Raising Funds, Hot-Air Balloons

Chuck Bump once landed his hot-air balloon at a McDonald’s restaurant in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The immense pear-shaped craft landed beside the microphone where drive-through customers give their orders.

Bump is a huge man with a bonfire of red curly hair. He lives in Vancouver, B.C., and was North American hot-air balloon champion for 1988 and 1989.

The voice over the speaker asked for his order and Bump said, “I’ll have two Egg McMuffins and a Diet Coke.”

The speaker voice said, “Just drive around to the window and pick up your order.”

“I can’t,” said Bump, “I’m in a hot-air balloon.” The restaurant emptied of customers and staff who surrounded the big man from space.

Audrey Ann Marie Boyle, Jean Erck and I went to the Stouffer Esmeralda Balloon and Polo Festival at the Empire Polo Field in Indio on a recent bright blue Sunday.

Balloon pilots from 14 states and four countries--among them the current champions from England, Canada and Holland--filled the skies, making crayon-colored shapes against the dark blue mountains.

We chose a table in the fenced area in front of the Stouffer Esmeralda hospitality tent and prepared to watch the beautiful polo ponies and the fairy tale balloons. Two men came up and asked if we were using the spare chairs and Jean, who has a sunshine friendliness said, “Sit with us if you’d like.”

They did and we met Chuck Bump and Bob Burch, a champion balloonist from Quebec. Burch explained that the ballooning event was to raise money to bring a planetarium to the Children’s Museum of the Desert in Palm Desert. Minolta Camera wants to teach kids astronomy. (Brian Deis, director of marketing and sales for the Planetarium Division of Minolta, told us that 28% of adults in the United States think that the sun goes around the moon.)

Bob Burch flies the Minolta balloon and was one of the pilots who took his balloon to a Coachella Valley School, delighting the kids. Twenty-five thousand Coachella Valley elementary schoolchildren have already been studying geography through a program sponsored by Minolta in which they earn ribbons and awards for recognizing states and countries from clues the teachers give them.

Bob Burch told us that Minolta’s founder, Kazuo Tashima, had loved the stars since he was a little boy, and during the 1950s, he realized that bright city lights and pollution were robbing the new generation of the wonder of the stars. In 1956, he began to build planetariums to bring the wonder of the night sky to as many people as possible.

Bob Burch said, “Would you like to take a balloon ride?” I said yes before Bob finished the question.

The crew began to blow up the balloon. Bob had brought his envelope (what the balloon is called) from Montreal. The envelope carries a basket holding propane tanks that roar hot air into the envelope with the augmentation of a large electric fan.

When the envelope was filled, Bob and crewman Bill Porter, a Long Beach photographer, lifted me into the basket and pilot Bob coaxed the balloon into the sky by adding and subtracting hot air. In a few seconds, we were floating above the polo field and over the Coachella Valley. There was silence except when the propane tanks roared their heat into the envelope.

Bob took us up to more than one quarter of a mile. From that altitude we could see the entire Coachella Valley from the Salton Sea to the east to the town of White Water at the west end of the valley.

We floated over a perfect date grove, looking into the hearts of palm trees that look like giant chrysanthemums from above. We floated over golf courses, picked out freeways and waved to kids who ran to look up as the blue and silver Minolta balloon went over in utter silence.

Bill radioed, “Minolta chase. Do you read? Copy.”

The chase car answered that they could see us and were following our shadow. We cleared a drainage canal and landed on a private golf course. In seconds, the white chase van arrived, carrying Valley View School teacher Jim Jones, whose students had been winners in the geography competition, and his son, Eric, and Jo Dee Hunt, a balloonophile from Santa Ana.

When we landed, Bill Porter said there was a traditional ceremony for first-time balloonists. He opened a chilled bottle of champagne from the van and poured us all a splash of the bubbly.

Then he recited the balloonists’ blessing:

“The winds have welcomed you with softness. The sun has blessed you with its warm hands. You have flown so high and so well that God has joined you in your laughter and He has set you gently back again into the arms of Mother Earth.”