Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's
Speaker 1: Chuck and this is short stuff and one I'm excited
Speaker 1: about because I've been wanting to do this one for
Speaker 1: a very long time. Chuck. Yeah, I kind of remember
Speaker 1: this a little bit, do you a little bit? It's
Speaker 1: just it definitely when I was researching it, I was like,
Speaker 1: I think I remember just like walking through the living
Speaker 1: room when the news was on and hearing about this
Speaker 1: when I was whatever, like fifteen. It's so sad to
Speaker 1: to to think about that this happened the way that
Speaker 1: it did, because what are we talking about. We're talking
Speaker 1: about something called balloon Fest eighties six And it was
Speaker 1: a uh publicity stunt UH initiated by the United Way
Speaker 1: of Cleveland to basically rehabilitate Cleveland's image. UM, because back
Speaker 1: in the eighties and earlier, Cleveland did not have a
Speaker 1: very good image. Apparently it was referred to as the
Speaker 1: mistake on the Lake like erie um. The Coyahoga River
Speaker 1: that flows through it had caught fire very famously in
Speaker 1: the sixties, UM, and it just didn't have a super
Speaker 1: good reputation. So Cleveland said, you know what we're gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna put ourselves on the map, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: do that, um by releasing the largest number of balloons
Speaker 1: anyone's ever released, and we're gonna set the world record
Speaker 1: in this beautiful display of millions of balloons just floating
Speaker 1: up into the sky over Cleveland, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be a new moment of rebirth for this city. And
Speaker 1: the thing is it didn't really go according to plan
Speaker 1: and kind of back yeah, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: this just is such an eighties thing, right, yeah, oh yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: It feels just like a balloon release like this could
Speaker 1: have only happened between n Yeah, yeah, I think you
Speaker 1: might be onto something there, not even eight nine. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just a very eighties thing to do. And we
Speaker 1: also want to mention that we have to tell this story,
Speaker 1: but we don't want to throw United Way under the
Speaker 1: bus for their um what ultimately ended up being a mistake,
Speaker 1: but a good, well intended, goodhearted mistake. Or George Fraser,
Speaker 1: who was the employee of the Cleveland chapter of the
Speaker 1: United Way who came up with the idea. I'm sure
Speaker 1: George again was very well intended and really wanted to
Speaker 1: create a happy moment for for the city and for
Speaker 1: the state of Ohio. But like you said, it didn't
Speaker 1: go well. Um, they knew they needed a lot of balloons.
Speaker 1: And you can't just willy nilly get a bunch of
Speaker 1: balloons and some volunteers and make it happen. It needs
Speaker 1: to be planned and coordinated. So they went to who
Speaker 1: else would you go to for this but Treb Hining. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who is a balloon artist and by this time a
Speaker 1: very very famous balloon artist because he'd done balloons for
Speaker 1: like the opening ceremony any of the four Olympics in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, and he's done Super Bowls and World's Fairs.
Speaker 1: And he's also known as the man who invented the
Speaker 1: balloon arch, which you've seen a million times been and
Speaker 1: like you see that kind of thing, you never think
Speaker 1: like somebody had to be the first one to put
Speaker 1: one of those together. Well, that's true. And it was
Speaker 1: Treb Hynding or Henning, I'm not sure how you say
Speaker 1: his last name. Um, who did that. And he did
Speaker 1: it actually for the third birthday of Share and Greg
Speaker 1: Allmond's son, Elijah Blue. That's where the balloon arch came from.
Speaker 1: Was SHARE's son's third birthday party. Yeah, I would. Um.
Speaker 1: I did a little bit more research on treb Hynding
Speaker 1: and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: But he he's always been a big balloon guy. I
Speaker 1: think when he was like a teenager, he was some
Speaker 1: sort of junior balloon captain at disney World or Disneyland.
Speaker 1: So made it his career, which is really neat, and
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on this. It took about
Speaker 1: six months of planning and built a big rectangular structure
Speaker 1: right there on the public Square downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Have
Speaker 1: you have you seen? Have you seen video footage of this?
