For your holiday viewing pleasure, we give you complete and true story of Cleveland’s 1986 Balloonfest: Letter from the Editor (2024)

Give us 40 minutes this holiday weekend, and we’ll give you true pride and joy in Cleveland.

Today we release our new YouTube documentary on Balloonfest, the 1986 event where the eyes of the world were on Cleveland as it set the record for the biggest release of balloons in history. Our movie, by videographer John Pana, conclusively slams the door on the absurd narrative that developed over the past decade about how the event was a disaster that killed people.

“BalloonFest ‘86: The Real Story” is an uplifting (smile) tale about vision and human spirit. It’s about leaders and children from throughout the region coming together to make a statement and raise a bundle for charity. It’s about what Cleveland can do when it sets its mind to something.

It’s also an object lesson in how a golden community moment can be trashed and converted in harmful fiction in the hands of people who seek to profit from phony misery.

You might remember that I wrote a couple of columns about Balloonfest last year. My awareness of the event was largely based on the many requests we had received to license our photos of it. When I finally took the time to look into it, I saw that storytelling about the event had careened out of control, into the ridiculous. I wrote a column to set the record straight and debunk those who had coopted the story.

I received so much reaction from witnesses and participants in the event -- people who were glad to see the event’s reputation reclaimed -- that I published a follow-up containing many of their notes.

After that, we heard from most of the key people involved in putting the event together, including the head of the United Way at the time. The United Way was the chief organizer of Balloonfest. I also heard from Treb Heining, the expert who staged the event, who had been distressed by the false narrative about Balloonfest being a disaster and was grateful someone was reclaiming the truth. As we corresponded, he told me he had hours of previously unseen footage from that day, and many photographs, and he offered them to us.

They became the backbone of John’s documentary. The footage and photos are wonderful. So is the story of how Balloonfest came to be.

John spent much of the past year interviewing people tied to the event. He went to New York to interview Heining. He spent time with the United Way’s George Fraser, who had the original vision for Balloonfest and the gumption to get people aligned behind it. One after another, people involved in Balloonfest graciously shared their memories.

John’s movie is entrancing storytelling, and when the moment comes about halfway through when the balloons are released with Terminal Tower in the background, you’ll see a majesty in it and wish you were there to bear witness. I know I do.

The second half of the documentary traces how the story was corrupted through the ill will of documentary makers looking for YouTube fame. Heining blames a 2011 Plain Dealer story for starting the downward progression, and I suspect he is right. I take full blame for that, as I was Metro editor at the time. One reason I assigned John to put together the movie was so we could atone for our role in changing the Balloonfest narrative.

If you’re thinking that we should not celebrate the Balloonfest achievement because we now know that such releases cause harm to wildlife that ingest the latex, I remind you that such thoughts were largely unknown in 1986. We should not judge what happened then based on modern standards.

And if you’re thinking that this movie much ado about a bunch of silly balloons, I say this is about so much more than the latex. As people discuss in the movie, Cleveland was down and out back then, the city with the burning river. Fraser saw the event as a way to recapture some of the city’s glory.

He proved that one person with a vision, and a community with a unity of purpose, can do anything.

So, when you head indoors this holiday weekend after a day of enjoying what I hope is glorious weather, pull out your laptop or tablet. Or click on the YouTube channel on your Apple TV or Roku device. Go to the cleveland.com channel on YouTube and launch the documentary, https://www.youtube.com/@clevelanddotcom. Or you can watch it in the player below.

And as it winds down, think about what your vision would be if you could get this whole community behind it.

What could we do today if we had the unity of purpose this city showed for one day in 1986?

I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com

Thanks for reading.