Balloonist’s Cousin Says Family Has Way of Rising to Occasion

It happens all the time, Mary Louise Piccard said, whenever she mentions her name.

Like when she reserves a table at a restaurant near her Pacific Palisades home. “They’ll say Piccard?” Mary Louise recalled Sunday. “You mean like the captain of Star Trek? Jean Luc Picard?”

And she would think, yes, sort of. As the story goes, her grandfather, Jean Felix Piccard, the famous balloonist, was a hero of “Star Trek” producer Gene Roddenberry, who named the fictitious captain accordingly.

Mary Louise Piccard would smile graciously and say, yes. “Except my name has two C’s.”

But now, after her second cousin Bertrand, and another man, Brian Jones, became the first pair to successfully circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon, Piccard said her answer will be different.

“Now I’ll say, Piccard, as in Bertrand,” she said.

With that, the single mother of 3-year-old twins, Madeleine and Emily, launched into her family’s remarkable story of balloon exploration, which started with Jean Felix and his twin brother, Auguste.

Jean Felix invented the plastic balloon and Auguste was the first to take a balloon into the stratosphere. Bertrand’s father, Jacques, set a record in 1960 for the deepest ocean descent, reaching 35,797 feet in a bathyscaph. Mary Louise said her father, Donald Piccard, helped pioneer the science of hot-air balloons.

The exploration began when the grandparents, Jean and Auguste, read Jules Verne’s book “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

They became interested in vehicles propelled through water and sky.

Jean’s wife, Jeannette, was the first woman to pilot a balloon into the stratosphere, and, as such, is considered to be the first woman in space.

As far as Mary Louise is concerned, “If Jean had not invented the plastic balloon, had Auguste not been the first into the stratosphere, had my father not pioneered the invention of hot-air balloons, and if Jacques had not given Bertrand the support to undertake this incredible feat, this flight would have never happened.”

After she learned of her cousin’s success, Mary Louise Piccard said, “I was thrilled, firstly that he made it safely. Secondly, that it was a Piccard.”

Mary Louise can praise her family without sounding boastful; more than a few family members are enshrined in one aeronautical museum or another.

That fact is not lost on Mary Louise.

She also didn’t act pompously.

On Sunday afternoon, she was busy slicing grapes in her kitchen to feed her girls, when one asked, “Mommy, do I have to be an explorer?”

“Yes. Because it’s in your blood, honey,” Mary Louise replied. “The sooner you get used to it, the better.”

Every weekend morning since she was 12, Mary Louise’s father, Donald, would walk into her bedroom at 4:30 a.m. and say, “It’s time to go fly.” Her first flight was over the California desert.

“I grew up flying in hot-air balloons and that’s probably why I became a stuntwoman,” said Mary Louise, who worked on the sets of the television show “The Equalizer” and the movie “Wall Street.”

“It’s in my blood,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about it. When I was hanging by one leg 95 feet from the ground in a body harness . . . I kept my cool knowing that I’m a Piccard, and that I can do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

The Piccards are from Switzerland, where Bertrand lives now. Mary Louise’s grandfathers immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. She grew up in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Newport Beach.

“I see Bertrand every few years,” said Mary Louise, who has not spoken to him since his world record flight.

She said that when he comes to visit, she expects him to stay with her.

“He’s never seen my kids,” she said. “He has to stay with me.”