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 a little bit. It definitely when I was researching, it 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 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 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 in 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 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 the sky over Cleveland. And it's going to be a new moment of rebirth for the city. And the thing is, it didn't really go according to plan and kind of back.

Yeah, I mean, first of all. This is such an 80s thing, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. It feels just like a balloon release like this could have only happened between 1981 and 1988.

Yeah, yeah. I think you might be on to something. They're not even Eighty-Nine. 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 their 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 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 Haining. 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 affairs. 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 to put one of those together.

Well, that's true. And it was Treb Haining 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 Orman 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 Haining 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 have you seen video footage of this? Oh, sure. So 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? Yeah, until they release them. Yeah. All right. That's the irony. It was huge. It was two hundred and fifty by one 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 the cargo nets for the space shuttle chipped in and made this mesh net. Yeah. And they had student volunteers, about 2500 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 in 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, you know, 30 feet above everyone's head.

It was really neat to see, like footage of that stuff in there. And apparently they were going to go for two million balloons. That was the original idea. And they were going to break Disneyland's record, which must have been bittersweet for Treb Haining from a year before. For the 30th anniversary of the park, Disneyland released one million two hundred thousand and 96 balloons. And The United Way said, we're going to release two 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.

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 Papic, as they call it in the biz. Yeah. 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. Cleveland, you know, 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 one point five 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 and that off and unleash one point five 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 still like this huge writhing mass, like they don't just immediately separate.

They're kind of moving together is like it was like a living thing.

Yeah. Or like a cloud rising in the sky made of balloons. But, you know, 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 in 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, that people are like, is he going to say minutes, please say minutes? Nope. Not 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 plane was these balloons were 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 supposed to supposedly especially 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 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 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. The BRK 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 Sulzer, had gone they've gone out fishing in 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 they may very well have found them because there's not really many things that are, say, 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 landed, still inflated on the lake.

The Coast Guard was like, I can't I can't see anything. Everything looks like 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 cost five hundred thousand dollars. I think that woman's I think the one of the wives of the fisherman actually sued and again, financially not disclosed settlement. Right. So we really don't know about these terms of these settlements, but they did spend five hundred thousand dollars 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 just 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, 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 putting that much stock into a balloon release in a world record, which they did get, by the way. They did the Guinness recognized them as the largest balloon release ever. But it's still like they were 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 a 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 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 I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?