Balloonfest ‘86! with Harmony Colangelo

The city of Cleveland will not be made to apologize for its balloons. Harmony Colangelo defends the mistake on the lake.

You can find Harmony on This Ends at Prom. 

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Transcript

YWA - Balloonfest 

Sarah: If you've never driven into or out of a major city late at night while listening to Bat Out of Hell, then you got to do it. 

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Cleveland's Balloonfest of 1986 with Harmony Colangelo.

Harmony was last with us for an episode about Tiny Tim, and today we are tiptoeing through the tulips again to talk about what it means when a city tries to jumpstart its renaissance by releasing more balloons than the human brain can conceive of. And perhaps even more importantly, what happens to all those balloons? 

This is a conversation about balloons, balloon-related folly, but also about what it's like to love and defend a city. And also to love a city, not in spite of its flaws, but in a way where its flaws and its problems make you love it more, because you want to try and help it be a better place. And that is a conversation that's close to my heart as a Portlander. 

So in this patchwork country made of struggling cities, here's a conversation between two girls from two cities, but boy, are there a lot of other ones. And I bet you will hear one or two things that feel very familiar to you if you have your own struggling city that you love.

This was a really lovely episode to record with Harmony, who you can also listen to on This Ends at Prom, the podcast that she co-hosts with her wife, BJ Colangelo. It is required listening, especially in the summertime. It's focused on teenage girl-centric cinema, need I say more. And I just loved getting to think out loud with her about what it feels like to belong to a city and for a city to belong to you, and the ways that not just cities but people try to reinvent themselves, and what it means when we stop trying to run away from what we might be afraid we are. 

If you like these episodes, if you're looking for more, we do have bonus content on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions for you. We just finished our Britney Spears saga with Eve Lindley, which I believe is about six hours long in total, so if you have a road trip coming up I recommend it. 

Thank you so much for listening to this tale with us. Thank you for getting through the summer with us. Thank you for being here. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we learn about America's folly. Today, we get to do a folly that involves so many balloons, and we're talking about it with Harmony Calangelo. Hello. 

Harmony: Hello, Sarah. 

Sarah: You are our foremost Tiny Tim expert on the show. We had you on not long ago in an episode that I loved seeing the response to among people who knew there had to be something interesting about the person who sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips, but didn't know what. And I feel like with that episode and now our conversation today, we're establishing you with a certain type of beat, but I wonder what name you would give to it. 

Harmony: Oh, I haven't the faintest, but it sure is just a really downtrodden trashy beat, isn't it? 

Sarah: It's like something that seems whimsical on the surface, but then with every subsequent inch you learn more about just the sadness in which we all live, I guess.

Harmony: Yeah, that's the human condition. 

Sarah: You're on the human condition beat. Somebody actually wrote in to suggest this idea. And people suggest all kinds of ideas for the show all the time. And many of them are great, but just not the kind of thing that I feel like this is the right show for, or that I'm the right co- host to talk about. But let me read you an email that I got. 

Subject, “Balloonfest 1986”. Heather Klinkhammer writes, “I really hope you do a story on the strange disaster that was Balloonfest 1986. A rescue called off, airports and roads closed, weather and ecological issues, the aspirations of a struggling city dashed, and poor Canada ended up with thousands of deflated balloons.”

Harmony: Why yes, they did. 

Sarah: This is funny to me somehow. It's like the role of Canada through the ages to accept our deflated balloons. 

Harmony: Balloonfest is just technically an international incident. 

Sarah: It's like a friendlier three-mile island in a way. 

Harmony: Yeah. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I just loved getting that email because I was like, that is the perfect topic. It's the porridge that Goldilocks ate. And you had brought this up to me before. I know that you are the person I learned about this from, or you and BJ anyway.

Harmony: Oh yeah. The day I was getting a tattoo of Balloonfest, Sarah goes, “Hey, do you want to do an episode on Balloonfest?” And I go, “Sarah, I need you to know something about what I'm doing right now.” 

I love Balloonfest. I'm fascinated by Balloonfest. It is one of the most Cleveland events that I can imagine. 

Sarah: Is it a good place to start by asking, what is Cleveland? Where should we begin? 

Harmony: Okay. Sarah, I'm sure that you, as someone who hasn't been to Cleveland, understand that Cleveland is routinely the butt of the joke in America. This and Detroit are pretty much the two that everyone punches down at all the time. 

Sarah: Yeah, Wisconsin is thanking its lucky stars that it has neighbors more famous for screwing up cities than it is. 

Harmony: Well, going all the way back to Cleveland, which used to be a big deal when a lot of different things in America were a big deal.

Sarah: I don't think Portland ever used to be a big deal.

Harmony: I don't know. It's got a cultural footprint that people appreciate. 

Sarah: Yeah, we're as big as we've ever been. We invented beer that tastes like things that it shouldn't. 

Harmony: Yeah. Delicious. In the 1800s, Cleveland was very attractive and very enticing for big businesses who wanted to set up some American industry, because there were large deposits of iron and coal near the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga River is very important to Cleveland for many reasons because it was a very important waterway for industry, and it also kind of started the reputation of Cleveland being a disgusting mistake on the lake.

Sarah: Oh yeah, that's mean. If you say it with enjoyment then I get that, but yeah, I don't know. 

Harmony: If you're not from Cleveland, you can't say ‘mistake on the lake’. That's our term. 

Sarah: As with all things, seems right. 

Harmony: So in 1968, the Cuyahoga River catches on fire for the first time. Over the next hundred years, it would do so 11 more times.

Sarah: I remember learning about this from friends from Cleveland in grad school and being like, wow, that is the kind of thing that you would expect a city to only have happened to it once. But again, I have to feel like maybe there were larger forces at fault here. 

Harmony: Yeah, unfortunately things like steel production and coal are not exactly good for the environment. They were just casually dumping things in the river so it would get washed down the stream and they wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. And as a result, I believe I remember reading once that the Cuyahoga River, at its worst, was not a city that one would drown in, but that one would decay in.

Sarah: So we were just talking the other day because I was like, Harmony, I couldn't sleep the other night and I was on Wikipedia for three hours. You want to hear about it? And you're like, I guess. And I was like, okay, great. 

