Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/07/bad-ideas-remembering-clevelands-1986-balloonfest.html
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“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
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This film was made by my friend Nate Truesdell!
It’s been on BB before, posted by Andrea James:
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This has big “exploding whale” energy
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“No longer the butt of jokes…”
Wonder if that guy moved to Cleveland from LA. Nope. No way. He didn’t
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Thing is, what was supposed to be a beautiful piece of community performance art very quickly looks like air pollution on the video, first an ominous pink cloud, then just lots of junk in the sky.
It’s one of those things where someone thinks “wouldn’t it be cool if we did this” and nobody thinks “what could go wrong?”
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Cringe on so many levels. At 1:02 did he just fix her dress??? Newscaster shoulder touching of strangers was a thing…
…did he just fix her dress?..
Maybe. No big deal, though, honest. That’s “Big Chuck” Schodowski. He and “Li’l John” Rinaldi (the guy with the mustache) were popular TV personalties from the '60s through the '90s—not newscasters—they were hosts of the CBS affiliate’s midnight monster movie on Fridays, and sketch comedians. (Rinaldi also owned and ran a jewelry store). The relationship between local media personalities and the public back then was very familiar. That lady would have known Chuck for decades and regarded him almost as a relative.
(BTW, I was about 10 miles east in Cleveland Heights with a newborn at the time of the launch rolling my eyes. Yes, a lot of us thought it was a dumb stunt. And it was embarrassing and disappointing when, after all, the balloons just kinda went up in an ugly clump.)
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Some of us did think it was wrong, but we didn’t have any say whatsoever, and would have (were) ignored if we did.
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Was going to say, this was a deep re-boing.
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So I did a little bit of research and found out this was a stunt by a non-profit called United Way which according to Wikipedia:
United Ways raise funds primarily via company-sanctioned workplace campaigns, where the employer solicits contributions from their employees that can be paid through automatic payroll deductions (in the same way tax withholdings and insurance premiums are deducted from an employee’s [net pay). 57% of United Way’s donations come through payroll deductions while an additional 20% from corporate donations
(emphasis added)
Massive environmental damage, disruption of emergency services (with fatal consequences), for no particular philanthropic cause, didn’t even broke the intended record and was probably funded by workers whose employers politely asked for a contribution. Just wonderful!
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To be fair, the United Way probably didn’t pay for the stunt, it was probably fully donated by somebody looking to get attention for their party store or whatnot. And boiiiii did they get attention!
I can’t attest to the good/grift ratio of the United Way, but it’s been positioned as a primary do-gooder within the US employment umbrella for dozens of years, like the Red Cross, March of Dimes, etc.
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