Short Stuff: Balloonfest

In 1986 Cleveland released more than a million helium balloons at once! It didn’t go at all according to plan!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and this is short stuff and one I'm excited
about because I've been wanting to do this one for
a very long time. Chuck. Yeah, I kind of remember
this a little bit, do you a little bit? It's
just it definitely when I was researching it, I was like,
I think I remember just like walking through the living

(00:25):
room when the news was on and hearing about this
when I was whatever, like fifteen. It's so sad to
to to think about that this happened the way that
it did, because what are we talking about. We're talking
about something called balloon Fest eighties six And it was
a uh publicity stunt UH initiated by the United Way

(00:46):
of Cleveland to basically rehabilitate Cleveland's image. UM, because back
in the eighties and earlier, Cleveland did not have a
very good image. Apparently it was referred to as the
mistake on the Lake like erie um. The Coyahoga River
that flows through it had caught fire very famously in

(01:09):
the sixties, UM, and it just didn't have a super
good reputation. So Cleveland said, you know what we're gonna
We're gonna put ourselves on the map, and we're gonna
do that, um by releasing the largest number of balloons
anyone's ever released, and we're gonna set the world record
in this beautiful display of millions of balloons just floating

(01:32):
up into the sky over Cleveland, and it's going to
be a new moment of rebirth for this city. And
the thing is it didn't really go according to plan
and kind of back yeah, I mean, first of all,
this just is such an eighties thing, right, yeah, oh yeah, totally.
It feels just like a balloon release like this could

(01:54):
have only happened between n Yeah, yeah, I think you
might be onto something there, not even eight nine. Um,
it's just a very eighties thing to do. And we
also want to mention that we have to tell this story,
but we don't want to throw United Way under the
bus for their um what ultimately ended up being a mistake,

(02:14):
but a good, well intended, goodhearted mistake. Or George Fraser,
who was the employee of the Cleveland chapter of the
United Way who came up with the idea. I'm sure
George again was very well intended and really wanted to
create a happy moment for for the city and for
the state of Ohio. But like you said, it didn't

(02:36):
go well. Um, they knew they needed a lot of balloons.
And you can't just willy nilly get a bunch of
balloons and some volunteers and make it happen. It needs
to be planned and coordinated. So they went to who
else would you go to for this but Treb Hining. Yeah,
who is a balloon artist and by this time a
very very famous balloon artist because he'd done balloons for

(02:58):
like the opening ceremony any of the four Olympics in
Los Angeles, and he's done Super Bowls and World's Fairs.
And he's also known as the man who invented the
balloon arch, which you've seen a million times been and
like you see that kind of thing, you never think
like somebody had to be the first one to put
one of those together. Well, that's true. And it was

(03:19):
Treb Hynding or Henning, I'm not sure how you say
his last name. Um, who did that. And he did
it actually for the third birthday of Share and Greg
Allmond's son, Elijah Blue. That's where the balloon arch came from.
Was SHARE's son's third birthday party. Yeah, I would. Um.
I did a little bit more research on treb Hynding

(03:41):
and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
But he he's always been a big balloon guy. I
think when he was like a teenager, he was some
sort of junior balloon captain at disney World or Disneyland.
So made it his career, which is really neat, and
spent a lot of time on this. It took about
six months of planning and built a big rectangular structure

(04:02):
right there on the public Square downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Have
you have you seen? Have you seen video footage of this?
And I've been in that square, So that structure must
have been maybe the most magical place on earth for
those for that day, for those few hours they were
filling up those balloons, don't you think until they released them? Yeah? Right,

(04:23):
that's the irony. Uh. It was huge. It was two
hundred and fifty by a hundred and fifty feet, about
three stories tall. It's got this netting obviously to hold
everything in. Apparently the same people that made the cargo
nets for the Space Shuttle chipped in and made this
mesh net and they had a student volunteers about student

(04:44):
volunteers who sold these sponsorships to raise money and then
blowing up these balloons. Yeah. So they were actually sitting
inside this structure, which is an open air structure but
was covered at the top by that cargo net, and everybody,
like hundreds of them just sitting They're filling up healium balloons.
And then when you filled it up and tied the balloon,
you just let it go and it floated up and

(05:06):
it got was trapped by the cargo net, and it's
more and more balloons were just constantly being added to it.
It was like this growing mass of multi colored balloons
all just you know, thirty ft above everyone's head. It
was really neat to see like footage of that stuff
in there. UM. And apparently they were going to go
for two million balloons. That was the original idea, UM,

(05:28):
and they were going to break Disneyland's record UM, which
must have been better sweet for Trep hinding Um from
a year before for the thirtieth anniversary of the park,
Disneyland released one million, two hundred thousand and nineties six balloons,
and the United ways that we're gonna release two million
here in Cleveland. All right, So that's a perfect cliffhanger.

(05:52):
Let's take a break and talk about what mother Nature
had to say about all of this right after this.

(06:18):
All right, so you've got uh, well, you've got two
million balloons. You're gonna blow up. They probably had a
few spares for breakage and stuff like that, or poppage
as they call it in the biz, and um, they're
blowing these things up. The weather turns bad. It is Cleveland,
it is right there on the lake, like you mentioned,
and the weather can be very dicey there by the lake.