Harmony: Always. 

Sarah: There's this ecological disaster I had never heard of before and I've been needing to tell everyone about. Basically in the early 70s, there was a company manufacturing various chemical products because for household use, basically, that created dioxin as a byproduct. Dioxin is the active ingredient in Agent Orange. 

And they were supposed to incinerate it, but it was more expensive than they wanted, apparently. And so they contracted disposing it to a company who contracted, to quote Eve Lindley in the Crossroads episode, “just some guy” to dispose of several truckloads of dioxin. And for reasons that I think maybe have been lost to time, but we don't know how much he knew or how much he was told. But basically he decided to mix it with a bunch of used oil, which and his main business was disposing of used motor oil, and then he had come up with this method where he would spray the oil onto like dirt roads or like a paddock at a stables to keep dust down. 

And so basically, by the mid 80s, after an eventual investigation from the EPA, the entire town of Times Beach, Missouri was just evacuated and no one could live there or go there for 15 years. 

Harmony: So many poisoned people. 

Sarah: Yeah. And as with, I think the story many of us learned by reading Silent Spring, that the animal sickness and death was the first clue of danger to humans. And talking about Cleveland and the kind of industry that we were getting up to in mid-century America and the scientific advances we had made during and as a result of World War I, that we then took several decades to appreciate any consequences of. It does feel like there's a sort of a gap or something in terms of- and not that we're not still in it now, or not that we ever left it really, of scientific and industrial advancement outpacing our ability or our willingness to regulate by light years.

Harmony: Oh, definitely. 

Sarah: Again, it's like yeah, that is a lot of times for a river to catch fire. But it feels like, I don't know, that like the people of Cleveland or any place where that happens deserve a reputation as people whose fault it wasn't, right? Because it's actually the fault of a pretty small number of people when that happens.

Harmony: So infamously, the biggest fire during all of this, of which, it wasn't the citizens fault. This was just another facet of the day. The 1952 fire, that one was very, very big. If you look up the Cuyahoga River catching on fire, that is the first result you will get back. Firefighters on a bridge trying to put out a flaming river as it engulfs ships. 

Sarah: Is the river just very full of flammable things? What's going on there? 

Harmony: Yes. There's a lot of oil and grease and things that probably should have been disposed of in other ways, and it all floats to the top. If you ever go to a gas station and you can see the beautiful, colorful pools of gas that just sit on top of the pavement. 

Sarah: That beautiful rainbow gas.

Harmony: It looks nice. 

Sarah: Flammable things are often very pretty. 

Harmony: Exactly. So that's the part that's on the top of the water. 

Sarah: Yep. What a great science lesson. 

Harmony: Yes. The “final” time, and I say final in quotes, because in like 2019, I believe, the river caught on fire. But that wasn't our fault. There was a drainage thing that something leaked into while already on fire. We cleaned up the river by then. It wasn't the citizens or even capitalism's fault that time, that was just a fluke accident. 

Sarah: That was just for nostalgia sake.

Harmony: We love a call back. 

Sarah: Ah, it's a reprise.

Harmony: In 1969 the river catches on fire and local news doesn't even really report on it because they're like, yeah, whatever, this happens. Okay, fine. They put out the fire so quickly that there are no known photographs of the incident. I'm talking like twenty minutes they had it down. However, this incident was famous because there was wind that was caught by other parts of the country of, what the fuck? Why is this river catching on fire?

Sarah: Yeah. And I bet if you're in a city that has other problems, you can be like, at least we haven't caught a river on fire. 

Harmony: Yeah. It's priorities. That's really what I think most cities love to do with Cleveland is, we're better than Cleveland. That's one of the jokes that people like to make. Cleveland is generally like the archetype of the downtrodden, dirty city by most American pop culture. 

Sarah: I think the lazy cliche for Americans historically has been Detroit is the city you fear, and Cleveland is the city you pity. 

Harmony: Yeah. So this incident, which was not a big deal at the time. For context, the ‘52 fire caused about $1.5 million worth of damage. The one in ‘69 was only $50,000. So this event ends up getting covered in Time Magazine. Fire of the year. And they end up using a photo of the 1952 fire. 

Sarah: Oh! 

Harmony: They false advertised this fire as being far more disastrous than it was. 

Sarah: Of course. When I think of Time Magazine handling something badly, I think of obvious unchecked sexism and racism and internalized bias among writers. I don't think of actual misrepresentation of photos. 

Harmony: Here's where Cleveland kind of steps up and is great. Two years earlier, we elected this guy, Carl Stokes. Dude's the man. He is one of the best mayors Cleveland ever had. His big legacy is he set in motion all the things that cleaned up the Cuyahoga River.  He appeared before the Senate and said, “We have the kind of air and water pollution problems in this city that are every bit as dangerous for the health and safety of our citizens as any intercontinental ballistic missiles that are so dramatically poised 5,000 miles from our country.” 

His whole stance was essentially like, as the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city, he was like, this is going to negatively impact people who can't afford to move out of the suburbs. This is going to impact people who have industry set up in their neighborhoods because it's easier to do it and it will harm all of them. He succeeds with this and a joint effort of sit in that would become Earth Day. This causes Richard Nixon to establish the EPA. 

Sarah: That's why they got to evacuate that town in Missouri. 

Harmony: Yes. So because of pollution, the Cuyahoga River does not catch on fire again. That's great. Unfortunately, this is 1969. The 1970s were very hard on working class industrial cities like Cleveland, as all of our jobs and our industry was taken away.

Sarah: When I was a kid and just learning about America through NPR terminology that people used without explaining. I was like, I guess the term “rust belt” is neutral because they have the rust industry there. It took me a long time to work out, as with many obvious things, that it was implying that it was an industrial area that had fallen into decay. Is that correct? And I was just like well, I like rust. It's a pretty color. 

Harmony: Exactly. I use the phrase that “there's rust in my blood” because I was born and raised in Northeast Ohio. But I will say that the 70s and 80s were not a kind time to this city. 

For example, I will say that the city has tried to rehab its image, but it's really hard to do when steelworkers and actual manpower is primarily what your city is based on, and they're all losing their jobs. The automotive industry, obviously, in Cleveland and Detroit collapsed. 

