Cleveland’s Catastrophic Balloon Fest THE GREAT DEFLATION
While you may have heard of Fyre Fest, the disastrous music festival that became the subject of documentaries on both Netflix and Hulu, you may not have heard of its record-setting older cousin Cleveland’s BalloonFest ’86. The event was supposed to improve its reputation. Instead, it became a notorious example of an event planned with good intentions that ended in disaster. More Than Just Hot Air On Sept. 27, 1986, Cleveland held the 1986 BalloonFest as a fundraising event for United Way. This charitable organization works to provide access to health care, education, and economic mobility for underprivileged communities. The idea was simple: For every dollar donated to United Way by Cleveland schoolchildren, two balloons
would be added to the celebration. At the end of fundraising, the tally was 1.4 million balloons: a world record. Shadows From Above After volunteers spent a full night and morning preparing the balloons and the net meant to contain them, they were released in front of Terminal Tower in Cleveland’s Public Square. With more than 100,000 people filling downtown, events quickly went from majesty to misery. The launch went well, but as a storm swept in, the cloud of multi- colored balloons turned into a giant plastic clump blocking air and street traffic and littering nearby Lake Erie. What the Helium?! In addition to shutting down a local airport, helicopters could not operate
over Lake Erie. Tragically, a boat carrying two fishermen had
been overturned that day, and the balloons made it impossible for the Coast Guard to mount rescue efforts in time to save them.
The largest balloon-related disaster outside of the Hindenburg is also notable for setting a Guinness world record, as 1,429,643 balloons were released at once. Unfortunately, that record only makes the event more notorious rather than giving Cleveland the prestigious victory it sought. No wonder no one has attempted to break it since!
WHAT’S THE SCOOP?
TRACING THE HISTORY OF ICE CREAM
While fables exist of Marco Polo returning from his adventures in the Far East with a recipe closely resembling modern-day sherbet, that was not the inspiration for the treat we’re exploring here. The history of America’s favorite dessert is as varied as a cone of Neapolitan ice cream! Beginnings in Europe While people have enjoyed iced desserts for thousands of years, sources tell us that the origin of ice cream dates back at least four centuries , with written records from 1600s Naples boasting that everyone in the city was born with the gift of making sorbet. While this was similar to the dessert we enjoy today, it was still quite different. A typical 18th-century ice cream maker was the sorbetiere , a bullet-shaped pewter mold filled with cream or custard, immersed in a salt and ice slush, and twisted
back and forth with a handle on the lid. Every few minutes, you had to remove the lid and scrape away at the sides to keep it from freezing into a hard block, making it a labor-intensive process. Crossing the Atlantic Our favorite treat likely made its way across the pond sometime in the early 18th century. Our first president, George Washington, was an ice cream fan. In 1784, presumably as a reward for winning the Revolutionary War, he bought a mechanical ice cream maker for his home in Mount Vernon. However, until refrigeration was invented and homemade ice became accessible to the masses, the dessert remained a rare delicacy reserved for the wealthiest Americans. However, by the 1940s, ice cream production flourished, and ice cream shops popped up just about everywhere. The dessert has remained popular ever since, with the average American eating roughly 20 pounds of ice cream yearly!
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