(06:39):
And it's late September too, yeah, which means it's the
dead of winter pretty much. Now it's fault. But it
gets really windy and really cold by the lake, like
big time winds. And the weather turned bad, and they said,
you know what, let's just stop at one point five million.
That still breaks the record. It still looks amazing. They
start to get a little bit nervious, and then they

(07:01):
finally said, all right, we gotta go here. It's one
fifty on Saturday, and they lift this net off an
unleash one point five million balloons and it is amazing looking.
It really is. Um like that that net was lifted
off by larger balloons, and like that was pretty cool
in and of itself. But as these balloons start to

(07:21):
move their way out from under the net um, they're like,
it's just like this huge writhing mass, Like they don't
just immediately separate their kind of moving together as like
it was like a living thing, yeah, or like a
cloud rising in the sky made of balloons. But now
you're right, it did look like a living thing, especially
because they released it right around in public square, right

(07:44):
around them what is the Terminal Tower, which is a
like a fifty two story skyscraper in downtown Cleveland, and
it just kind of like wrapped and writhed and moved
around the building. It just it was really cool looking
for about don't thirty forty seconds, I would say, and
then things really started to go badly that people are like,

(08:07):
is he going to say minutes, please say minutes? Nope,
thirty minutes of joy, yeah, no, nothing like that. It
was much more short lived than that. The joy was. Yeah,
So then things get weird. Um a lot these balloons
basically just have a mind to their own at this point.
A lot of them, because of the cold air, were
just pushed back down to the ground. So imagine a
million balloons and what kind of it's hard to say

(08:31):
destruction because you're still talking about balloons, but just chaos
that a million and a half balloons cause when they're
coming back down to the ground in traffic and over
the water and over oh, I don't know, a horse
farm where a woman named Louise Nowakowski was raising some
very expensive Arabian horses who freaked out and got injured

(08:54):
and she ended up suing. Yeah. I mean, like there
were a lot of stories that came from, like you said,
kay as Um that that erupted from these balloons coming
back down, because I mean, the original plan was these
balloons were just gonna go up, up, up, and they're
eventually going to start to disperse, and in in the
United Ways defense, the balloons were supposed to supposedly um

(09:17):
especially made natural latex balloons, which would eventually biodegrade. UM.
But they would by the time they like came back
down to the ground um and lost you know, all
of their air, they would have been you know, days
or weeks later, and um they would have been so
far separated there shouldn't have really been any kind of

(09:38):
problem whatsoever. The you know, this huge, massive million balloons
didn't disperse at all. They just started to move together.
And when you see footage of this stuff like like
all over Lake Erie or coming down in fields and
stuff like that, it's just it's insane, how many different
how many balloons there really are just right back down
on the ground a minute or so after they were

(09:59):
really east. Oh yeah, they're coming down in the lake,
They're coming down in the Cayugar River. Uh, They're they're
coming down wherever they want to come down. And like
we said, the one lady sued I think for a
hundred thousand dollars for those Arabian horses undisclosed settlement. Um.
The Burke Lakefront Airport had to shut down for half
an hour. Uh. There were traffic collisions on the highways. Uh.

(10:23):
And then there was one sort of genuinely sad story
because of some lost fishermen that the Coast Guard had
to suspend their search and rescue for because of these balloons. Yeah,
these two guys, um Raymond Broderick and Bernard Solzer had
gone They've gone out fishing in like a little open boat,
and their boat was discovered later, but they weren't they

(10:45):
were nowhere to be seen. So the coast Guard was
looking for them out on Lake Erie, which normally Um
they they may very well have found them, because there's
not really many things that are saying orange like a
life jacket or you know, like white like a head
or something bobbing around in Lake Erie under normal circumstances.
Because so many of these balloons came down and just

(11:08):
landed still inflated on the lake. The coast guard was like,
I can't I can't see anything. Everything looks like an
orange life fester at somebody's head bobbing. And they actually
had to, like you said, call off the search because
they were just getting nowhere they couldn't differentiate anything from
the balloons. Yeah, the whole thing costs five hundred thousand dollars.
I think that woman's I think the one of the

(11:31):
wives of the fishermen actually sued um and again, uh
financially not disclosed settlement, so we really don't know about
these terms of these settlements. But they did spend five
thousand dollars in the whole thing on top of these settlements.
So the whole thing just makes me feel terrible for
the United Way, for Cleveland, for George Fraser. It just

(11:53):
it's just a sad story, It really is, especially when
you watch some of like the news footage from that day. Um,
they were so happy, they were so excited, like they
genuinely were like, this is going to turn the page
for Cleveland, Like this will change Cleveland forever for the better.
This one thing, which is pretty questionable, you know, like

(12:14):
putting that much stock into a balloon release in a
world record, which they did get by the way. They
did a Guinness recognize them as the largest balloon release ever. Um,
but it's still like they were they were trying to
undo one, um terrible reputation for an environmental disaster, the
Coyahoga River catching fire, and they ended up replacing it

(12:37):
with another notorious environmental disaster. These a million and a
half balloons just clogging up everything and screwing things up. Yeah,
and uh, I think many lessons were learned that day.
They really weren't. Don't release a million and a half
balloons all at once. Have you got anything else? I

(12:58):
got nothing else. I love you, Cleveland. Yeah, way to go, Cleveland.
We still love you no matter what. And since we
said that, everybody that means, of course, that short stuff
is out. Stuff you should Know is a production of
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