Naked isn't good in Kansas
And naked as a jaybird.
Except for the big ball of twine covering his own southern exposure.
David was local artist Cher Heller Olson's painted interpretation of Michelangelo's famous statue.
"Welcome to Cawker City," proclaim signs on both ends of town. "Home of the World's Largest Ball of Twine." (It's 40 feet in circumference.)
Over the past few months, Olson, a retired art teacher and the town's new head of tourism, has created an art walk on the prairie. More than 40 colorful "masterpieces" hang in windows downtown, beckoning tourists to do more than just gawk at the ball, which turned 50 this year.
A yellow ribbon of "twine" painted on the sidewalks wends its way from one end of town to the other, two long blocks in all.
It passes Mona Lisa holding a ball of twine in her lap and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can, a twine ball where the round emblem goes. It loops in front of Diego Rivera's Flower Vendor, the gentleman's basket loaded with twine balls instead of blooms.
You get the idea.
But alas, David is nowhere in sight. He's been blackballed in Cawker City.
About 500 people live in Cawker City, one of the towns that dots U.S. 24 as it snakes across northern Kansas. Having a highway as the main street means that cars and semi-trucks rush through on the way to somewhere else.
People looking for the ball, which sits under a metal-roofed pavilion along the highway, sometimes miss it.
Cawker City was named after E.H. Cawker, the lucky man who earned the honor of a namesake in a poker game with three other landowners. Four mannequins re-create that poker game in an empty storefront.
In December 1953, farmer Frank Stoeber began to wrap scrap lengths of twine until he couldn't fit the ball inside his red barn. Ask the locals why someone would want to make a ball of twine and you'll likely get a bemused smile.
You're a city slicker, ain't ya?
Before baling wire, hay bales were bound with twine. Farmers couldn't just leave it lying about because it got caught in cattle hooves and farm machinery, or the cows ate it and got sick. Some farmers burned their twine remnants at season's end.
Stoeber saved his. Just as the sign at the ball reads: Thrift, patience, success.
He brought the ball to town during a celebration of Kansas' centennial in 1961.
Stoeber gave it to the town, and in turn Cawker City has turned the ever-expanding sphere into an internationally known tourist attraction, a staple of guidebooks and a media darling that's drawn much attention lately from the likes of Newsweek and People magazines.
The ball is always open for viewing and people have visited at odd hours, according to comments in a guest book tucked in a mailbox at the site.
"It was the coolest thing I ever saw," Zach wrote. "We drove from Grand Island, Neb., at 11 p.m., just to see the giant ball of twine."
Last summer a Dallas family noted that they come every summer to photograph their children in front of the ball, kind of a roadside growth chart.
The ball grows, too, thanks to the town's annual Twine-a-thon every August. On that day, anyone who wants to can add twine to the ball.
Olson moved to Cawker City from Concordia more than a year ago when her husband became pastor of the United Methodist churches in Cawker City and nearby Glen Elder. Olson, who earned an art education degree from Kansas State University, left behind a job teaching elementary school art.
In Cawker City she opened a studio and gallery in an old blacksmith's building downtown. The white walls are decorated with her paintings, mixed-media collages and colorful bowls crafted from papier-mâché.
Her painting of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water house in Pennsylvania sits unfinished on an easel. A boulder in the stream below looks suspiciously like a brown ball of twine.
When Olson was asked to think of ways to bring people to town, she and her tourism committee — Linda Clover, the ball's caretaker, and businesswoman Lottie Herod — decided to play up everything positive about the town.
That meant the big ball.
The idea of re-creating masterpieces came one day while Olson sat outside her studio. "I think the good Lord just popped that idea in my head," she says.
She thought a community art project might be a leap of faith for the residents of a small town, but so far the effort has been financed by private donations; Olson, too, has contributed her hours.
She didn't create her paintings to woo art critics. "I'm just trying to paint them so that they are somewhat recognizable, so that tourists driving through town can say, 'Oh yeah, that is the Mona Lisa.' They're not perfect in any way," she says.
She knew better than to display a completely nude David, so she added the twine ball to cover "anything that I felt the good Lord might want me to hide."
The artist in her balked at the censorship. But the minister's wife in her caved in. And David came down.
"I miss David," says Joni Frasier, owner of the Cut Above salon, where David resided until he was banished. In his place Olson put up a painting of the Statue of Liberty, holding a ball of twine. "People would laugh and honk and point," Frasier recalls. "There was a bit of humor with it."
And that, in the end, is exactly the point. People are having a ball in Cawker City.