in the paint shop when one of us missed the ball and it knocked over a gallon of paint, needless to say the ball was covered in paint. We cleaned up the paint up from the floor but I left the ball as it was, with paint on it. I set it on top an old table, and the next day I went to get it and that’s what gave me this idea.
The History Behind The Ball Of Paint
I wrapped a wire around the ball and dipped it in a gallon of paint and preceded to record the colors. So everyday throughout my junior and senior year I kept a record. The ball was getting very large and longer in length then round. After 1000 coats of alternate colors on this ball I quit painting it. I donated to my trade instuctor (Joe Hinton) who kept it for several years before donating it to a museum.
Thankfully for us, he labelled it clearly, allowing me to mark this many-splendoured day.
Incidentally, you may until now have been labouring under the misapprehension that eccentricity was an exclusively British, or even just English, affair. There is a tendency to think this, mostly among British people. Edith Sitwell, for example, herself a deeply strange person, wrote a book, English Eccentrics, and she’s far from the only one. We seem to pride ourselves on it, but we’re all wrong. It’s people who are odd.
Anyway… Mike continues:
After several years I knew that someday I wanted to start another one.
…which seems perfectly reasonable, does it not? Why would any sane person not want to apply repeated coats of paint to a baseball? So…
A few years later, in 1977, my wife (Glenda) and I had started another baseball. The baseball was 9" in circumference and weighed less than one pound, I ran a 3/8"rod through it so I could easily suspend it from the ceiling giving me easy access to paint at all angles.
According to the archived site, the saga of the second ball began on 1 January 1977, and originally, they
painted the ball many times a day, while the ball was little and easy to handle a record of every coat and color was kept. My wife painted the ball several times throughout the day while I was working, I painted it in the evenings and on the weekends. (Now, don’t go thinking we spent every waking moment with this ball, we had a life too.) It became a piece of artwork to us and we rather enjoyed showing it off.
As we know now, of course, it grew and grew — rather like the gigantic turnip in the Russian folk tale — until it became unwieldy and had to be specially housed and hung from a girder and visited and gawped at and featured on Atlas Obscura:
There’s also a world records website which is clearly unconnected to Guinness, but which has bestowed the honour of coverage on the ball:
…and for its part, Guinness recognised Mike’s creation as having “the most layers in a ball of paint” back in 2004, when
Certified aborist Rick Barker inspected a core sample at 1200 times magnification and determined that a layer of paint is approximately 7 millionths (.000778) of an inch thick, and that each inch of the 14-inch sample contained 1,285 coats of paint — therefore concluding that baseball has approximately 17,994 layers of paint.
No source I have found, however, has identified where one might find the world’s second largest ball of paint, and you may wish to speculate as to just how much competition Mike has. Or you may not. You may simply wish to enjoy the absurd magnificence of a harmless if inexplicable obsession.
You can find out more on this Indiana tourism site:
…and you can read an account of a visit to the ball from a Wisconsinite called Dannelle Gay, who documents her meanderings on a website called Travelling Cheesehead:
Apparently, the people of Wisconsin are known as cheeseheads, due to that state’s history of dairy farming, and Dannelle now visits places while wearing a foam cheese on her head. (A lot of Winsconsinites wear foam cheeses, it seems, presumably in tribute to the flavour of what passes for dairy produce in America.)
In the end, I think, my point is this: I’ve given it some thought, and read pretty widely, and… I don’t think eccentricity is confined to the British Isles, you know.
