Interesting Pod #5 - LawnChair Larry and Backyard Aeronauts Take Flight.

Today we finally get to the inspiration for this set of episodes: Lawnchair Larry himself - the man who tied a bunch of balloons to his lawnchair and flew off into history. A great, great story - and a cautionary tale.

But before we get to that, let me do the typical podcast host drivel for a moment. As an Indie show not hosted by a celebrity, the Interesting Pod relies on word of mouth. Please tell folks about us, and share episodes on social media. Our growth depends, in large part, on you guys. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts would be helpful as well. I’ve been podcasting since 2005, and believe in the medium as an excellent way to communicate. From about 2005 to 2015, podcasting was a ground-leveling way for normal people to reach lots of people with all kinds of fascinating topics, but now the podcasting world is flooded and saturated with celebrities. That’s fine, I suppose, but I hope there’s still a place for indie shows and little podcasts like this one, and when you tell people about it, you help little efforts like this carve a niche. Thank you!

On our last episode, we introduced you to the real Wonder Twins - The scientists, aeronauts and deep sea exploring Piccard Twins, likely the inspiration behind Starfleet Captain Jean Luc Picard. Before the Piccard twins inspired the creation of Captain Picard, however, they inspired another luminary, this one much more like Dr. Zefram Cochrane than Picard. A high-strung - in more ways than one - truck driver and aeronaut named Larry Walters. He dreamed of becoming an ace pilot in the USAF, but poor eyesight and maybe other factors grounded him. At least, it grounded him temporarily, but not permanently! I’m Chase, and today we’re telling the story of Lawnchair Larry—the man who lashed helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair, rose to an altitude that Isaiah might call “mounting up with wings like eagles,” and drifted his way into American folklore, aviation case studies, and even a blackout in Long Beach. This is a story about ingenuity and longing, the thin line between gumption and folly, bravery and recklessness, and some of the depressing factors of life after kissing the sky.

It’s July 2, 1982, and Los Angeles is doing what Los Angeles does best, sunshine, smog, and improbable dreams. The front page of the LA Times for that day discussed the benefits and dangers of radio therapists - around 11 years before Frasier appeared on the airwaves. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were, unsurprisingly, going at it, and Ronald Reagan weighed in on the insanity plea of his would-be assassin John Hinkley. The weather that day called for a high of 78 and a low of 59, a bit cold for LA at that time of year.

In the backyard of a San Pedro home, a Sears aluminum lawn chair is tethered to dozens of weather balloons like a suburban version of Jules Verne. A rope slips loose earlier than planned, and our hero, Larry Walters, truck driver and thwarted Air Force hopeful, shoots into the relatively cool Southern California sky. Not metaphorically. Literally. Up, up, and away…straight toward controlled airspace. A Delta pilot gawks. A TWA pilot confirms. And somewhere on a CB radio, Larry calmly informs the REACT volunteers: “Ah, the difficulty is, ah, this was an unauthorized balloon launch.” You don’t say, Larry.

Long before he tangled with those power lines, Larry tangled with a different kind of line: the Air Force’s vision requirements. He wanted to fly, but his eyesight grounded the dream. Like many of us who don’t get Plan A, he did what you do, he settled. Truck driver by trade; dreamer by nature. And that dream, according to Larry, started early. At 13, he walked into a military surplus store, looks up at a ceiling of weather balloons, and thinks: there’s a way to get airborne without a fighter jet. The seed is planted.

Fast forward to 1982. Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, E.T. is in theaters, and Larry, now in his early thirties, decides to cash in the dream. The plan is simple in a Rube Goldberg kind of way: attach roughly 42 (sometimes Larry said 43) eight-foot weather balloons to a lawn chair, fill them with helium, lift off gently, drift over the Mojave, and, this is the key, shoot a few balloons with a pellet gun when it’s time to descend. What could go wrong besides literally everything?

Oh yeah, about that lawn chair. It was reportedly a Sears special, about $109 at the time…

Pause - $109 for a lawnchair in the early 1980s?? That’s like 350 today. On the one hand, if you are going to take your lawnchair up to the edge of space, then I get wanting to have the absolute best lawnchair possible. On the other hand, that’s a LOT of money for a lawnchair!

This is the American tinker spirit with a dash of…creative paperwork, because Larry and his longtime girlfriend, Carol Van Deusen, bought 45 balloons and helium, using some forged documents and fudged reasonings. The launch site? The backyard at 1633 West 7th Street, San Pedro, which turned out to be Carol’s mom’s house. Equipment list for this manned aerostat included: parachute, CB radio, sandwiches, Coca-Cola - that’s regular Coca Cola before the New Coke debacle - a pellet gun, and a camera he would later be too awestruck (read: busy not dying) to use.