Speaker 1: And I've been in that square, So that structure must
Speaker 1: have been maybe the most magical place on earth for
Speaker 1: those for that day, for those few hours they were
Speaker 1: filling up those balloons, don't you think until they released them? Yeah? Right,
Speaker 1: that's the irony. Uh. It was huge. It was two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty by a hundred and fifty feet, about
Speaker 1: three stories tall. It's got this netting obviously to hold
Speaker 1: everything in. Apparently the same people that made the cargo
Speaker 1: nets for the Space Shuttle chipped in and made this
Speaker 1: mesh net and they had a student volunteers about student
Speaker 1: volunteers who sold these sponsorships to raise money and then
Speaker 1: blowing up these balloons. Yeah. So they were actually sitting
Speaker 1: inside this structure, which is an open air structure but
Speaker 1: was covered at the top by that cargo net, and everybody,
Speaker 1: like hundreds of them just sitting They're filling up healium balloons.
Speaker 1: And then when you filled it up and tied the balloon,
Speaker 1: you just let it go and it floated up and
Speaker 1: it got was trapped by the cargo net, and it's
Speaker 1: more and more balloons were just constantly being added to it.
Speaker 1: It was like this growing mass of multi colored balloons
Speaker 1: all just you know, thirty ft above everyone's head. It
Speaker 1: was really neat to see like footage of that stuff
Speaker 1: in there. UM. And apparently they were going to go
Speaker 1: for two million balloons. That was the original idea, UM,
Speaker 1: and they were going to break Disneyland's record UM, which
Speaker 1: must have been better sweet for Trep hinding Um from
Speaker 1: a year before for the thirtieth anniversary of the park,
Speaker 1: Disneyland released one million, two hundred thousand and nineties six balloons,
Speaker 1: and the United ways that we're gonna release two million
Speaker 1: here in Cleveland. All right, So that's a perfect cliffhanger.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break and talk about what mother Nature
Speaker 1: had to say about all of this right after this.
Speaker 1: All right, so you've got uh, well, you've got two
Speaker 1: million balloons. You're gonna blow up. They probably had a
Speaker 1: few spares for breakage and stuff like that, or poppage
Speaker 1: as they call it in the biz, and um, they're
Speaker 1: blowing these things up. The weather turns bad. It is Cleveland,
Speaker 1: it is right there on the lake, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: and the weather can be very dicey there by the lake.
Speaker 1: And it's late September too, yeah, which means it's the
Speaker 1: dead of winter pretty much. Now it's fault. But it
Speaker 1: gets really windy and really cold by the lake, like
Speaker 1: big time winds. And the weather turned bad, and they said,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's just stop at one point five million.
Speaker 1: That still breaks the record. It still looks amazing. They
Speaker 1: start to get a little bit nervious, and then they
Speaker 1: finally said, all right, we gotta go here. It's one
Speaker 1: fifty on Saturday, and they lift this net off an
Speaker 1: unleash one point five million balloons and it is amazing looking.
Speaker 1: It really is. Um like that that net was lifted
Speaker 1: off by larger balloons, and like that was pretty cool
Speaker 1: in and of itself. But as these balloons start to
Speaker 1: move their way out from under the net um, they're like,
Speaker 1: it's just like this huge writhing mass, Like they don't
Speaker 1: just immediately separate their kind of moving together as like
Speaker 1: it was like a living thing, yeah, or like a
Speaker 1: cloud rising in the sky made of balloons. But now
Speaker 1: you're right, it did look like a living thing, especially
Speaker 1: because they released it right around in public square, right
Speaker 1: around them what is the Terminal Tower, which is a
Speaker 1: like a fifty two story skyscraper in downtown Cleveland, and
Speaker 1: it just kind of like wrapped and writhed and moved
Speaker 1: around the building. It just it was really cool looking
Speaker 1: for about don't thirty forty seconds, I would say, and
Speaker 1: then things really started to go badly that people are like,
Speaker 1: is he going to say minutes, please say minutes? Nope,
Speaker 1: thirty minutes of joy, yeah, no, nothing like that. It
Speaker 1: was much more short lived than that. The joy was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So then things get weird. Um a lot these balloons
Speaker 1: basically just have a mind to their own at this point.
Speaker 1: A lot of them, because of the cold air, were
Speaker 1: just pushed back down to the ground. So imagine a
Speaker 1: million balloons and what kind of it's hard to say
Speaker 1: destruction because you're still talking about balloons, but just chaos
Speaker 1: that a million and a half balloons cause when they're
Speaker 1: coming back down to the ground in traffic and over
Speaker 1: the water and over oh, I don't know, a horse
Speaker 1: farm where a woman named Louise Nowakowski was raising some
Speaker 1: very expensive Arabian horses who freaked out and got injured
Speaker 1: and she ended up suing. Yeah. I mean, like there
Speaker 1: were a lot of stories that came from, like you said,
Speaker 1: kay as Um that that erupted from these balloons coming
Speaker 1: back down, because I mean, the original plan was these
Speaker 1: balloons were just gonna go up, up, up, and they're
Speaker 1: eventually going to start to disperse, and in in the
Speaker 1: United Ways defense, the balloons were supposed to supposedly um
Speaker 1: especially made natural latex balloons, which would eventually biodegrade. UM.
