Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Balloonfest

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

In 1986 Cleveland released more than a million helium balloons at once! It didn’t go at all according to plan! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey and 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 room when the news was on and hearing about this when I was whatever, like 15. It's so sad 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 86 and it was a publicity stunt initiated by the United Way of Cleveland to basically rehabilitate Cleveland's image because back in the 80s and earlier, Cleveland did not have a very good image.

Apparently, it was referred to as the mistake on the lake, Lake Erie. The Cuyahoga River that flows through it had caught fire very famously in the 60s and it just didn't have a super good reputation. So, Cleveland said, you know what, we're going to put ourselves on the map and we're going to do that by releasing the largest number of balloons anyone's ever released and we're going to set the world record in this beautiful display of millions of balloons just floating up into this sky over Cleveland and it's going to be a new moment of rebirth for the city. The thing is, it didn't really go according to plan and kind of backfire. Yeah. I mean, first of all, this just is such an 80s thing, right? Yeah, totally. It feels just like a balloon release

like this could have only happened between 1981 and 1988. Yeah, I think you might be onto something there. Not even 89. It's just a very 80s 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 what ultimately ended up being a mistake but a good, well-intended, good-hearted mistake. Yeah. 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 the city and for the state of Ohio. Yeah. But like you said, it didn't go well. 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 in 1986 for this but Treb Heining? Yeah, who is a balloon artist and by this time a very, very famous balloon artist because he'd done balloons for like the opening ceremony of the 84 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 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 Treb Heining or Henning, I'm not sure how you say his last name, who did that and he did it actually for the third birthday of Cher and Greg Almond's son,

Elijah Blue. That's where the balloon arch came from was Cher's son's third birthday party. Yeah, I would, I did a little bit more research on Treb Heining and don't want to go down that rabbit hole but 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. Yeah. 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 right there on the public square downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Have you seen video footage of this? Oh, sure. I've been in that square. So, that structure must have been maybe the most magical place on earth for that day, for those

few hours they were filling up those balloons, don't you think? Yeah, until they released them. Yeah, right. That's the irony. It was huge. It was 250 by 150 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. Yeah. And they had student volunteers, about 2,500 student 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 there filling up helium balloons. And then when you filled it

up and tied the balloon, you just let it go and it floated up and it got was trapped by the cargo net. And as more and more balloons were just constantly being added to it, it was like this growing mass of multicolored balloons all just 30 feet above everyone's head. It was really neat to see footage of that stuff in there. And apparently they were going to go for 2 million balloons. That was the original idea. And they were going to break Disneyland's record, which must have been bittersweet for Treb Heining, from a year before for the 30th anniversary of the park. Disneyland released 1,296 balloons. And the United Way said we're going to release 2 million here in Cleveland. All right. So, that's a perfect cliffhanger.

Oh, yeah. Let's take a break and talk about what Mother Nature had to say about all of this right after this. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and

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K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you've got, well, you've got two million balloons you're going to blow up. They probably had a few spares for breakage and stuff like that. Yeah. Or poppage, as they call it in the biz. And 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. And it's late September too. Yeah, which means it's the dead of winter. Pretty much for Cleveland. No, it's fall, 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 1.5 million that still breaks the record. It still looks amazing. They start to get a little bit nervous. And then they finally said, all right, we got to go here. It's 150 on Saturday the 27th. And they lift this net off and unleash 1.5 million balloons. And it is amazing looking. It really is. Like that net was lifted off by larger balloons. And like that was pretty

cool in and of itself. But as these balloons start to move their way out from under the net, they're like, it's just like this huge, rising mass. Like they don't just immediately separate. They're 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 no, you're right. It did look like a living thing, especially because they released it right around in public square, right around the, what is it, the terminal tower, which is like a 52 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 30, 40 seconds, I would say. And then things really started to go badly. I bet people are like,

is he going to say minutes? Please say minutes. Nope, not minutes. Please say 30 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. A lot, these balloons basically just have a mind of 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 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 and she ended up suing. Yeah. I mean, like there were a lot of stories that came from, like you said, chaos that erupted from these balloons coming back down. Because, I mean, the original plan was these balloons are just going to go up, up, up and they're eventually going to start to disperse. And in the United Way's defense, the balloons were supposedly specially made natural latex balloons, which would eventually biodegrade. But they would, by the time they like came back down to the ground and lost, you know, all of their air, they would have been, you know, days or weeks later and they would have been so far separated, there shouldn't have really been any kind of problem whatsoever. No, this huge mass of a

million balloons didn't disperse at all. They just started to move together. And when you see footage of this stuff, 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 released. Oh yeah, they're coming down in the lake, they're coming down in the Cuyahoga River, they're coming down wherever they want to come down. And like we said, the one lady sued, I think, for $100,000 for those Arabian horses, undisclosed settlement. The Burke Lakefront Airport had to shut down for a half an hour. There were traffic collisions on the highways. 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, 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 were nowhere to be seen. So the Coast Guard was looking for them out on Lake Erie, which normally they may very well have found them because there's not really many things that are, say, orange, like a life jacket or white, like a head or something bobbing around in Lake Erie under normal circumstances. Because so many of these balloons came down and just landed, still inflated on the lake, the Coast Guard was like, I can't see anything. Everything looks like

an orange life vest or 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 $500,000. I think that woman's, I think one of the wives of the fishermen actually sued and again, financially not disclosed settlement. So we really don't know about these terms of these settlements, but they did spend $500,000 on the whole thing on top of these settlements. Right. So the whole thing just makes me feel terrible for the United Way, for Cleveland, for George Fraser. It's just a sad story. It really is, especially when you watch some of the news footage from that day.

They were so happy. They were so excited. They genuinely were like, this is going to turn the page for Cleveland. This will change Cleveland forever for the better. This one thing, which is pretty questionable, like putting that much stock into a balloon release in a world record, which they did get, by the way, Guinness recognized them as the largest balloon release ever. But it's still like they were trying to undo one terrible reputation for an environmental disaster, the Cuyahoga River catching fire. And they ended up replacing it with another notorious environmental disaster, these million and a half balloons just clogging up everything and screwing things up. Yeah. And I think many lessons were learned

that day. They really were. Go Browns. Don't release a million and a half balloons all at once. You got anything else? I 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 iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.