Balloon Fiesta; 62; Rutherford Interview

It's hard to tell yet maybe we may just be here so it doesn't affect the light too much possibly we might just put it on his feet because the hard part is the floor right now that's what's reflecting the sound okay okay you'll have bars on this hi hey okay here you are at the end of a very long journey for us but let's look with some enthusiasm the mass ascension should be taken off we've just seen the cold inflating the hot inflating the waves everything and everything's right at the end of the mass ascension what's going through your mind if you look up in the sky like this oh it's it's such a beautiful sight I think ballooning itself is something that that causes you to suspend belief it's not something that you can even relate to it's just this beautiful panorama in front of us

I like to think about watching this the mass ascension's taking place and we're up in our tower we're watching and it's like somebody's planted this beautiful flower garden and it's coming to life in super speed and and then the flowers are floating away it's like a big beautiful flower garden in the air it's really fun to see how many people that I like about the blue infiestes the people and they'll be 50 or 60 or 100,000 people out on the field and everybody's happy and everybody's smiling and everybody's looking up and it's a time when our community really comes together it's a great event what do you see when you see people's faces I don't think you know well it's I think it's just wonderment I think people are in awe of how grand this is how big the balloons are how colorful they are how how noisy they are how many people are around just the whole thing is it really almost sensory overload but in a very good way

when you see everything happening on the field you have the balloons being cracked and some balloons taking off you have people walking around interacting walking between have the zebras they're backing people up and blowing their whistles how do you try that out together what are you how do you describe that well I know what's going on I mean there's a real there's a plan to all that it looks like it's sort of spontaneous but but there's a plan to all of that there's a way that they launch the balloons as they move into the winds the balloons don't fly over the top of each other this is a unique place in the ballooning world and that people get to be out on the field with the balloons as they're inflating and lifting off and people are very respectful of the pilots request a standback or the zebras whistle blowing but what kind of energy I guess I'm asking how do you sum up all of that happening what's funny for me is to watch people rushing they'll they'll see a balloon begin inflating and they'll just get completely captured by it

and the balloon will then lift off and they'll sort of look around and by then most of the balloons right around them have already lifted off so they'll run up the field run into the wind to the next group that'll be launched and see that again it's it's it's it's it's really hard to describe 60,000 people in just constant excitement the again the noise and the balloons lifting and the whistles blowing and the people going and it's like being in the middle of some great big parade but it the parade moves on and then comes value again I'm usually down on the ground and sometimes I'm interviewing pilots and sometimes I'm helping people find their way and sort of watching it unfold and and it's amazing to me how it just sort

of rolls on I mean it's like a big wave that sort of rolls through the crowd as the balloons are launched more and more and the people move to see the new winds and it's it's really an amazing energy people so many of us told me that going to the balloon fiesta and seeing it there in person it's sort of like seeing a picture of the grand canyon and then going to the grand canyon it you just can't imagine it the scale is so far beyond our imagination it's it's really fun to watch people smiling and not knowing what to look at next and there's just so much excitement going on

I can I use my grand canyon thing somebody once described to me and it makes sense and I talk about it now seeing the balloon fiesta in person is sort of like the difference between seeing a picture of the grand canyon than going to the grand canyon you just can't imagine how huge the balloon fiesta is how glorious the mass ascension is what a big thing is happening and it's really fun to watch people race from balloon to balloon and and look from one thing to another they have no idea how grand this is going to be and it is glorious you've been on TV before okay moving on first fiesta how does first fiesta get started well the local radio station wanted to have a 50th anniversary

birthday party and they had arranged to have the largest birthday cake and sit cutter had gotten a lot of publicity lately having his hot air balloon in town so we decided we got to have the world's biggest talk of birthday balloon and get said to come with this hot air balloon we talked to cutter and he said why don't we have the biggest balloon race and I'll get some people I know around the country and we'll come he said I've never seen a balloon race before but I I'm sure they're quite wonderful so we agreed that we would have the balloon race only if it was the world's biggest balloon race just like the world's biggest birthday cake and it would have been if there hadn't been a snow storm in Chicago that caused air freight to be delayed so we had 13 balloons there instead of the 17 we planned so it was still almost the biggest balloon race in the world people were again they were just amazed as you could this is 1972 Albuquerque was a much smaller town the shopping center there hadn't really grown that far we were really in a big vacant corner