Sarah: And I think I didn't associate Ohio so strongly with the automotive industry because it's just, yeah. 

Harmony: It's not known for it as much as Detroit is, because that was obviously the Motor City. But it exists throughout that entire part of the country, or at least it did at one point. 

Sarah: Right.

Harmony: So if your city was dirty, but you've been cleaning it up and you helped found the EPA. If your city had industry, but it's losing industry, what is your city known for? What kind of is there? What is your cultural identity? 

Cleveland did have some significant musical exports in the 70s. It broke like David Bowie and Rush into America. Cleveland International Records is what produced Bat Out of Hell, one of the biggest albums of all time. Cleveland had some stuff going on. 

Sarah: If you've never driven into or out of a major city late at night while listening to Bat Out of Hell, then you got to do it. 

Harmony: God, it's the best, right? That's the cultural identity of Cleveland that I love very much. And also in a very hilarious, morbid way, here's a list of events that could probably be You’re Wrong About episodes on their own. 

So there's 10 cent beer night, in which at a baseball game, they decided to be nostalgic, always good, and sell beers for 10 cents a piece. But people were only allowed to get six beers. 

Sarah: And I bet that they complied after their sixth beer. They're like, okay, thank you for cutting me off. That's nice of you. 

Harmony: They can only get six per purchase. So they were going back many times to get more and more beer. 

Sarah: Oh, boy. I know that there are a lot of implications, but one of my first thoughts is just urinal capacity.

Harmony: Oh, at a ballpark? Oh, it's heinous. At Old Jacob's Field? No, there's no way that's good. 

Sarah: What was the inevitable outcome? 

Harmony: Oh, many fights. The baseball teams needed to retreat to their dugouts with bats and defend themselves. It's a hilarious tragedy that is retold in the cynical Christmas classic, in quotes, Uncle Nick, starring Brian Poussin.

Sarah: Nice. 

Harmony: So we get that. That's fun. Cleveland got a reputation in the 70s as Bomb City, USA, because with poverty comes, of course, organized crime. But in this case, it's the Irish versus the Italian mobs, and Cleveland became the top city in the country for car bombs. 

Sarah: Really? Wow. That's awful. 

Harmony: Isn't it just? So the 70s are still plugging along. They try to rehab the city's image with the slogan, “New York is the Big Apple, but Cleveland's a Plum”. Oh, as in like a plum job. 

Sarah: Yep. A saying that I feel was already kind of grandma-ish at the time. 

Harmony: Huh. It was very fuddy duddy.

Sarah: Welcome to Cleveland. Fewer car bombs this year. 

Harmony: We had our crumbling industry. All of our sports teams were, they're pretty notoriously bad usually, but they were not great in the 70s. But we get to the 80s, we get to 1986, things are looking good. We're getting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, much to the country's dismay, because they're like, why is it going to Cleveland?

Sarah: Why did it go to Cleveland? 

Harmony: Cleveland can lay claim to it because we had the Moondog Coronation Ball in 1951, 1952, I don't remember exactly the year, but it's commonly believed to be the first ever rock concert. 

Sarah: Whoa. 

Harmony: And it has its own set of Ten Cent Beer Night shenanigans. But we have so many things to talk about, so we're just going to keep moving on.

Sarah: Just implied shenanigans all around. 

Harmony: Yes, that's why Cleveland defended it. The reality of it is, as I have read over the years, we got the Rock Hall because we were like, please, we'll pay for building the museum. Just put it here. 

Sarah: Please give us something. We know we're not going to get the Olympics.

Harmony: So ‘86 is a good year for Cleveland, with all of this said, we have finally made it to Balloonfest. You now understand why Cleveland needed a win. Yeah, let's go. 

Sarah: And the great American belief system is all about second acts. So this is going to be their second act.

Harmony: Oh, yeah. So I'm going to tell you a campfire story about September 27th, 1986, the site of Cleveland Balloonfest. 

The United Way of Greater Cleveland wanted to pull a publicity stunt to get Cleveland back on the map, investing half a million dollars in the event and orchestrated by the LA based company Balloon Art by Treb. The titular Treb is Treb Heining, a balloon artist who wished to break the record for the most balloons ever released, breaking a previous Guinness World Record set in Anaheim for the 30th anniversary of Disneyland the previous year. It was between 1 and 1.2 million balloons released for that event. 

Sarah: I like that Disney couldn't quite keep track. They were like, I don't know, we got it down within 200,000 balloons. 

Harmony: Yeah. Most people say a million, but I've seen some sources say it goes up to 1.2. 

Sarah: Nice. Yeah. 

Harmony: A little bit of wiggle room. 

Sarah: My brain cannot even visualize how many balloons that would look like. I feel like maybe there's a Caroline Calloway moment when all the yet to be inflated balloons arrived and they're like, “Jesus Christ!” 

Harmony: Just a giant like dumped truck full of un-inflated balloons. 

Sarah: And then you would worry about storing them because what if it heats up in there and it catches fire in the middle. I mean it didn't happen this time, but you got to be careful. 

Harmony: Oh there was planning. So Treb's a balloon artist. He actually is the man who I believe invented the balloon arch. 

Sarah: Really? 

Harmony: He's got his own backstory that I didn't read as much about. But he started working for Disney. He became like the premier balloon artist in the country. He's the guy you get for something like this. 

Sarah: It was a Wild West at the time, for balloons. 

Harmony: Yeah. They were big and they were colorful, and people saw them as this exciting kind of event. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I realized that balloons are a little complicated. Because my understanding is that, as with most things on the planet, there's a limited supply of helium. And once we use it all up, we're just going to not have any. And that's wild, but yes, I love balloons. Humans are fragile, little creatures who love shiny things and brightly colored things and things that fly around in the sky, and I really love that about us. 

Harmony: Six months of planning go into this event. 

Sarah: Beautiful. 

Harmony: That includes getting clearance from Cleveland Hopkins Airport, fire, police, getting the logistics for bussing kids to the event, getting port-a-potties the works for what you need of something of this scale. 

Sarah: If you're going to have a bad idea, at least plan ahead. 

Harmony: No, this was done by capable people. 

Sarah: Yeah, and by grown-ups, importantly. 

