2 Families Linked by Flight of a Balloon : Friendship Born on Gentle Breeze

Neva Heacock, a Montebello grandmother and real estate agent, telephoned Mount Carmel, Ill., last week to congratulate Norman Bosecker on their 14th anniversary.

Heacock isn’t related to Bosecker. In fact, she has never met him face to face. Yet she regularly corresponds with Bosecker and his wife, exchanges Christmas presents with them and is the adoptive grandmother of their 3-year-old son, Mark, whose picture she shows off to her friends.

What binds the two families is a pink balloon.

It floated 2,011 miles in January, 1973, from a Montebello elementary school to a Mount Carmel cornstalk, where Bosecker found it dangling a few feet above the day’s light snow.

Attached to the half-deflated balloon was a postcard from the students at La Merced Elementary School asking whoever found it to fill it out and mail it back. Bosecker, who lived on his parents’ farm and has never been west of St. Louis, got a kick out of the spectacular distance the balloon had traveled and dropped the card in the mail.

Heacock, whose grandson was a student at the school, heard the news and she, too, grew excited about the flight. Presuming that the person who found the balloon was another child, she copied the address off the postcard and sent a nice letter telling him that she had been at school on the day of the launch. She enclosed several pictures of the mass of balloons going up.

It was only when Bosecker wrote her back that Heacock realized the finder was a 43-year-old bachelor who split his time between the family farm and a job in an electrical factory. Bosecker had enclosed with his letter a few newspaper clippings describing Mount Carmel, a town of 9,000 people a three-hour drive from St. Louis.

Heacock, in turn, wrote back (and went to the Auto Club for a map so she could figure out where the heck Mount Carmel is), and a few months later so did Bosecker. At year’s end they sent Christmas cards and by the next spring Heacock realized that this had been going on for an unusually long time, and her husband, Homer, was teasing her about the fact that she didn’t really know to whom she was writing or what he looks like and that “one of these days somebody was going to knock on the door and say, ‘Hi, I’m Norman.’ ”

Two years later, the Heacocks found out what Norman looks like. He sent them a wedding picture of himself and his bride, Barbara. He had told his new wife about those California folks he met so strangely, but she was surprised when the correspondence continued. She was even more surprised to find herself doing most of the writing, and doing it more often than her husband had. Letters were flying as often as every month or two.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Barbara Bosecker said. “We really became familiar.”

When the Boseckers bought a new piece of furniture or fixed a leaky roof that let in nine buckets of snow or had trouble with the soybean crop or were worried about Uncle Cleo’s heart, the Heacocks knew. When Southern California had an exceptionally hot or wet spell, or when the Heacock’s son-in-law won a campaign for the Montebello City Council, or when Homer Heacock had eye problems, the Boseckers knew.

Maybe it was the fact that Homer Heacock had done some farming in his younger days before establishing his real estate company, or that Neva Heacock had grown up in sleepy Modesto, that let them feel a kinship with the Boseckers. Mostly, Neva Heacock said, the correspondence was just fun.

In the last few years it has become something more.

The Boseckers adopted Mark as an infant in September, 1982. Delighted, Neva Heacock organized a baby shower among members of one of the various social clubs she belongs to. Twenty-eight women participated, and from the hostess’s home they called Barbara Bosecker and passed the telephone around so each guest could congratulate her.

A couple of months later, at Christmastime, the Boseckers telephoned the Heacocks. As the Heacocks knew, the last year had been a bad one. For decades, there had not been a death in the family of either Bosecker, but during the last year there had been five, including both of Barbara Bosecker’s parents and Norman Bosecker’s mother. His father was alive but ailing.

“Here they were, finally with a baby but almost no grandparents,” Neva Heacock said, “so they asked us if we’d be the adoptive grandparents, even though we were a long distance away.” Remembering the gesture, her eyes moistened slightly.

Norman Bosecker feels the same way when he remembers what happened when his wife had to be hospitalized recently.

“The morning she was having surgery they delivered a rose for her right in her room, before she went in,” he said. “It was from Neva.”

“We’ve almost gotten to be relatives,” Neva Heacock said. “No matter what’s happening--if they take a trip, a new car, if she’s going to have catfish and potato salad for dinner--she tells me about it.”

Will the Boseckers and the Heacocks ever meet?

“I keep hoping we will, it’s sort of a dream,” said Norman Bosecker, who now works as a supermarket maintenance man and farms a few acres (and still has yet to travel west of St. Louis), “but the economic situation isn’t all that great.”

Even at long distance, said Neva Heacock, the relationship has been rewarding.

“It puts a lot in the lives of many people,” she said. “All of my clubs have been so interested. Every time we have a meeting, it’s always, ‘What happened to the balloon man?’ ”