kind of being out on the mesa in northeast heights and and people had started showed up there at five in the morning I arrived about six thinking I would hand out parking passes and and greet the crowd and when I got there the place was full of people already we had invited it's sort of Bruce King was governor then and he was a good friend and and so we invited him to come to the balloon fiesta and he was there a neighbor across the street used to have barbecues on the weekends to promote a land development that he was selling so he invited slim pickens to come to the barbecue and slim came out to the balloon fiesta I was starting my political career that day and had invited Rob Reiner who had just started being meet head on all in the family to come so we had Bruce King and slim pickens and meet head all up on the stage and 30 or 40,000 people and 13 hot air balloons and it was amazing what did you know the parking passes well I just threw the whole

script away the passes and and we gave up on our plans we still announced from the stage and introduced the governor and slim and and Rob Reiner and it was really quite fun that's great I'm going to ask you to do a little point for him just for an edit yeah um I saw those people I just took those parking passes yeah so I sort I drove up sort of having an idea of what I would do when I got to the balloon fiesta and when I got there and there were so many people I threw everything out the window and just decided we better wing it um how many people showed up at the first you know I think it was somewhere between 15,000 and a million people and we still estimate crowds that way um I think 10 or 15,000 people had to be there it was just jam packed I mean it was again it was the first time in Albuquerque it's still like that you uh maybe people in Albuquerque

sort of feel like they've gotten used to the balloons but it's still a brand new sensation every time and it certainly was that day why do you think so many people showed up well we've been promoting it on the radio people have been hearing about and some of them seeing cutter flying his balloon around town and it's it's just quite magical why did you sit well sit at the balloon we uh always be we had the birth we had the birthday party idea we thought a big birthday balloon would be good and we'd been seeing the publicity about Sid flying around town and having his balloon and starting a balloon club and so that seemed like a good idea so we called Sid and uh and he was ready willing and able well he yeah Sid was uh there's a great story about Sid and his brother going to South Dakota buying the balloon it was too windy to take it outside so they sort of

showed him how to inflate it and stuff all inside the hanger they inflated it inside their hanger out at cutter flying service and then the next morning was I had to go fly the balloon well neither had ever been up but they figured it out pretty quickly and uh off they went they flew down Yale Boulevard right on top of the power lines the whole way to the UNM North Golf Course and finally we're able to land and Sid said there was at least 5,000 people out on the golf course and he said he was never so relieved as when he saw his lawyer running through the crowd to the balloon so he knew whatever trouble he was in he'd be okay I think it's just that magic of all that has captured people's imagination surely from 1783 back in France till today it's still the same thing yeah well Sid had gotten a lot of attention and publicity about his balloon in town we didn't know there were any other balloons in the world we thought we would have a balloon at the the balloon

at the birthday party we didn't know there were others so we called Sid he had heard about others through his relationship with the balloon manufacturer and thought he could put together a list of 17 which would make the largest balloon race ever held and how would you describe Sid's approach to ballooning or his personality or his zero balloon? Sid's father was a barnstormer and Sid grew up as a tot in his father's lab flying airplanes since he was six months old I guess so he he he loves being in the air and he loves aviation and he's not the least bit uncomfortable about any of it he understands it and he does it well Sid really liked the idea of all those people looking at him he really loves the attention all of us do and so Sid had a great time we created special balloon outfits for our company to help promote the balloon fiesta and special outfits for

different sponsors and and he loved being there and in his uniform and ready to go what was happening on the field at that first time I mean we had one police officer I mean he was a man it gives us a little bits of play well the one we're probably not supposed to talk about is that we decided to have advertising banners that we would hang down from the basket and we got a I think probably radar awning to make them for us and we're afraid that they would flap flap up they would float upwards and people wouldn't see it we put metal pipes in the bottom of them so Sid and Don Draper took off first in the first balloon and unfurled the fire just came hurtling to the end of the fabric ripped and came hurtling on down to the ground we could hear it was probably in the middle of but all boulevard you could hear this big clang as the metal pipe hit the ground we learned not to do it that way after that most of these pilots came from