Let’s talk about that backyard at 1633 West 7th Street. If you aren’t from Cali, you may not know this, but if you are a californian not named Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg, you probably live in a house with a surprisingly small backyard. I come from Alabama, where giant backyards are owned by even lower middle class folks, and in Cali, even upper middle class and some rich folks have comparatively small backyards. Carol’s mom’s house fits this bill. I’ve never been there, but I’m looking at it on satellite view right now, and it is TINY. Like so small it could only fit a few lawnchairs. But I guess it really only had to fit that one!

Then, the critical moment: Larry’s sitting in his chair, hovering a bit, and hoping for a SOFT launch. He’s attached balloons to his chair, and it is held to the ground by a seemingly strong tether. Unfortunately, that tether snaps earlier than planned. No gentle 30-foot float; instead, Larry rockets skyward to something like 16,000 feet—three miles up—right into controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. I ride roller coasters, but I get nervous as they go up steep hills - especially huge roller coasters like Six Flag’s Goliath. One time in Atlanta, I looked at my friend Sam as we rode up together, and simply asked him - “What are we doing? This is insane.” I can only imagine that Larry had similar thoughts as he rocketed from 10 feet to 16,000 feet IN A LAWN CHAIR.

And somewhere on the ground, a handful of friends are staring upward at a little aluminum throne sailing the firmament, wondering if this is still technically a backyard barbecue.

Unfortunately, as Plane and Pilot reports, Larry got too high, too fast: I can almost hear the power-chords and wails from Dokken as Larry goes up, Too high to fly, but you should've seen him there (Yeah) The sun shines down on his face, but he did feel a thing, sadly.

Larry didn’t need to look at his altimeter to know he went much higher than he had intended. He began to feel cold and dizzy from the thin air and feared that if he shot out any of the balloons that the balance of his chair would become unstable, causing him to fall. Which is the kind of thing he might should have considered earlier. He used his CB radio to call REACT, a citizens' band radio monitoring organization. REACT: “What information do you wish me to tell [the airport] at this time as to your location and your difficulty??” Larry: “Ah, the difficulty is… this was an unauthorized balloon launch… I’m sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authority… just tell them I’m okay.” This transcript is real, recorded by REACT—the volunteer radio monitors who found themselves dealing with perhaps the most unique mayday in SoCal history.

After about 45 minutes in the air, he finally found the courage to shoot out some of the balloons, starting with those in the outer ring, but accidentally dropped his gun in the process. He poured out ballast to control the descent from there.

Let me repeat what you just heard…Larry eventually starts carefully shooting balloons to descend…and then drops the pellet gun. That seems like one of the more significant fumbles in history. A small, gravity-obedient mistake, but by then he’d punctured enough balloons to begin coming down—slowly, and then not so slowly, but - grace upon grace - Larry and his makeshift gondola snagged some power lines in Long Beach. Bummer for the neighborhood though, because Lights flicker and die across a broad swath of the community. Twenty minutes of blackout, so nobody lost their steaks or anything. Larry, by grace and plastic tethers, avoids electrocution, clambers off the chair, and steps back onto the earth. Unharmed. Score one for improbable Providence—and maybe for water-jug ballast.

Sadly for Larry, but unsurprisingly for everyone else, The Long Beach Police Department is waiting. Larry is promptly arrested, a bewildered slow and confused, “what do we even charge this guy with?” kind of arrest. An FAA regional safety inspector, Neal Savoy, says the line that belongs in a museum of deadpan regulation: We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed. That right there is a stereotypical bureaucrat speaking. This looks and feels wrong, but we don’t know why it’s wrong until we pore over the standards and regulations. I don’t disagree with Neil, but that’s definitely hall of fame level bureaucrat thinking there. If Larry had a pilot’s license, they’d suspend it. He did not. It’s hard to revoke a license from a man who just flew a lawn chair.

Initially, Larry gets slapped with a $4,000 fine (in early-80s dollars - that’s not quite $15,000 today, not chump change) for multiple regulatory sins: entering an airport traffic area without proper two-way radio contact, creating a hazard, and operating what the FAA first treated like a civil aircraft. On appeal, the FAA eventually drops the airworthiness-certificate angle, and reduces the fine to $1,500. Even the feds, it seems, recognize the difference between malice and misadventure. But hey, $5000 bucks is $5000 bucks! I wouldn’t want to get hit by a fine like that, and I’m a very wealthy podcaster! Well, I’m a podcaster anyway.

