The First Ball of Paint

Back in the late 1960s, long before the world had ever heard of the “World’s Largest Ball of Paint,” Mike Carmichael was just a teenager in high school. He worked part-time at a little paint shop in Knightstown, Indiana, stacking cans, mixing colors, and sweeping up dried paint chips that always seemed to drift across the floor.

One slow afternoon, Mike passed the time the way high school boys often did—tossing a baseball back and forth behind the counter with his coworkers. The shop was quiet, no customers in sight, just the hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint smell of fresh paint in the air.

 

Then it happened. The baseball bounced off the counter, and plop!—right into a bucket of paint!

 

The ball was ruined, dripping and shiny with thick, glossy paint. But instead of tossing it out, Mike got an idea.

 

“What if I let it dry, and then dipped it again?” he thought. - “Why not?”

 

And so he did.

 

That one messy accident turned into a project. After work, Mike would come back to the shop, brush on another layer, then another. At first it was just for fun, but soon he realized something was happening. The ball was growing, little by little, like a strange, colorful onion of dried paint.

 

By the time he hit 1,000 coats, the baseball had become something else entirely—a solid, heavy oval of color and patience. Word spread, and eventually the ball found a home at the Knightstown Children’s Home. For years it sat there, a curiosity and conversation piece, a testament to boredom turned into creativity. Generations of kids at the home saw it, tapped on it, and wondered just how many coats of paint it really had.

 

Decades passed. Life moved on. But the ball didn’t disappear.

 

In 2003, the Knightstown Children’s Home returned the ball to him. By then, he had already started on a new one—a ball that would eventually become the official “World’s Largest Ball of Paint,” with more than 30,000 layers of paint.

 

But that first ball, the one born from a dropped baseball and a bucket of blue paint, will always be where it began. It was the spark, the seed of an idea, and the proof that sometimes the biggest things in life start by accident.