I guess most people of Liberty United States come from places that aren't quite as as barren as it is in New Mexico and they're used to flying in grass and inflating on grassy fields and things and we knew that would be an issue so we went out and bought these huge hundred feet by hundred feet sheets of clear plastic that the pilots could lay out and inflate their balloons on one of the pilots was so impressed by that the care that we took that he invited us to make a bid to host the first ever world championship for hot air balloons which would be held in the US somewhere the next year in 1973. So we're going to pick it up with just a few anecdotes on the last first few balloons that would be great if you could just set it up for me like I was saying something like you see how many balloons there are today it's hard to imagine we started

so none of us had seen a balloon race before including said the others who came in had and were more seasoned pilots than said although nobody was very seasoned by that time and it's hard to imagine that those 13 balloons created the stir that they did which is sort of comparable to the stir that gets created by 800 balloons today but it was and it was the first time ever and it was just magical and amazing it was fun watching Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall was along with him they were married and she hadn't started on Laverde and surely yet that they were having a ball at some nice old pictures of them and their daughter Tracy watching so for instance we had a mounted policeman there who came on horseback nobody had any idea how many people would be there horseback made a lot of sense and of course it was a good idea we probably needed 20 of them

if they were going to be very effective we still have a police on horseback at the balloon fiesta and they're still able to carry out their mission well and they're also quite a tourist attraction just like they were that first first balloon event certainly that would have been just I think that's a little too complicated but just far above and sound like so for instance we had a city policeman a mounted policeman set to come to the to the event and he showed up and had the same puncture the same response I did oh my goodness what have I gotten myself into so he rode through the crowd and everybody loves them still so it was quite an attraction but it probably was a little less than was needed if we were really going to have crowd control I think we learned from that that you don't need much control of the crowds they are so in awe that really there's no way for anybody to start any trouble or cause any problems

and there's just too much fun going on the part I remember was just hectic we had no idea how this would unfold and so we were all running around trying to make sure everything was covered I think the crowd didn't know that we didn't know and and we're just happy to see it all happen people were really tickled people still tell me about their experience at that first balloon race well we weren't really at the shopping center the shopping center hadn't come that far over so we were just out in the middle of a vacant lot so what what happened at that vacant lot we'd set up sort of a little stage kind of where we thought the middle would be and we'd

created these barricades somehow around what we thought would be the launch sites where the people would later put their plastic down and lay out their balloons and people were very respectful of all of that but it didn't look like it was an event set for 20,000 people to attend okay moving on when you look at the Albuquerque Chester and compared to other Chester's how do you compare it well I think there are a lot of things that make Albuquerque unique what is its size of course I think this sheer size of the fiesta makes it so completely different than any other balloon event it's hard to make comparisons some of the things that happen in Albuquerque that don't happen in other places is the idea that spectators can be out among the

balloons and be right there at the basket as it takes off that doesn't happen at other balloon races the one of the reasons it's so big here and wouldn't be anywhere else is because by now so many families are involved Albuquerque people who've hosted balloon crews for 30 years now take their week off from work and use their pickup truck and act as chase crews now all the food vendors around and again the scale of it it just makes it so completely different now how does the community fit into the yes and it's hard to make use of the problem well I think that there are about 10,000 volunteers that help put on the fiesta that includes probably 5,000 crew people chase truck drivers and that sort of thing and then the Kiwanis Club and other civic groups that do the parking and sell the programs and sell the cameras to raise money it was one of the great things about the way it developed was

that this money is the fiesta set up so that the money will go back out into the community in the broadest possible way you hear about other events who come to Albuquerque or other places and you don't see that widespread economic impact we couldn't do it without all those people for one thing and then the business community has warmed up to it sponsoring the balloon blow for instance sponsoring the special shapes rodeo sponsoring the fireworks those were all events that we thought were needed to keep the fiesta getting bigger and went into the community the business community and and people step forward and and offered their sponsorship France I sound like that how many people do you think show up to be part of the fiesta's first crewing and whatever and how many people show up to see the fiesta? So all those like very kind of the people on the field supporting the balloons and there's a