Speaker 1: But they would by the time they like came back
Speaker 1: down to the ground um and lost you know, all
Speaker 1: of their air, they would have been you know, days
Speaker 1: or weeks later, and um they would have been so
Speaker 1: far separated there shouldn't have really been any kind of
Speaker 1: problem whatsoever. The you know, this huge, massive million balloons
Speaker 1: didn't disperse at all. They just started to move together.
Speaker 1: And when you see footage of this stuff like like
Speaker 1: all over Lake Erie or coming down in fields and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, it's just it's insane, how many different
Speaker 1: how many balloons there really are just right back down
Speaker 1: on the ground a minute or so after they were
Speaker 1: really east. Oh yeah, they're coming down in the lake,
Speaker 1: They're coming down in the Cayugar River. Uh, They're they're
Speaker 1: coming down wherever they want to come down. And like
Speaker 1: we said, the one lady sued I think for a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars for those Arabian horses undisclosed settlement. Um.
Speaker 1: The Burke Lakefront Airport had to shut down for half
Speaker 1: an hour. Uh. There were traffic collisions on the highways. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then there was one sort of genuinely sad story
Speaker 1: because of some lost fishermen that the Coast Guard had
Speaker 1: to suspend their search and rescue for because of these balloons. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these two guys, um Raymond Broderick and Bernard Solzer had
Speaker 1: gone They've gone out fishing in like a little open boat,
Speaker 1: and their boat was discovered later, but they weren't they
Speaker 1: were nowhere to be seen. So the coast Guard was
Speaker 1: looking for them out on Lake Erie, which normally Um
Speaker 1: they they may very well have found them, because there's
Speaker 1: not really many things that are saying orange like a
Speaker 1: life jacket or you know, like white like a head
Speaker 1: or something bobbing around in Lake Erie under normal circumstances.
Speaker 1: Because so many of these balloons came down and just
Speaker 1: landed still inflated on the lake. The coast guard was like,
Speaker 1: I can't I can't see anything. Everything looks like an
Speaker 1: orange life fester at somebody's head bobbing. And they actually
Speaker 1: had to, like you said, call off the search because
Speaker 1: they were just getting nowhere they couldn't differentiate anything from
Speaker 1: the balloons. Yeah, the whole thing costs five hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: I think that woman's I think the one of the
Speaker 1: wives of the fishermen actually sued um and again, uh
Speaker 1: financially not disclosed settlement, so we really don't know about
Speaker 1: these terms of these settlements. But they did spend five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in the whole thing on top of these settlements.
Speaker 1: So the whole thing just makes me feel terrible for
Speaker 1: the United Way, for Cleveland, for George Fraser. It just
Speaker 1: it's just a sad story, It really is, especially when
Speaker 1: you watch some of like the news footage from that day. Um,
Speaker 1: they were so happy, they were so excited, like they
Speaker 1: genuinely were like, this is going to turn the page
Speaker 1: for Cleveland, Like this will change Cleveland forever for the better.
Speaker 1: This one thing, which is pretty questionable, you know, like
Speaker 1: putting that much stock into a balloon release in a
Speaker 1: world record, which they did get by the way. They
Speaker 1: did a Guinness recognize them as the largest balloon release ever. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's still like they were they were trying to
Speaker 1: undo one, um terrible reputation for an environmental disaster, the
Speaker 1: Coyahoga River catching fire, and they ended up replacing it
Speaker 1: with another notorious environmental disaster. These a million and a
Speaker 1: half balloons just clogging up everything and screwing things up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, I think many lessons were learned that day.
Speaker 1: They really weren't. Don't release a million and a half
Speaker 1: balloons all at once. Have you got anything else? I
Speaker 1: got nothing else. I love you, Cleveland. Yeah, way to go, Cleveland.
Speaker 1: We still love you no matter what. And since we
Speaker 1: said that, everybody that means, of course, that short stuff
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