Larry’s public comments, though, are not the swagger of a daredevil. They sound more like a pilgrim. “It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn’t done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm.” In another line, he credits God: “Since I was 13 years old, I’ve dreamed of going up into the clear blue sky in a weather balloon… By the grace of God, I fulfilled my dream.” Those aren’t victory-laps; they’re testimony. He did the thing he’d longed to do, and he knew it wasn’t exactly prudent, but I imagine it was quite fulfilling.

The world, predictably, goes bonkers for Lawnchair Larry. Ten days after the flight, he’s on Late Night with David Letterman. He does Johnny Carson. He gives speeches for a bit, even snags a Timex print ad years later. Yes, you heard that right - Timex featured "Lawnchair" Larry Walters in a series of ads for their watches in 1992, focusing on his ambitious flight and adventurous spirit. The ad specifically highlighted that Larry was wearing a Timex "moon dial" watch while he was in his lawn chair.

Someone dubs his craft Inspiration I, a name as earnest and backyard-poetic as the flight itself. Meanwhile, the great sorting hat of modern folklore places him in the orbit of the Darwin Awards, where he’s labeled an “At-Risk Survivor” (in other words, spectacularly lucky) in 1993. The cultural verdict lands somewhere between admiration for chutzpah and a universal parental eye-roll.

And the chair? What became of that amazing and ridiculously expensive lawn chair? (Maybe I shouldn’t be so critical - it did survive and keep Larry safe.) Well, that aluminum recliner becomes an artifact. Larry gave it away to a neighborhood kid, Jerry Fleck, in a move he later regretted when institutions started calling. Eventually, Jerry surfaces years later, the chair still in his garage with some original ballast jugs attached, and loans it to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. It is later donated to the Smithsonian, displayed at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, and today it’s part of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.—a place that houses the Wright Flyer, the Apollo command module, and…a surprisingly expensive, but sturdy aluminum patio chair that once blacked out Long Beach. God bless America!

Fifteen years after the flight, in 1997, the early Internet rediscovered Larry, and the story ballooned again. A widely shared post claimed all sorts of specifics, painting a dramatic scene involving LAX, helicopters, offshore rescues, and one very quotable line as he’s led away in cuffs: “A man can’t just sit around.” It’s sensational, cinematic…and, as Snopes.com pointed out, full of embellishments. The core is true—Larry really did fly, and he really did hit 16,000 feet, and there really was a blackout—but many details from the 1997 viral version were just that: viral. Consider this a friendly reminder that folklore accumulates barnacles, especially online. Legends, like toenails, tend to grow.

Larry’s flight also inspired imitators—most notably Kevin Walsh in 1984, who ascended under 57 balloons from a Massachusetts airfield, hit 9,000 feet in minutes, and parachuted down, promptly earning his own FAA paperwork. Think about that - parachuting out of a lawnchair at almost two miles high! Larry had become a genre and an inspiration to many, many others.

And then there’s the pop-culture wake: the Australian film Danny Deckchair, a stage musical (The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man), and countless magazine features. That movie gets a fairly decent 6.7 IMDB rating, and stars two guys named Rhys - spell it - which is something. Actually, it's kind of weird, because Danny Deckchair is an Aussie film, and Rhys is a Welsh name. Oh well, we live in a strange world.

I watched the trailer for that 2003 film. It looks…odd, but maybe decent. Spoiler alert - I guess, I only watched the trailer - but this Larry, or Danny - doesn’t land in powerlines, but his balloons get blown up by a fireworks show, and he plummets out of the sky, landing in a backyard tree where a woman nurses him to health and - it appears - falls in love with him, even though he uses her leg shaving razor to shave his face. Which is gross on two different accounts.

Lawnchair Larry lives on to this day - every now and then a new batch of people discover his story on websites like Reddit and Tik Tok as recent listicles and social news aggregation sites keep rediscovering and retelling, some faithfully, some fancifully, the day a lawn chair shared airspace with airliners. The fact-checked bottom line, though, is stranger and better than fiction: a backyard dream rode a thermal right into the history books.

Let’s talk meaning. Why does Lawnchair Larry endure when so many stunts fade?

Part of it is the quintessentially American cocktail: restraint-defying ingenuity, Home Depot aesthetics, and a stubborn refusal to accept that flying requires permission. Larry is a folk saint of the DIY imagination—equal parts Huck Finn and Apollo 11. Another part is the sheer audacity of earnestness. He wasn’t trying to sell a sneaker or set a sponsored content record. He was chasing a twenty-year prayer with a parachute and a pellet gun. And, man - he did it - he climbed up over 3 miles high where the airplanes go with just stuff you can buy at Home Depot!