big difference yeah I think that on a weekend there's probably those 10,000 people doing parking and chase truck driving and all that sort of thing and then there's another 80 or 90 or 100,000 people who come as spectators and then there's another 50 or 60,000 that are watching from their backyard or front porches or some vacant lot nearby and then there's some millions of others that watch it on television around the country so it's it has a broad reach and a great attraction and I know we're running a little later so we can do the voiceover channel plan okay what time is it? It's two o'clock right now. Oh I'm okay. See how we do. Well, we're flexible. Yeah. Okay.

Can you give me a little something to intro the out of 30 bucks? I don't remember when we discovered it probably as the balloonist would fly for fun on the weekends they would go down to the Anderson vineyards down in the valley and notice as they lifted off early in the morning they would head south and as they began to climb up they'd come back north this was when there were 10 or 15 or 20 out just flying for fun as the fiesta moved farther north to new locations that box became a really important part of the of the activity because of the the situation Albuquerque is unique and in this way also with the mountains on the east in the morning through the night the air cools and sort of rolls off the mountain into the valley and that cold air then runs down the river it runs south down the river because of the mountains the air when the sun comes up the sun doesn't shine on the ground first it heats the

air at about five or six or seven hundred feet first so a pilot takes off floats in the air south as he climbs up he begins to get into that warmer air and turns back to the north and and then on great days which often happen he can then descend again get back into that other air and and keep circling overhead it's you don't see it anywhere else and that's again it makes it so amazing not only are there six or eight hundred balloons lifting off that you can see them all in the air at once because they don't go anywhere I think another great thing about Albuquerque that people don't that we love but don't think about very much is we have this huge vistas you can see forever in Albuquerque and so so even when there isn't an Albuquerque box and the balloons fly away somewhere you still can watch them for 30 or 15 miles they don't usually go that far so it makes a great place for ballooning and for watching ballooning because of the wonderful

vistas here great nice a real shardy for the intro to the boxes say something like the intergoal two that's yes the Albuquerque box that only is the big mass ascension now a very important part of bloom fiesta but the fact that it usually turns into the Albuquerque box has become not only is a huge mass ascension of five or six or seven hundred balloons a really important sensational part of the bloom fiesta but the fact that that mass ascension usually turns into a ballet overhead because of the Albuquerque box makes us completely unique and makes it even more breathtaking how about that damn good yeah that's a great one everyone are just a little bit about really what makes it a little more I mean you know what I know

I mean sure but most general public that so there's just like kind of a a little bit of a balloon sign you can throw out a set of things the hot air balloon is made out of so I can't remember so hot air balloons made out of a special rip stop nylon the nylon is sewed together with special here aircraft webbing so a hundred balloons made out of rip stop nylon thousands of yards of fabric are sewn together special nylon webbing actually holds the weight of the basket that's beneath it and distributes the weight throughout the bloom underneath the balloon is attached usually a fiberglass aluminum or wicker gondola with propane fuel on board the propane gets pressurized as it moves through the burner system there big coils that are burners that heats the propane just before it becomes ignited and so it shoots into the envelope about 20 or 30 feet tall

flame the idea is to get the air inside the balloon about 100 degrees hotter than the air outside and when you've done that the balloon is buoyant the oxygen the the air is lighter in the balloon and so it lifts the aircraft up hydrogen has the same thing hydrogen starts out lighter than air and so and so you don't have to keep heating the hydrogen it stays there what you have to do is keep replenishing the hydrogen or decreasing the weight of the balloons when they have gas balloon races they fly for days and days and days but at some point they have to land while they still have a little bit of helium or hydrogen in them and a little bit of sand left for their balance so the best time in the to fly balloons is early in the morning because the air is very stable the temperature is cooler you're flying because the air inside the balloon is hotter than the

