Dan's Papers -November 6, 2009

Shortly after George Plimpton, the novelist and adventurer who lived in Amagansett, died in 2003, his widow arranged for Random House to publish a collection of his best short stories. The lead story in that collection, which many feel was the best he ever wrote, was the true story of a man in Los Angeles who attached helium balloons to his lawn chair and sailed up into the stratosphere for half a day. It was called "The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair."

Plimpton was fond of that story, too. He'd often tell it when he made public appearances. He included it in his introductory remarks when he was the Master of Ceremonies at the Dan's Papers 30th Anniversary Party at the Montauk Yacht Club in 1990. It also became the title of his 2004 book.

The story of Balloon Boy (or Attic Boy), which has been making headlines since Oct. 15, made me think of Plimpton and Larry Walters, the man who flew in the lawn chair.

Walters, a truck driver, had been planning to fly in his lawn chair since graduating high school 15 years before. He'd been interested in helium and balloons and flight since he was a boy. He made model planes and flew them. He made miniature balloons and flew them. When he met Carol, the woman he would marry, he told her about his plan. He intended, sometime, to make a helium-filled floating device and take off over California. He thought she should know that.

At first, Carol was supportive. But 15 years later, when he said that it was now or never, she tried to talk him out of it.

She said she would go with him. He said it was too dangerous and that he had to go alone. She said he should keep it as a dream. He said he couldn't do that. She said he should take a parachute. He said he would. She said he should take a skydiving lesson. He did, jumping out of a plane above San Bernardino. But when she said she hoped that that would get it out of his system, he said no, the time had come.

Walters bought an aluminum lawn chair at Sears, 60 basketball-sized helium weather balloons and a pellet gun (he intended to shoot the balloons when it came time to land). On the day before he was scheduled to take off, he bought a two-way radio, a compass, a flashlight, an altimeter, a pocket knife, a medical kit, eight plastic bottles of water (for ballast), a package of beef jerky, a camera, two liters of Coca-Cola and a roadmap of California.

Walters took off on the warm clear morning of July 2, 1982. He set up the lawn chair on the patio of his mother-in-law's house in San Pedro, hooked everything up with ropes, struggled into his parachute pack, climbed into his chair and began filling helium balloons. As the number of balloons hovering above him passed 45, they began to move the chair. The women shouted and screamed, and suddenly he was off the ground and climbing. He was amazed, startled and frightened. The pellet gun slipped from his lap and fell to earth. He held onto the arms of the chair for dear life.

Walters leveled off at 16,000 feet and floated evenly toward the glide path used by airplanes at the Los Angeles airport. There is a report, fully documented, of an alert issued to traffic control by the pilot of a 747.

"This is TWA 231, level at 16,000 feet. We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our 10 o'clock position, range five miles."

Eventually, the helium began to leak and Walters began to slowly descend. He circled around as the wind changed and finally landed in a residential neighborhood near Long Beach. People helped him out of his chair. Someone asked if they could have it, and he gave it to them. He was fine. There is no record of police or firemen or anybody else following Walters on the ground for the seven hours he was aloft. The comment from the pilot was never acted upon. It was filed in the flying-saucer folder.

Larry Walters was famous for a while. The FAA fined him $1,500. He was on the "Tonight Show." He was on "Letterman." He was treated with the respect someone gets when they have scaled the side of a New York City skyscraper. Letterman asked how he felt with the event over. "Life seems sort of empty," Walters said, "because I always had this to look forward to." Other than that, he said, he was delighted with all the publicity.

In October of 1993, Walters went hiking in the California mountains and fatally shot himself in the heart. He was 44. That event also made news, but in the back sections of newspapers and on cable. It seemed very out of character for him. He was really such a happy guy, Carol told people.

Plimpton's account of all this appeared in the New Yorker in June of 1998. It was such a wonderful piece that it was not only collected as the lead piece in the short story book, but also optioned for film. It eventually became a movie called Danny Deckchair starring Rhys Ifans and released in 2003.

The circumstances of the current caper, of course, have taken a very different turn. Balloon Boy Falcon's mother and father could very well do jail time for pretending that their six-year-old son was aloft in their homemade helium balloon over Fort Collins, Colorado for two hours. The charges include lying to authorities to get them running around after Balloon Boy, and violating child labor laws, since the Heene kids, all younger than 10, were in on the hoax.

I don't see where the child labor part of this is going. The parents told their kids to "help dad" by lying. It would get them a TV show. Wives are not allowed to testify in court against their husbands. Kids can be in on things, too. I might note that the kid did not spend the whole time in the attic over the garage, which might be considered child abuse. He stayed in the house during the escapade, and hid in the attic when the authorities came to look around. I think the real sin the parents committed was tricking everyone, making authorities run around crazily and forcing the closing of a nearby airport for several hours. Not nice and very expensive. A REAL emergency might have been ignored because of this hoax.

Hoaxes take place all the time, particularly in this newspaper. (Ever taken the Hampton Subway?) But it's all in fun. Once, I wrote a story about an attempt to locate a Loch Ness-type sea monster in the Hamptons in a pond in the woods north of Bridgehampton. I said that students from St. Johns University were living in a camper out there and trying to document the monster with cameras, videotape and audio equipment. As a result of this, ABC sent a news-chopper with reporters and photographers to try to interview these students and perhaps see the monster. When ABC found out they were hoaxed, they were pretty pissed at me. But I never did any jail time.

An account of this story is in the chapter "Jim Jensen" in my memoir In the Hamptons, which was published last year-by Random House, coincidentally. The memoir's still selling well in all bookstores.

A sequel, In the Hamptons Too, will be published in May 2010. The earlier book will appear in paperback that month, too.