At this point a pastor’s brain can’t help but surface. The Bible is not short on sky metaphors or cautionary tales about vertical ambition. The Tower of Babel warns us about building up in our own name (Genesis 11), and Ecclesiastes has strong words for “chasing the wind.” But Scripture also gives us Isaiah 40—“those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles”—and Peter, who actually stepped out onto water when Jesus said “come.” Faith can look like audacious obedience; folly can look like audacious self-promotion. The difference is motive, wisdom, and maybe just a sprinkle of wise counsel.

With Larry, I don’t read arrogance but antsiness, unease, maybe even ADHD, but also a lot of good old fashioned earnestness, and it’s important to be earnest, right Oscar? “By the grace of God, I fulfilled my dream.” said Larry, afterwards. Maybe that’s not exactly Babel; but more like Pilgrim’s Progress with helium. Maybe that’s too generous. Wisdom might have thought better of this excercise: romantic visions don’t absolve us from neighbor-love or hazard mitigation. Larry’s flight cut power to a community for twenty minutes. There’s a balance between holy daring and humble diligence.

In pastoral counseling, I often see this tension: God-given desires that, if pursued without wisdom, planning or restraint, create collateral damage. The call isn’t to stop desiring; it’s to apprentice desire to faith and patience. Larry’s story is at once beautiful and complicated: a dream realized, a community briefly blacked out, a nation delighted, and a bureaucracy perplexed. It is in so many ways a quintessential human story. I can’t throw stones, because it sounds like the kind of thing I would have done in my 20s.

The next day, Larry Walters was famous, and plastered across the front page news of the Los Angeles Times. I’m looking at the paper as I type this. Two headlines frame a picture - not a very good picture, sadly - of Larry on his lawnchair. If you’re thinking these are helium party balloons that lofted him three miles high, then think again. These balloons are big - as in, each balloon appears to be way bigger than Larry and his lawnchair, and there were over 40 of them. Let’s read the article! (READ THE PAPER) That’s a big deal - I’ve never done anything to make the frontpage of the newspaper, and the closest I’ve come is making the front page of the Birmingham Grotto of the National Speleological Society’s newsletter in 1991 because I got myself stuck in a cave and rescued by the cave rescue team. Another story for another day. Larry was famous, but Fame is fickle. He did the talk shows, hit the circuit, and then, people turned their attention to other things and real life resumed. Unfortunately, Walters didn’t realize fame is fleeting, and he retired from his main job to become a motivational speaker, a decision that appears to not have gone very well. Over the years, He hiked the San Gabriel Mountains, volunteered with the U.S. Forest Service and did some odd-job security work. He broke up with his girlfriend of 15 years - ouch, that’s a long time to date and not marry - and had to deal with real life, jobs, bills and the dogged reality that the mountaintop—literal, in his case—isn’t where we live most days. And then, in October 1993, at age 44, Larry walked into one of his favorite hiking places and died by suicide in the Angeles National Forest. News reports were matter of fact, somber, restrained, and sad. The man whose flight made millions laugh and gasp had been carrying more weight than any balloons could lift. All of us feel that way some of the time. Even many of the great saints in the Bible - Moses, Job, Elijah, dealt with depression and fought suicidal thoughts. If you’re listening to this and you are fighting that struggle, allow me to encourage you to NOT fight alone. Reach out. More people care than you realize, and if you can’t find somebody in your local context, then call 988 and you will find help. Life is hard, and it’s not meant to be lived alone.

Larry’s death complicates his legend in the way real endings often do. The Tik-Tok video wants an uncomplicated hero or a punchline. The truth gives us a warty person, someone who sought wonder and brushed the heavens and then struggled in the valley. If anything, his story invites gentleness, and should cause us to ponder what those around us are grappling with. Ecclesiastes again: “There is a time to laugh” and a time to weep. We can do both.

What can we learn from our guy Larry? First, dreams need craft. Larry didn’t just wish; he planned, he sourced, he calculated lift (not perfectly, but he tried), he strapped on a parachute, and he brought redundancy—well, until the pellet gun plummeted. Aspiration without preparation is a recipe for blackouts. For all of his foibles, Larry reached the heavens and returned. That’s really impressive.

Second, wisdom is communal. Larry’s story reminds me of an old Solomnic proverb, "Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety." Had an FAA-style mind been in the backyard that morning, some hazards might have been avoided. In an abundance of counselors, there is safety—and probably fewer neighborhood outages. But you know what? I get it - put an FAA-style mind in that backyard, and Larry probably never takes off. That balance between prudence and daring-do is so hard to navigate. The prudent rarely, if ever, touch the heavens in lawnchairs, but neither do they end up at the bottom of Strids in Bolton either.