Harmony: It was ran by grown-ups. I will say that leading up to the event, kids, literal teenagers, sold tickets and or notes that could be attached to the balloons to help raise money to offset the cost of such an event. 

The majority of the people who inflated these balloons were high school students. The balloon box that housed the one and a half million balloons that they had, was constructed in Cleveland Public Square in front of Terminal Tower. Which some of you might recognize from various films. In Marvel's The Avengers, Tom Hiddleston has to tell a bunch of Germans to kneel, cause that's Germany. Nope, that's Cleveland, the site of BalloonFest. 

Sarah: God, love the idea of Loki being like, “Kneel, this is the site of Balloonfest, show a little respect.” 

Harmony: The thing is, a bunch of Clevelanders would just be like, No, fuck you. Oh, that's the best thing about it. 

So that is the scene of where we are setting these balloons loose. The pen that all of these balloons were housed in was 250 feet by 150 feet, and it was three stories tall. 

Sarah: The scale is incredible, and it reminds me of learning about the structures, the huge boxes they had to place on the river floor when they were building the Brooklyn Bridge, I think.

Harmony: Mr. Treb Heining, that man is a California boy. Here is what he had to say about the weather in Cleveland. 

Sarah: Oh boy. 

Harmony: “We almost got wiped out the night before with hurricane force winds. I'm a California kid. I'd never experienced anything like that before. I've been doing events for almost 10 years, I always had good luck, but I was afraid that my luck almost ran out.” 

That's the thing about Cleveland weather is, people generally say the weather's pretty crummy. Honestly, today in California, it's overcast and like 69 degrees, which is about what it was the day of Balloonfest. People don't tend to compliment the weather in Cleveland, but it's pretty non-lethal for the most part. The cold might get you, but for the most part, it's not hostile weather. It's just not nice weather. 

Sarah: Yeah. And this is in September. So it's not like we're in winter storm season either. 

Harmony: Exactly. 

Sarah: You can't plan for the weather, but you can plan for some reasonable predictions of what the weather could be, I think.

Harmony: Right. So the weather's going to play a big factor in Balloonfest here. 

Sarah: Oh boy. 

Harmony: The night before the event, there were 40 to 60 mile an hour winds reported, with heavy downpours that flooded some streets. Reports of the night described trash cans flying down the street and the entire balloon structure flapping in the wind.

Sarah: By your standards, would that have been pretty hard to expect for that time of year? 

Harmony: It's not totally out of the question. That's just a thing that can happen. You certainly can't figure that out six months in advance. And it's not like you can just put the balloons away. Once you've started, there's no going back with this event.

Sarah: Right, I mean, actually it is in that way like the other 1986 event, the launch of the Challenger, where it came down to doing it now or never. 

Harmony: The entire basis of making balloons and launching them as helium, and helium doesn't stay in balloons for very long. So this is either all or nothing. This is do it or bust. 

Sarah: And that is the kind of thing that you can imagine, and this is comparatively low stakes, but yeah, so many disasters. There's a certain number of things that seem dodgy to various extents, but there's often a sense of, it'll be fine. It'll probably be fine. It'll be fine, I bet. 

Harmony: Between 2,500 and 3,000 plus volunteers, most of which were high school students that I heard referred to in one article as “Treb's Balloon Platoon”, they worked nonstop to inflate just shy of 1.5 million balloons for the launch. These teens were expected to do roughly 700 balloons in one day, with many getting blisters on their fingertips. In coverage of the event, most volunteers can be seen with bandages on their finger, either because they got blisters or to prevent future sores. 

Sarah: And may I just say, okay, 700 balloons a day, if you do the simplest math possible. So 10 hours is 70 balloons an hour, which is over one balloon a minute.

Harmony: Something like that. So there was a 70 percent chance of rain the day of Balloonfest. It had stormed the night before. That kind of weather doesn't usually just go away in Cleveland, it tends to linger. So there's a cold front coming in and showers expected to start around 2:30. That is the time of the launch.

Sarah: It would have maybe made more sense to do it in summer, but they didn't. So, okay. 

Harmony: Yeah, no I agree. To beat the weather, the launch was pushed up to 2:00, or 1:50 by some accounts I've seen. Some spectators very nearly missed the event, but even with the adjusted time, the rain started just as they released the balloons.

Sarah: Oh, man. 

Harmony: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no mistake on the lake anymore”, shouted Little John Rinaldi of local late night fame as one half of the famed Big Chuck and Little John show. 

Sarah: Because we're all going to die today. 

Harmony: He screams this as the swarm of balloons lifts into the air and engulfs Terminal Tower. So the crowd cheers, people are like, “Yeah, Cleveland”. They are stoked. Mics for reporting are being clipped by cheers. Everyone is so jazzed about this. And I'm going to be honest, it looks awesome. It looks great. The iconography is stellar. 

Sarah: When I got this email from Heather, I looked at footage of it and it is spectacular. And the balloons from that distance, that many of them look like a visualization of red blood cells moving through an artery or something. And it also looks like the bees in Candyman, which I want to believe was slightly inspired by this. But it is stunning. On some level, I get excited whenever I see humans make something much bigger than ourselves.

Harmony: Yeah this feels like the indomitable human spirit as these balloons almost create a hand that looks like it's going to rip Tower City out of the ground. As it wraps around the skyscraper, it looks ominous and violent and colorful and lovely. It's great. 

So because of the weather, originally it was expected that only about 10% or 150,000 balloons would descend back onto Cleveland.

Sarah: Which is a lot of balloons.

Harmony: It's a lot, but in reality it was closer to 60%, which was about a million, like 900,000, give or take. So this descends back onto the city. This was within about 10 minutes of the launch. They went up and they came down very quickly. 

So they plummet back down onto the city and Lake Erie. The immediate aftermath caused Burke Lakefront Airport to shut down. Some businesses had to close. Numerous traffic accidents, including a 10 car collision. Prized Arabian horses were injured in southern Medina. And the death of two fishermen whose boat had capsized as they were lost on the lake. 

Sarah: Oh my god. What did they think would happen? And I'm not saying that there's not a good way for this to have gone, but the balloons, they're not going to go into space, right? They have to go somewhere eventually. 