air outside the balloon usually about a hundred degrees hotter it gets hot by being heated by propane burners that are airborne and used by the pilot to keep the air warm throughout the flight I think I think a balloon would probably carry 30 to 50 gallons of propane fuel on board and that would last for about a two or three hour flight originally we started by putting markers on the ground and dropping baggies on them when the would when in 1973 we hosted the first ever road championship for hotter balloons and we wanted

to make it sort of New Mexico unique so we created instead of a hair and hound race a road runner coyote race and had looms built with a road runner and a coyote on them we thought it might be fun to have people drop tumbleweeds out of the balloons and actually for many years we continued to do that it wasn't it wasn't very practical and and it probably wasn't very safe and it didn't take too long to figure that out we had a chicken flying contest one year that we'd seen at some event in the south and all sorts of goofy things but the one thing that's really unique about the balloon feast in albacurkey is that you get to see both the beginning and the end of the balloon of a balloon race as half the balloons launch from the field flying to target somewhere down wind the other half are launching upwind of the field and flying over targets that are on the field so just as you've finished watching 200 or 300 hotter balloons inflate and leave in that beautiful

ballet suddenly a bigger ballet comes towards you from at least a mile away as these 300 balloons come overhead jogging for position trying to get near targets or grab things off the poles yeah and maybe you could prefer to sit by the same over the years or something I've just basically a balloon race involves not speed but some sort of accuracy and almost always it's a balloon lifting off one place and trying to fly to a target someplace else a lot of times they tell you where the target was ahead of time and you try to fly out there and land on an X but with 800 balloons just got a divorce so a balloon race usually involves a balloon taking off one place and flying to somewhere else and and whoever gets closest to the somewhere else as the

winner lots of times you do that by putting out an X at the target and people drop things on the X sometimes the target is predetermined other times they had what used to be called a hair and hound race where a first balloon lifted off the others started chasing it about 10 minutes later and tried to land as close to where the first balloon landed well we wanted to make that new Mexico so we changed it to a roadrunner coyote race so the roadrunner takes off first and the coyotes follow 10 minutes later in the Midwest where they have competitions like the National Championship they would drop these little bags of corn with streamers attached and actually we still use them here but for a while we decided it would be more New Mexican if we would drop tumbleweeds out of the baskets and tumbleweeds as we all know from watching them blow by are pretty light so the pilot sometimes would wet them and then freeze them overnight using the propane to freeze the tumbleweeds

so they'd be heavier or get them really wet and water down so suddenly it wasn't just a marker that was floating out the basket it was hurtling down and got a little dangerous so we started we created the roadrunner coyote race we created the tumbleweeds drop some other kind of new Mexican things just to make it very New Mexico Albuquerque specific could be a favor just for submitting to say in the past at least to drop tumbleweeds instead of markers was a real short time for a while we thought it would be fun to drop tumbleweeds out of the basket instead of markers it turned out that wasn't a great idea but we didn't realize it for a couple of years at least okay moving on just for your sense of the competition and what's happening on your off-field

I don't think people really know that there's a big time of field and often it's a semi-burden and essentially you can call it something a lot of the pilots who come to the balloon fiesta come for fun and they want to be good balloon pilots and they want to learn how to watch the wind and measure their direction but basically there's sort of weekend flyers there's quite a large group of pilots who come to the fiesta who fly and competition all the time and these are people that sort of make their living racing balloons they win prizes and cash and endorsements and things like that so the competition is really very serious at balloon fiesta there are big prizes motor cycles and big screen TVs and fancy radio equipment so it's worth the pilot going into some extra trouble to to win those prizes I was never very good at it but apparently a really good pilot who has the patience can first watch a little helium balloon

that they send up before they leave a weather balloon they call it a pie ball and kind of tell what the wind is doing at different altitudes above them and then after they lift off they are watching balloons who lift it off ahead of them at different altitudes watching which direction they go watching balloons below them and keeping an eye so that they get a picture in their mind of which way the wind is blowing at each different altitude you can't steer a hotter balloon so what you have to do is work with the winds that are there and try to use those different directions to focus in on a target usually when the race is announced in the morning the judges and the competition officials know generally which ways the winds blowing I mean they want somebody to win so they don't make it impossible to win but some of them are fairly difficult we don't do it much in albuquerque because there are so many balloons and it's really supposed to be mostly fun but for instance when we hosted the world championship some of these were