Third, the afterlife of artifacts tells a story. That chair’s journey—from a San Pedro yard to a kid’s garage to the Smithsonian—says a lot about what we value. America keeps odd company under glass: lunar landers and lawn furniture, Kitty Hawk and cul-de-sacs. There’s something delightfully patriotic about that. The next time I go to the Smithsonian, I’m making a bee line to that lawnchair, and want to see it up close more than almost anything else in that museum.

Fourth, folklore is fun, but facts matter. The Internet’s 1997 myth-saturated, turbo-charged version gave Larry a Hollywood makeover he never needed. The truth is interesting enough: a lawn chair entered controlled airspace and made airline pilots do double-takes. That story is so beautiful it needs not makeup or implants or lies or embellishments.

Larry’s launch wasn’t policy-compliant. But it was sincere, and it was impressive. He looked up at a big sky, and rather than merely envy the pilots who used it, he gave himself thirty minutes in that expanse, trusting a pellet gun, some water jugs, and grace. He made us laugh, made the FAA frown, made the lights flicker, and made history.

If you’re dreaming today—about scholarship, a deeper calling, a story to write, a song to compose—tie your balloons thoughtfully. Invite wiser friends to look over your ropes. Surround yourself with a mixture of dreamers and unstifled bureaucrats…you’ll need ‘em both. File the metaphorical flight plan. And when you finally rise, do so in boldness and prudence, wisdom and adventure. You may not cause a blackout or capture the attention of airline pilots, but you’ll make an impact, and likely live to tell about it to your grandkids.

This has been the story—and the aftermath—of Lawnchair Larry Walters: the backyard aviator who drifted into controlled airspace and cultural memory. For the record: do not try this at home, at church, or really anywhere. If Larry got a slap on the wrist in 1982, you can bet they’d put you under the jail in 2025. These are different times!

Larry spawned a lot of copycats, as such events often do. I could talk about many of them, but I will focus a little bit on the most impressive and maybe the saddest. We need to talk about Adelir Antônio de Carli. Initially, de Carli had humble beginnings, born in Brazil, but lived for much of his childhood in Paraguay until his mom died of cancer. As a teen, he worked as a tire repairman and later as a gas station attendant at his uncle's gas station, while also painting tablecloths as a side job. He was described as a quiet and humble person, and was an excellent student. In other news, I don’t know what painting tablecloths means, but I guess that is a job. In his early 30s, de Carli went to seminary, and was ordained in 2003 as a Catholic priest. He was a man of deep compassion, advocating for the homeless before it was cool to do so, and he also created the Pastoral Rodoviária, a rest area for truckers. Fuelled by a "necessity to spread God's message", he conceived the project with the intent of assisting and evangelizing the truck drivers who would pass by the port - creating a rest space for them, where he offered pastoral care. It was this ministry that would lead to him reaching higher than any other amateur chair-cluster balloonist, and would also lead to his tragic death.

In April 20, 2008, shortly after leading Mass, de Carli planned a record-breaking balloon flight to raise awareness for his truck stop ministry. He was not unprepared, having attended paragliding classes (where he was unfortunately expelled, but also taking jungle-survival and mountain-climbing courses.

This wasn’t his first attempt to fly. On January 13, 2008, in Ampére, Brazil, he rose beneath 600 helium giant party balloons, climbing to about 5,300 meters (17,400 ft). He drifted across borders and landed safely in Argentina. Impressive. Very impressive.

Three months later, he tried again. Lifting off from Paranaguá, de Carli aimed to travel roughly (450 mi) inland to Dourados. This time he used a chair slung under 1,000 balloons, climbing to about 6,100 meters (20,000 ft). But he hadn’t checked the forecast. A storm swept in. Though he carried a GPS, he didn’t know how to operate it. About eight hours after liftoff, his final radio call reported he’d drifted off the coast, approaching water, unable to give his position. The transcript reads:

“I need to get in touch with the staff so they can teach me how to operate this GPS here to give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way anyone on the ground can know where I am. The satellite cell phone keeps going out of range and furthermore the battery is getting low.”

Unfortunately, storms caught him and He crashed into the Atlantic. Weeks later, on July 4, 2008, the Brazilian Navy recovered his remains near an offshore oil platform. A daring heart, a pastoral calling, a passion for evangelism and careteaking. What a guy, what a unit. This is a good place to end today’s episode. May his memory call us to courage—and to wisdom—before we loose the ropes and trust the wind. Our next episode - out this week, Lord willing and the creek don’t wise - looks at the amazing Balloon boy story, and also the mysterious JPG - Jet Pack Guy AKA Ironman. Share the show, and stay tuned!