Harmony: Yeah. 

Sarah: So what was the idea? 

Harmony: I think the idea was they were going to be dispersed enough that it wouldn't cause any major impact to any one area. 

Sarah: So every town in the Midwest would get a handful of balloons and just move on. 

Harmony: Yeah, maybe. I saw one report that said some of the notes they were writing on the balloons that they were selling for a dollar was like, “Hey greetings from Cleveland, hope you're cool in Saskatchewan” or whatever. They were hoping that this was just going to be like a Flat Stanley thing where it would reach all parts of the country and be like, “Hey, this came from Cleveland for this event. Isn't that cool?” 

I saw one report say that they just thought the balloons would go high enough that they would just disintegrate, which isn't how that works, and I don't know how substantiated that report was. 

Sarah: Humans have a hard time visualizing where our stuff goes, understandably. Because we do have a system where professionals take it away and we never see it again.

Harmony: Yeah, so let's talk about these fishermen for a little bit. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Harmony: So Coast Guard was out searching on the 27th, the day of Balloonfest. They were searching for the fishermen, and it was very difficult to impossible for them to distinguish heads bobbing in the water or like an orange life vest, because there were just thousands and thousands of balloons on top of Lake Erie. It looked like you had just covered the lake in sprinkles. It was very difficult to find anything. 

One member of the Coast Guard went so far as calling their rescue efforts as trying to find a needle in a haystack. Those running Balloonfest did not check if there were any emergency situations that the balloon launch might affect, and it subsequently forced the halt of the search for the men. 

Sarah: Man. 

Harmony: On September 29th, the Coast Guard suspended their search. In the following week, the men's bodies washed on the shore. One of the men's widows would later attempt to sue United Way for $3.2 million. 

Sarah: Fair enough. 

Harmony: And they settled out of court. The woman who owned those horses tried to sue them, also settled out of court for, I think, $100,000, I believe. In addition to personal harm done by Balloonfest, there was a great deal of environmental damage done by all the non-biodegradable latex balloons, with thousands of them washing up in Canada.

Sarah: Oh, Canada. Sorry about the balloons. 

Harmony: Yes. The results of the international incident with Canada, not specifically the Canadian part, the everything else part, resulted in Guinness revoking Cleveland's world record that they did indeed set. 

What was once conceived as a possible annual event ended up losing considerable money and was by all accounts a disaster. Except Sarah, you know what show we're on, right? This is your show. I don't need to tell you. This is, You’re Wrong About. 

Sarah: Yeah! That's the name of the show. 

Harmony: There is a lien to everything I just said. 

Sarah: Perfect.

Harmony: And now we're going to go ahead and really break that down. Here's where we get to have a little bit more fun, because this story is not a tragedy the way that everyone thinks it is.

Sarah: Because there's nuance in those balloons. 

Harmony: Exactly. The Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, which is the main newspaper in Cleveland, recounted the events the following day after Balloonfest. It included all of the mishaps, including the deaths, but emphasized that overall, the event was a success based on the happiness of the crowd that was gathered for a public square for the event. I believe it was around 10,000. 

Sarah: Amazing. 

Harmony: And by my research, that is the most people that had gathered in public square in 40 years. 

Sarah: Yeah, getting people into the city to share something feels like something that was declining, as cities were getting less dense in this period. 

Harmony: Let's talk about maybe the most egregious things about Balloonfest here, because yeah, I've got some stuff to say, I got some details. First and foremost, let's talk about these deaths as a result of balloons. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Harmony: All right. 

Sarah: Okay, Counselor. 

Harmony: Thank you. The evening before Balloonfest, Skip Sullivan and Raymond Broderick went out fishing. About an hour before the heavy storm hit, the goal was for them to go out fishing for five hours, come back at like midnight. The following morning, their families reported that two men were missing. And their 16-foot boat was found anchored just west of the break wall of Edgewater Park, which is just west of downtown Cleveland the day of Balloonfest. 

Sarah: I realize this isn't super relevant, but do we know what they were fishing for?

Harmony: I don't, but I want to believe it's perch, because Lake Erie perch is like the best perch. They go out fishing, their family reports them missing. Two life jackets were found in the water nearby, and the Coast Guard theorized that the boat had capsized, throwing the men into the lake. And it's assumed that they probably tried to swim to the break wall near where their boat was anchored. 

The most prevalent detail that people bring up whenever they talk about Balloonfest is specifically this, because this is what makes it go from being like ‘ha’ funny to a tragedy, and it's not funny. But, this is not really what happened. 

Allow me to quote from the article, Where Truth Ends and Fake News Begins on Cleveland's 1986 Balloonfest, a letter from the editor by Chris Quinn. This is the best article about the truth of Balloonfest and a good number of things that I've learned about it are from this article. 

Sarah: Amazing. Thank you, Chris Quinn. 

Harmony: Here we are. “Consider this. By the time Cleveland's balloons were released, the two fishermen were missing for at least 14 hours. If they dropped into the water with the storm at 8:30, it would have been more like 17 hours. Might they still have been alive when the balloons went up?” Possibly. I don't know. The average water temperature in Lake Erie on September 27th is 68 degrees. 

This is what the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary says about that temperature. If you lose control of your craft and find yourself immersed in the middle of the lake, hopefully wearing a life jacket, you won't survive 12 hours in water at 60 to 70 degrees. On top of that, the two men would have been fighting against Lake Erie's notoriously strong currents during powerful storms. To say that Balloonfest killed the fishermen is ridiculous.

Sarah: Is it even possible for Balloonfest to be part of the reason that they didn't make it, right? If the conditions were such in the water. 

Harmony: I think that it's a very strong chance that the fishermen were already dead by the time the balloons went up. So the idea that there was an emergency in place and the Balloonfest people ignored it, that's not necessarily true. 

There's also reports that say that the helicopters had to suspend their search because the balloons were in the air. They didn't. They had to suspend their search because of the rain at the same time the balloons were released. There's a lot of these things that are existing parallel to each other but aren't necessarily interacting with each other in this story. 

Sarah: It's a correlation, not a causation. 