very complex involving multiple tasks where you might drop five or six markers during a race of course and help me understand as a as a spectator what's happening on and off the on and off the air events on the few things something as simple as there are competition events on the field as well as often and again I'm looking for a little intro so in the weekends we have the mass ascension where everybody takes off from the field and flies away during the weekdays we have competition events half of which involve pilots taking off from the field and flying to targets somewhere downwind the other half of the pilots then taking off from somewhere upwind and flying across the field where targets are laid out on the balloon field and so in most cases and there's some ways to make this a little more elaborate but basically a target is set out for the most part

because there are so many balloons each pilot has a marker rather than landing they drop a marker and the drop a marker is close to the target as they possibly can sometimes they have flown for only a mile or two and get to the target sometimes they fly for a very long time waiting to get just the right wind to approach the target in just the right way one of the one of the really exciting events that they have at room fiesta is called the key grab and and the pilots are required to fly over the field and there's a target with a pole on top of it so they not only have to get right at the target but they have to be at the right altitude to be able to reach out and grab a ring or an envelope from a top this pole and people get to watch it from the from the field it's very very exciting I have no idea I never I the first I started being a balloon announcer I wasn't a very good pilot so I started being a balloon announcer and I remember the first time I ever saw

a target was after I'd become a balloon announcer and was up on top of a dormitory at the National Championship and looked down and there it was I'd never seen them before even though I had flown competition for years when we're watching the key grab we're seeing the best pilots in the country of flying over the field and you can tell who the real tough competitors are every now and then somebody will just get in the middle of them and you got to get pretty lucky besides being really really good you got to have a little bit of luck too so I think it's uh 600 balloons will fly in that competition and maybe five prizes will be grabbed off the top of poles with everybody trying to grab one so another great thing about the balloon fiesta is that it starts on Saturday morning and finally ends on Sunday morning a week later so it's a nine day competition

there are events every morning sometimes the mass ascension sometimes these competition events and then our most evening there's some sort of an event so it's quite a spectacular I think maybe there's 14 different competitions that are going on so the balloon fiesta lasts for nine days and there are competitions each day there's something fun to do all day long each day so that the competitive events take place every day for the whole nine days of the balloon fiesta that's not quite true that's right okay and I'm going to try that one more time since competitions are held over a number of days and are held on so the competitions are held each day some involving balloons lifting off from the field some involving balloons flying into the field so this is so yeah so throughout the week some of the

pilots are flying to targets off the field leaving from so during the competition during the week some of the pilots take off from the field and fly to a target somewhere downwind so during the competition all week half the pilots are taking off from the field flying to targets downwind the other half are taking off upwind and flying to targets on the field okay so what happens after the the morning events so the pilots have flown they've used up their propane gas they come back and get in line and all two or three or four or five hundred balloons

refuel with propane and then the balloons and the trucks and the crews all come back onto the field and have tailgate parties the balloon fiesta provides an opportunity for pilots all over the world to come as a family and see each other again it's usually the the one time they see each other all year long so it's really a big family reunion not a little barbecues out on the field and tailgate parties and and a lot of it takes place at the field some will take place in these private homes or the hot is the fire truck hitting and how does the the symptoms a lot be and the October fest and those are all the things we've got coverage or just that they can't take some front and personalities coming to life we have a lot of that so there's maybe a way you can have such as you can imagine none of these pilots are really shy you don't dress up like that and fly in something that colorful if you don't want to attract attention and often their chase trucks

are every bit as colorful and unique their outfits are unique the chase crews all dress up and some funny outfit fire trucks used as chase vehicles it's it's a it's a pretty crazy time and that all kind of comes out of one point it's time to be gentle to have them so how can I be gentle to have them well and so all those colorful people end up back in the same place you really notice it after the fueling the pilots often come back on the field with their crews and celebrate the flight and and they might perform a little ceremony for first-time passengers and share a lunch maybe barbecue or breakfast burritos and it's a way for the ballooning family to regather and have a family reunion I'm going to so I got an option on that I don't know what you mean about the October 5th oh we were out there probably talking really well so we've got guys in their lateros

