1982 Darwin Awards Honorable Mention: Lawn Chair Larry
Larry Walters of Los Angeles is one of the few to contend for the Darwin Awards and live to tell the tale. “I have fulfilled my 20-year dream,” said Walters, a former truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. “I’m staying on the ground. I’ve proved the thing works.”
Larry’s boyhood dream was to fly. But fates conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from the job of pilot. After he was discharged from the military, he sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead.
He hatched his weather balloon scheme while sitting outside in his “extremely comfortable” Sears lawnchair. He purchased 45 weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawnchair dubbed the Inspiration I, and filled the 4’ diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself into his lawnchair with some sandwiches, Miller Lite, and a pellet gun. He figured he would pop a few of the many balloons when it was time to descend.
Larry’s plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about 30 feet above his back yard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. But things didn’t work out quite as Larry planned.
Spoiler: he survives. Another spoiler:
He enjoyed intermittent demand as a motivational speaker, but said he never made much money from his innovative flight. He never married and had no children. Larry hiked into the forest and shot himself in the heart on October 6, 1993. He died at the age of 44.
Snopes says the story is essentially true, and even inspired a copycat:
Although Larry Walters never made another balloon flight, he did inspire someone else to try the same feat. On 1 January 1984, a licensed pilot, parachutist, and chute rigger named Kevin Walsh outfitted himself with 57 weather balloons, each six feet in diameter. Armed with five knives and carrying a parachute, Walsh tethered himself to the helium-filled balloons (no chair) and took off from Minuteman Airfield in Stow, Massachusetts, at 7:00 AM on New Year’s Day. He shot into the sky even faster than Larry had, hitting the 1,000-foot mark in twelve seconds, reaching 6,000 feet in two minutes, and peaking at 9,000 feet after four minutes.
When one of Walsh’s balloons popped, he came back down to 6,000 feet and settled in to enjoy the view. He had wrapped his tether lines in foil in the hope that they would show up on radar, and, sure enough, he was picked up on the screens of controllers at Boston’s Logan airport, where he produced a radar blip the size of three stacked jetliners. After a 45-minute flight Walsh cut himself free of the balloons and parachuted to the ground, landing in Hudson and walking away. Kevin claimed that he had been planning his flight for seven years and did it “just to make a positive statement about mankind.” Walters had been his inspiration: “I had to commend him for his ingenuity. That’s when my dream hooked up with reality.”