Harmony: Exactly. Was it like trying to find a needle in a haystack with these guys? Yeah, sure. Probably couldn't find them bobbing in the water with balloons, but at that point you're not helping them. That's the sad thing about this tragedy is that these guys died, and it happened to be on a happy day by all accounts, but the balloons had nothing to do with it. 

Sarah: Yeah. And if you are mourning a loss, then that maybe feels less relevant. But if you're making history about it, or a nice internet video 30 years later, than the timeline is right there. 

Harmony: It's important. 

Sarah: It's a little bit disingenuous to be like, people died. And like okay, I get that it's a better story. It's more compelling. But it does feel like that's not a reason to prohibit Cleveland from trying to have fun ever again.

Harmony: For real. The minor tragedies that follow this are the car accidents that happen. Would you like to hear about these car accidents? 

Sarah: I would love to. I would also, before we move on, I would like to point out for people who aren't familiar with the area. In North America, we have this thing called the Great Lakes. And they really are great. And they're like oceans, basically. It's not like…

Harmony: You cannot see Canada on the other side. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Harmony: It's that big. 

Sarah: And that's also part of the situation. So yeah, it also feels like nature is scary, and a fun day can turn into a dangerous day very easily. And the balloons didn't help. But yeah, they can't take the blame for everything. 

Harmony: Exactly. There were reports of car accidents that I heard described as drivers swerving to slowly avoid blizzards of orbs falling from the sky or something. Which I just think is a very funny way of describing this. The most infamous of these incidents was a ten-car accident on the shore way leading into Cleveland. So the westbound shore way of people driving towards downtown would have had a view of the balloons. According to one witness, people were stopping their cars in the middle of the highway and getting out to chase balloons. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Harmony: Most of the car accidents, from what I can understand, were extremely minor collisions because people were simply gawking at balloons and not watching the road. That's again, not necessarily the balloon's fault. That's user error. 

But my favorite thing about this, and this is where local knowledge comes into play. I-90 is a straight line. It is the straightest highway. Something's not going to jump out at you, you're not coming around a curve. So the idea that people had to swerve or dodge things, no, you see everything. You see absolutely everything coming. 

I don't know, I think people stopping because they saw the balloons, and then getting in the way? I don't know, there's something whimsically stupid about that. And that's the worst of this. 

Sarah: And hopefully having some pretty low speed collisions. Again, it feels like blaming Balloonfest for all this feels in a way like you get to hide just how dangerous any day in any city is just in terms of there are going to be accidents. People get lost a lot. I'm not trying to fully exonerate the balloons, but I simply believe they do not deserve the sentence they were given.

Harmony: No, I think that there are some mistakes that the balloons made, but it is certainly not to the first degree that everyone tends to sentence them with. No. Yeah, I don't know. This is just that thing where I'm like, people are embellishing details to make it sound more devastating than it actually is.

Sarah: It's enough for it to be an environmental hazard. 

Harmony: That should be the main thing, right? 

Sarah: And then we learned that no one, not even Disneyland, should probably be releasing 1 million balloons into our fragile ecosystem. But instead, we have to do it as “and then those balloons, they got loose, and they killed everyone”. And it's like, umm.

Harmony: I will say that it's often reported that Cleveland's record was never acknowledged or that it was stripped from them. The reality of it is they did for a single year in 1988 actually have the record in Guinness for the largest ever balloon launch. And then the following year, they discontinued that record because they didn't want anyone to try to break it. 

So I think that was about the point where we went, listen, okay, we know this is bad. Either because of the bad PR that it might have gotten, but I don't think that's it because it was mostly region specific. It wasn't like a big tragedy of errors. I think it was purely for the environmental damage and the unnecessary use of helium. I think that is why they retired it. In a sense, Cleveland will have the record forever. 

Sarah: Good. 

Harmony: Good. No one should break it. 

Sarah: Because then we would have ended up in this balloon arms race for the rest of the 80s. It would have been, I mean, God. 

Harmony: There's one other final thing that people talk about when they talk about the disaster of Balloonfest, which is the airport closure. Because closing an airport is a pretty big deal. That's like a terrorism level event. 

Sarah: It's true. And yet the question does occur to me, how big was this airport? 

Harmony: That is the right question to be asking. So Cleveland's main airport, the one that matters, is Cleveland Hopkins. That is far South. That's like down by Brook Park. That is nowhere near the North side of the city on the lake where Balloonfest was. That was the airport that they got clearance from when they were planning the event to see if it would affect that airport at all. 

The one that closed was Burke Lakefront Airport, and Burke is a dumb, useless airport that nobody uses. It's a very big airport, all things considered. It takes up a large amount of space, but I think that's just every airport. 

Sarah: It's like if the Hillsborough airport had to close, I know that things would be affected, but not very much. 

Harmony: Yeah, it only closed for 30 minutes, which is again, a detail that some people choose to neglect because it undermines the severity of it and it downplays the tragic severity that they like to talk about. 

But the thing with Burke is like, the only people that use it are usually sports athletes when they're flying in for a game or politicians. Normal people don't use Burke, and it often closes for large amounts of time for car shows or air shows for whole weekends. So it's not a big deal. It's such an unimportant airport that they want to turn it into something else.

Sarah: Maybe a Balloonfest museum. 

Harmony: Honestly, if there was just a plaque. I would love a plaque, that would make me really happy. I will say that there is one particularly litigious family that most Clevelanders don't like who are trying their damnedest to buy that property. And Cleveland's mayor, Justin Bibb, who is the fucking man. And I love Justin Bibb is basically saying, no, we're going to find some other productive way of doing this that will service the community. 

Sarah: That’s wonderful.

Harmony: So I love that shit. 

Sarah: A city that is for its own people can never lose. 

Harmony: That's what I love about Cleveland versus other cities. It's the biggest small city. There's a good chance that you'll know somebody, or you know someone who knows somebody. So it makes it feel more intimate and like a community. And so it has the sense of ‘we're all in this together’ that I really appreciate. 

Sarah: Yeah. I'm even going to go out on a limb because it's been a thing in Portland forever and ever. We don't want Californians moving here. And individual Californians are fine, I think. God knows they're being burned to a crisp down there. Transplants generally do not by themselves destroy a place. It's the footprint of the corporations that a city invites in without asking for anything, really, on the front end that can destroy a place. Or it's what some very wealthy individuals can do. 