yeah either they're gentle and serving or brought worse and we've got shots of people and they're who's it that's gonna give their head fire engine out there oh and then there's a guy who had a gelato it was all suit up there's the great toss game and then Kevin that we do the pilot ceremony the first time flight so you're gonna give me a little cheese to get into the competition or was it the tailgate once the morning lines over with everybody was forward to tell this date starts really early in the dark and then it gets very hectic launching the balloons and then everybody chases the balloons and is focused on that so at the end of all of that comes the tailgating and that's what everybody looks forward to and the trucks and the crews all come

back on the field and start the party so after a really long morning of all the ballooning stuff the tailgating on the field is what is really fun for people it's when the trucks and crews come back on the field and start the party all right really have here we go um what was the life when you saw your first special shape well it was probably a very long time ago and I think it was probably a chicken there's some discussion about which was the real first special shape but I think it was a chicken balloon that we saw in Iowa and you could kind of imagine how it was made but it just seemed so weird and of course we had no idea it would become such a popular thing what do you think of when you saw those special shapes coming together well we've been more and more shapes would start appearing at the fiesta but it's one of those

things where we needed some kind of new event to really kick the thing off it was really fun seeing just all the different stuff the technology the engineering of making those balloons now has developed so much that they can make a shape of almost anything so each year it's just amazing the new stuff that comes out every year of bloom fiesta there's something several things usually they're just brand new and more unbelievable than the last time it's quite a it's really fun I mean I it's hard for me to think back and remember all those years but every year it's been grander and better than ever before I'm going to keep coming back for a very very long time so each year there's more and more the engineering is so advanced now you can make a shape balloon of almost anything and so it's one of the fun things about fiesta each year is

there'll be 15 or 20 brand new never seen before special shapes and it's just fabulous describe me the most unusual special shape you've seen you remember from the early well in the early days they were sort of rudimentary I mean they were a regular balloon with some stuff sewn around the outside so it really wasn't even any extra rigging inside or anything I think the funniest one ever saw was a purple people leader and it was a balloon that lived in the south and there were great stories about him flying over the Ozarks and the guys with the stills out in the what was thinking they'd been invaded I think that was probably the funniest since I was a story maybe you can tell us how to tell us the same story but one of the early special shapes was the guy showed up on the actual time in the gondola and had a regular boom that he actually had a gondola yeah and I remember that

and I have that one. Any other succumb to mine? No I know in Albuquerque we had some great ones Uncle Sam and Chikibum and those guys went on to build up flying witch and castles we used to fly some with Malcolm Forbes back in the day and he would travel around the world and visit world leaders and he would take with him in his airplane a fleet of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and he would have a balloon built that represented something famous about the country a monument or something so we had a sphinx balloon a balloon of his castle and balawaw he had some pretty grand ideas. What do you think is the most fun special shape at the atmosphere? Oh I like the orange express because of the train whistle and I like the bees because they hold hands and all the different animals are really fun to see I like the stage coach balloon

I think that's pretty amazing and the one that used to win the favorite prize every year was the big cow. Well again it's just so different you have to really suspend belief. Special shapes I think are so are so unusual that they're just unbelievable it's hard to imagine something that's sort of a familiar thing appearing suddenly 80 feet tall they're it's just so clever and and really magical. Why do you think people get so involved with that? I mean why would a regular balloonist with a round balloon suddenly get sucked into a special shape I mean is there some kind of... Is there something higher archaea or I don't know? I think

the same reason that some of those pilots were kilts and dry fire trucks is the same reason they make special shape balloons that when you're in and among 800 balloons that are all pretty but all kind of the same you don't get near as much attention as if you're flying one that looks like a cute little bee also from a commercial standpoint the pilots get paid a lot of money to bring those special shape balloons to balloon events around the world so somebody like that Darth Vader balloon travels all the time all over the world and I'm sure this has a fabulous time. So let's do the wrap up here. This is what we're hoping to do on camera the interview but also we'll do it as a video for how to do something over the last few years but here's a wrap up I mean this is some of my amber my idea is here about what you might say but I mean this might give you the tone that we're looking at. How do you how do you pull the whole

