At about 1:50 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, 1986, close to 1.5 million balloons boiled up from Cleveland's Public Square, engulfing Terminal Tower and setting a world record.
In the hours and days and weeks that followed, the United Way executives who had engineered the feat were reminded of the basic law of gravity: What goes up must come down.
Down, in this case, on Burke Lakefront Airport, shutting down a runway there. Down on a pasture in Medina County, spooking a horse, whose owner would sue and later settle with the charity. Down on Lake Erie, blanketing the water just as a Coast Guard helicopter arrived to search for two missing boaters -- who would later be found, drowned; the wife of one of them also sued, and also settled. Down weeks later on the shores of the lake -- the northern shores, where Ontario residents found their beaches littered with thousands of deflated balloons.
Balloonfest in 1986 was a fundraiser for United Way and a chance to put Cleveland on the map, busting a record for simultaneous release of balloons set the previous year by Anaheim, Calif., on the 30th anniversary of Disneyland. The aftermath was not something to boast about, and it seems to have faded from public memory. Cleveland Remembers was drawn to the story by a note from DRM of Lakewood, who remembered seeing a photo of the balloon-covered lake and wondered what the event was.
Cleveland.com user was the first to respond with the correct answer: "It was 1986. The United Way of Cleveland wanted to break the world record for a balloon release. I think they released 1.5 million balloons. Except the weather didn't cooperate, and it started raining right before they let them got. The winds pushed the balloons north, and the rain pushed them down into the water. I vaguely remember it, but recently found a bunch of slides a relative of mine took from the event."
We've recreated the story through The Plain Dealer's archives. Here's how the paper's Jane Kahoun described liftoff:
On Sept. 29, three paragraphs on Page 3-B reported that the Coast Guard had suspended its search for Raymond Broderick and Bernard Sulzer, two fishermen who had gone out the Friday before and were reported missing by their families Saturday when they failed to return. Their 16-foot boat was found anchored just west of the Edgewater Park breakwall. The Coast Guard guessed it had capsized in choppy waters and the men had tried to swim to the breakwall, while the boat later righted itself. Small stories in the next two weeks reported that their bodies washed ashore.
By that time, letters to the editor about Balloonfest were coming in. The event had, indeed, gotten widespread publicity. That wasn't necessarily a good thing. Floyd Riemenschneider of Yakima, Wash., wrote:
William F. Coret of Woodbine, Iowa:
By November, the balloon fallout had become international. P. Allen Woodliffe of Morpeth, Ontario, complained:
The story wasn't over. On Sept. 4, 1987, The Plain Dealer reported:
The woman, Louise Nowakowski, soon settled the suit for undisclosed terms. A year later, though, came another lawsuit over a much grimmer aspect of the event:
Gail Broderick also settled her lawsuit for undisclosed terms.
The last word on Balloonfest that we could find in the archives -- and a fitting coda -- comes from a 1994 profile of George Fraser:
There's an old saying, from an entirely different context, that says what you do is all right as long as you don't do it in the street and scare the horses. By that standard, at least, Balloonfest '86 deserves a spot in Cleveland's roll of infamy along with the burning river and the time Mayor Ralph Perk's wife turned down a White House dinner because it was her bowling night.
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