Harmony: I just think it's important when a city gets to define its own history and it's honest about it. Because I'm sure there's a lot of people who want to paint themselves in a better light, like, oh no, bad stuff like this didn't happen. Cleveland's not allowed to forget it. People will remind us. They almost exclusively bring up the bad things or LeBron James, and that's about it. 

Sarah: They're like, I hear LeBron James was afraid of a balloon getting him, so he left town. Oh, no. I don’t think that happened. 

Harmony: So television news coverage, of which there's a fair amount of archival footage covering this event because it's not so old that it is lost, showed a great deal of enthusiasm from the teen volunteers, from attendees, from Treb himself, who remarked on camera that all of his friends in LA think he's crazy because he's thinking about moving to Cleveland.

Sarah: He's going to do the reverse Colangelo. 

Harmony: Here's the thing. You move to Cleveland from LA and you're going to go, “Jesus Christ, everything is so cheap.” 

So from what I can tell, all of the kids that had bandages on their fingers, all recount this as being a very good event. They enjoyed their time. They had fun. They were maybe tired, but this was seen as a very positive experience. 

Sarah: But I believe that. And I still feel like that speaks mainly to the fact that people have an overwhelming desire to be a part of a community and a part of a team and a part of something bigger than ourselves. And it makes sense that people loved getting to make those balloons.

Harmony: Because so few things happen in Cleveland, that's really what it boils down to. We don't have the cultural footprint that say Portland does, or a much more eventful city like New York, LA, Chicago, whatever. 

I don't know, when something happened, it's cool that you were there for it. Sure, it's probably a nightmare at the moment to be a part of Ten Cent Beer Night, but you can just go “Yeah, I was at Ten Cent Beer Night”, and people go, “Oh shit. That's cool!” 

Sarah: Right? I think in a way that's like how I feel about Gus Van Sant movies. Like the ones that were shot in and around Portland in the late 80s and 90s, where I don't watch them very often, but when I do, it's like the scrapbook of the place where my friend used to work, the kid I went to high school with, the kid I met that time downtown, the locations and the people. I don't know these moments in history to that you get that kind of make you feel like someone is not just showing your city to the world, but they're showing something that is just beyond the borders of your own scrapbook. That feels very intimate. 

Harmony: Oh yeah. It's existing in my city just beyond where I could have gone. And that, to me, is exciting because it's like I was almost there. 

Sarah: Yeah, I think every city is like this in its own way. That when we truly love it, we love everything about it. And we love the things that feel that actually contribute to quality of life or that we're proud of. And we also love to hate things or remember things or be annoyed about things together. 

Harmony: Oh, 100%. I remember whatever year it was, 2015, I think, the year that Cleveland actually won a championship. The Cavs won the NBA finals that year. And I am not a sports person by any means, by the way. I don't want anyone to misconstrue me talking about Cleveland sports in this episode to think that I know anything about anything. My favorite sports team is the Browns, and it has nothing to do with their playing. The Browns are hilarious. 

Yeah, like the Cavs parade was so big, and everyone was so overjoyed that we'd actually won something. Because part of the Cleveland tourism videos is that our economy is built on LeBron James, that Republicans have co-opted pictures of the Cavs parade to be like, “Look at this gathering for Donald Trump at the RNC” or whatever it is. They try to pull that stuff. It was that big and the crowds were that packed and that intense. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Harmony: And then the following year, the Browns had a perfect season in which they're only like one of two teams to ever lose every single game. And we had a perfect season parade in which everyone sat in a rainy parking lot and tailgated. And I had to go to work, so I couldn't go, but I love that story. 

Cleveland is a very funny city. We are such a funny city. Like they sell, ‘I survived Balloonfest t-shirts’. Everything about Cleveland, we have such a good sense of humor about ourselves, but only when we make fun of ourselves. And I think that's common about most places.

Sarah: As is correct. 

Harmony: I don't know. I feel like a lot of cities are homogenizing their culture. I think a lot of cities are losing their own charm, especially post the pandemic, when a lot of places closed. A lot of institutions didn't make it out of that. And now they're being upcycled into these dreadful, minimalist eateries.

Sarah: Yeah, God, the number of restaurants and theaters and bars and anything that's fun to do at night entertainment that we have lost, I think, is one of the many things that it's there hasn't even been time to really process. 

My baggage with Portlandia is that I've never seen a whole episode of it when it came out. I was just like, absolutely not. I already hate it. I'm 19. I'm very stubborn. I'm never going to watch this thing. It doesn't feel inaccurate to me what I've seen of it. It feels on point and at the time, especially, and the whole put a bird on it thing was true. Someone needed to point that out. None of these are inaccurate as cultural phenomena. 

But I think what got under my skin and actually really helped inspire me to get on the Tonya Harding beat at the time when I was starting in grad school was this idea of yeah, that is who we are. But we as a city, in a weird way, are wholeheartedly embracing the idea that we now have a reputation nationally, and it's just this. And it's just as a haven for twee, problemless, white people who just graduated from Swarthmore and are learning to forage. And that's true. And I am that person, although I could never have gotten into Swarthmore. 

But it was also that it felt like the city trying to launder its image by being like, yes, exactly. We are the crispy candy coating you see in Portlandia. That is the city. And we are not a crispy candy coating! We are a crispy candy coating over a weird, old city with a history of industry that's interesting and often pretty dark when it comes to logging and paper production, and the relationship that people have with the land. The Pacific Northwest is interesting and a place where a lot of people came, especially in the 70s, to just be left alone. And some of the stuff they did was great and some of the stuff they did was nefarious. 

And people, I think, know a lot more about this now, because there's been so much good writing and culture on in the last few years. But historically, on a legislative level, are an incredibly racist city and a very white supremacist city, and historically one of the most segregated cities in America. And so it felt like there's something about to truly love a city is to also get a clear view of its faults and its major problems and to love it. Not by selling it as this adorable kind of toothless little Utopia, because that's built on top of something very dangerous. I don't know, to respect that no city can survive for over a century just by being adorable. 