fiesta together? I'm a pretty cynical old guy but I still get goosebumps when I see the balloon fiesta when it starts to happen and at the end of the week haven't seen so many old friends having watched weddings and family reunions and little children looking up amazed into the sky it's just the most full complete feeling one can have. All I have experienced all my senses have been tingled and uh it's in a box. Can you hear it? Yeah. What's a great location? I appreciate your experience. It's really it's amazing after nine days of being stimulated in every way seeing old

friends and little kids and fantastic shapes and hearing sad stories and beautiful stories and there's always some new balloons that you've seen some old friends that you thought you wouldn't see again. It's just it's the most rewarding fulfilling experience I can imagine. It's everything's there. It takes me days and days and days to kind of come down from it because it's that's really touched every nerve. I like it. It's like you're hitting the whole kind of family care to ask that. It's really nice. I think sit and concentrate more and just the awe and wonder. Let's try that one more time maybe and touch the every nerve. How about it? Push your heart.

So after nine days of all of that all those people all that magnificent color and the music and the excitement and seeing old old friends and watching little children get so excited and and taking new friends to the fiesta for the first time all of that. I end up with my heart so full. It takes a few days just to get back down to my right size. It's just amazing. Thank you so much. Is that close? That's good. Okay. Um, that was your time. I didn't want to miss it. What did you like it? No, I didn't mean it. I was lying about all that shit. We got that. So glad to get to sleep in. All right, what do you want to say? That's it for me. I mean, I was sure to answer that when you heard all my questions. Yeah.

That's where I called with some of these areas of the music. Anything you want to say? Anything you'd like to say? I really feel lucky that I was in at the beginning of the Bloon Fiesta and helped to create it and and helped to bring it along. But there have been so many people since then who have made it into such a spectacular huge event that's touched millions of lives. It's really quite an amazing thing to watch. All that it takes to put it together and make sure it operates and all the people involved. It's, uh, it's just wonderful to see. I could, I think, sit imagine how big the Bloon Fiesta could be. I never imagined this and, uh, it's really something to see what others have done with that dream that I watched begin. What do you say about you and Sid kind of coming together at the right moment and getting the Bloons shot up at the right moment? Anyway. I, as I say, I feel really lucky about being at the beginning of something so big.

Uh, Cutter always, I, I think, uh, I think Sid always had a special vision because he'd been an airplane so much. He was used to seeing things bigger than him, seeing the world from a whole different angle. I'd never been in a plane before I don't think. Uh, so his, his view and his vision was much larger than mine. Um, it was such a privilege to get to work with him for so long and to, and to get to be part of his vision and to help him with some of the detail of it. But, but basically it was his grand vision that you were all helping to carry out. I always curious, I know you've worked with this a tiny group of people, the right idea seems to all have created some great things that are really unique in the world. Yeah. I think sort of that nature of the enterprise brings out the best in people. I think it brings out really talented and creative people.

The idea of being a balloonist is something that attracts adventurous and people who are willing to look at a bigger vision. So I think it had all the elements of something that would be great. And, uh, it had good leaders and it had, uh, the community support. And, uh, it, uh, it is amazing how it's all come together. I mean, it's a lot of hard work, a lot of hard work by a lot of people. But it, uh, it is the right thing to do. It is the most mega emphasis we've been in the world, I'm sure of it. I got back up to the frame. Um, I don't know if you're all warmed up. Mm-hmm. Uh, we're now. We're now working with him. I'm like, do I get a drop of soul out of it? Yeah, geez. The mass ascension, all those balloons are up in the sky. You're looking at them, what's going through your mind? You know, I watch the people on the ground as much as I watch the balloons up there.

And I, and I, and maybe it's because I'm cynical or I think I've seen it before. Nothing can be new. But I start looking around at the people and how they're reacting to all this and seeing all that joy. It's, uh, that's what I like. I like the people. Great. I think we're good. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you.