Harmony: Oh, for sure. Cleveland's the same way in that it is heavily segregated, it's heavily redlined. The east side is the older side of Cleveland, and that's where a lot of the Black families live, and it is generally regarded as the neglected side. It hasn't been gentrified. I accept all of those truths about what's going on in that city, and it sucks. But that's also a thing that a lot of people don't mention when they think about the cool happenings of Cleveland. They just go, “Don't go to East Cleveland. You'll die.” And I was like, you're probably fine. 

Sarah: Yeah. To love a city in the long term is to love what it could be, if it could get its shit together. And to ignore those problems or to allow it to continue to not. And every city has a lot of ghosts, and those ghosts deserve to be looked at and acknowledged and then we get to fix things. 

Harmony: Yeah, like that's what this whole thing is about. Because it's hard to say when the perception of Balloonfest shifted from this regional novelty into this way that it's treated to millions of views. 

I think that The Atlantic in 2018 put together a little mini doc, six or seven minutes of archival footage, and it has a very negative slant of being like the disastrous Balloonfest or whatever it is. And that's how a lot of people learned about it because it got 15 million views or something like that, like a huge amount. 

At some point, the story of Balloonfest left our neighborhood of the greater Cleveland area, and that's when people started to paint it with this brush. They started to recontextualize this event to suit what they wanted the common perception of Cleveland to be. 

The thing with what United Way did with this event is they actually instilled civic duties to children. They got them involved in philanthropy, they got them involved in volunteering, they got them involved in working with their community. They wanted them to do all of these things and put a love of that in them that would then carry to other events, other preferably not balloon-related events. These kids ended up raising like $220,000 to help offset the half million-dollar budget of Balloonfest. And with the lawsuits, they ended up losing quite a bit more than that. But it gave the kids something to be proud of with their city. They were like, we're going to get a world record. We did this. We put this together. 

Because people don't tend to achieve so much in Cleveland the way they do other places. There is a ceiling to where you can go in Cleveland, especially if you're a poor kid, especially if you're from a not particularly great family. You either leave or you just make it work. And I don't know, I want to believe that this taught kids how they can make it work and this new idea of what Cleveland could be in the eighties. To redo the car bomb city, the Ten Cent beer night city, the flaming river city. 

Sarah: I think my main concern is just the ecological impact of it. But again, there was a lot more going on at the time that just wasn't conspicuous and that wasn't colorful. And just in terms of their effect on the environment, how deep do you think this is? 

Harmony: That's really the one part of this that I can't defend, because it's clearly bad for the environment. There's no two ways about that. But what people don't bring up is that Cleveland was breaking an existing record. Disney had released a million balloons the year before, and no one talks about how bad that was for the environment. 

Sarah: Right? It's not like the Disney balloons made it into space and are still out there.

Harmony: Other rivers have caught on fire than just Cleveland's rivers. That's a thing that has happened elsewhere, but it is only brought up in Cleveland. 

Sarah: “Come to Cleveland. Other rivers have caught on fire”. And this idea that we've established Cleveland as the underdog, and this idea that it's okay for Disney to release 1 to 1.2 million balloons into the sky because they're a corporation and we love them and they're winners and it was fine when they did it. I've had stuck in my head the last couple days for whatever reason, Ben Stiller in Heavyweights being like, “I want to see a bunch of skinny winners around here.”

Harmony: Oh, hell yeah. 

Sarah: And I feel like in America, really, you can do anything as long as you're a skinny winner. And Cleveland being punished for just not for the mistake, but for trying to escape being America's underdog in that moment. But I also feel like cities that can't hide their troubles, right? Cities where the river catches fire, cities with rates of maternal mortality or fetal mortality, or rates of crime, or rates of past environmental disasters and contagion that can make other places in the country feel glad that they're not them. It feels maybe truest of all that we are all in this together. 

As a country, we are ruled by the same corporate overlords. We're being polluted by the same chemicals. We're all subject to the whims of the same extremely powerful jerks. I was like, how mean do I want to be here? I'm going to call them ‘jerks’. And also, that cities that have a hard time early are the ones where people are able to come together as a community within a community to try and do something about it, and that the most dangerous place to be in, in many ways, is a city that can successfully hide its troubles from itself.

Harmony: Oh for sure. The thing I kind of wonder about as far as that's concerned, is what does the city do if it can't hide its troubles? What does the city do if it outlives the thing it was designed for? I think that's what a lot of the cities that we have, especially in the Rust Belt, in flyover states, that's how you get ghost towns where there's nothing left for me here. What do you do? 

Because you can't just say, okay collectively we all gave up on Cleveland. We're just going to wipe our hands and try again. You can't just do that. There's a lot of issues with Cleveland as there are everywhere, I am sure. I'm just more intimately aware of them. 

The thing that I love about the city is that so much of it is people just trying to make it work. And some very successfully in very specific ways. There was, I think at one point, this was relevant to me, I think it was 80 percent of all concert venues in the city were owned by women.

Sarah: That’s amazing. 

Harmony: There's things happening where people are trying to make changes. There's a lot of community events. It was a city that was taking care of itself. I don't know, I just think there's something about that that only exists in like these working-class cities that is just really hard to put into words. 

Sarah: And is worth protecting. May I just say, Cleveland rocks.

Harmony: Cleveland rocks so hard. I love Cleveland.

Sarah: Harmony Colangelo, you do podcasts, you're a historian, you're a cineaste, I would say. I'm just throwing titles at you. You have some of the best movie memorabilia I've ever seen in someone's home. What else should people know about you? Where can they find you? Where can they find more of your stuff? 

Harmony: I'm on the internet. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at @Velocitraptor. I also host the Teen Girl Movie podcast with my wife BJ. And we break down how teen movies have aged and the concept of girls growing up and gender and all sorts of wonderful things on that show. We also have a book on Sleepaway Camp, in which I tear open my still beating heart and talk about how much that movie means to me and the struggles of trans film criticism. 

Sarah: Like a bat out of hell. Yeah. 

Harmony: Like a bat out of hell. It's the last thing I see as it flies away. 

Sarah: Still beating. 

Harmony: Still beating.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for coming to Cleveland with us. Thank you to Harmony Colangelo of The Sunset Prom for your passion and for your knowledge. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing help. Thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. We will see you in two weeks. Stay frosty.