Talk:Lawnchair Larry flight

message: The sentence about Larry first getting the idea when sitting in his backyard in a lawn chair is dubious, and I have marked it as such.  It is in conflict with facts known to his biographer, Mark Barry, who has reported that Larry first got the idea to use balloons at age 13.  I will do some more checking and may come back and remove those sentences.  paul klenk 16:28, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Dubious facts

message: The middle of the article claims that Larry planned to just hover for a little while, but the bottom of the article, about the Myths, says that he planned for a long flight and that that was his intentions all along. This needs to be resolved- both sentences can't be right.Andrewdt85 04:23, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Contradictory facts in article

message: Wasn't there a fictionalized version of Mr. Walters' story released last year. It featured the basic element of the balloons on a chair, but then had him land far away where he fell in love. While certainly not an exact adaptation, it must've been influenced by his story and deserves some mention.
The movie is called Danny Deckchair.  It's on the TV right now as I type this.  The chair with the balloons is probably based on Larry's flight, but the rest of the story is totally unrelated.  I'd heard the Larry story, so the movie prompted me to look him up on the net.  For information on Danny Deckchair, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/.
I'm glad the real Lawnchair Larry didn't live to see that movie. It was so sitcom-ish. 
Not that a good film couldn't have been made of his exploits, but Danny Deckchair wasn't it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.50.79 (talk) 22:06, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The movie?

message: The phrase "often mistaken as an urban legend" is a little inaccurate. "Urban legend" does not always mean false; it simply means it's a bit of folklore that is claimed to be true by the person telling it. What passes it from a news story into folklore is the changing of details. For example, every time the Darwin Award e-mail comes around, it claims this happened "last year" or some such (but I highly doubt that e-mail has been circulating since 1983). It's also often told that the man (with no name given) died, thus he was a candidate for that year's Darwin Award. Or sometimes we never hear what happened to him afterward, the story ending with Walters floating above LAX or JFK or the ocean but presumably having plummeted to his death. It's these exaggerations and mutations that make it an urban legend. --Birdhombre 16:47, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urban legend status 

message: Approximately what distance did Larry cover?  According to Mapquest the distance San Pedro-Long Beach is about 7 miles / 11.5 km by road—maybe someone could come up with more accurate info.  Thanks.  Maikel 15:20, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Distance?

message: I have to say that Larry's girlfriend Carol van Deusen appears to be the unsung hero of this epic.  The way she stood by her man makes Tammy Wynette look like a pushover, a fair-weather friend and a quitter rolled into one.  Is there any more information we could more information get on her, especially on her motivation?  Maikel 15:20, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Tammy always was a pushover.  That's why she was married five times!  It's Carol van Deusen (and Hillary Clinton) who really  knows how to stand by her man!  Rlquall 01:32, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Carol just loved Larry I guess.  A couple years after the lawnchair incident, she got on a daytime NBC show of the period called "Wishes" I believe.  The premise of the show was to find some worthy person and fulfill their wish.  Carol's was to marry Larry.  They basically built it up over the course of the program offering him/them various prize-based incentives to tie the knot, doing a nice sales job on her, etc., and at the end of the show, he just turned it down.  --98.206.188.62 (talk) 07:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Girlfriend?

message: In 2003, Bridget Carpenter wrote a play, "UP", centered around a fictionalized version of Larry and his (also fictional) family.  The play has since been performed at major regional theaters, including the 2006 season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.  This seems worth noting in the article. PavelCurtis 18:38, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For what it's worth, Walters is also mentioned in Robert Fulghum's book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, which was also turned into a play. --Birdhombre 21:43, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The play? 

message: I was always confused about this lawn-chair stunt.  I'd heard it described as happening in upstate New York, not LA.   I finally found the cause:  an earlier effort!  Garret (Gary) Cashman, age 27, took off from Albany, NY, using 70 weather balloons filled with natural gas and attached to a tiny seat.  He rose to 6,000ft and drifted over 25 miles.  And this occurred  ...on September 9, 1954!  Photos of his rig and his flight are in "Illustrated Current News Inc.," 9/13/54 no. 6408, New Haven, CT, as "Former dancing teacher flies aloft in 70 balloons."
:Any chance the "Illustrated Current News" of 1954 was anything like the contemporary Weekly World News?  Rlquall 01:34, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, it appears to be more like "UPI wirephoto" with large-format B&W photos of major news events.  Cashman also made it to several upstate-NY newspapers as well as Life Magazine Life Magazine: Sept 20, 1954 p32 and Nov 21, 1955 pp44-45  Before posting my above comment, I searched on Cashman's name and found it in the "history" section of clusterballoon.org.  That site says that the first one to try the idea was professional balloonist Jean Piccard in 1937, with 98 weather balloons, and his son did the same in 1957 and 1962.  So it appears that the first crazy amateur DIY cluster balloon was Cashman's.  But he used a tiny wooden seat, not a big comfortable lawn chair.--Wjbeaty 03:17, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Earlier flight on a tiny seat: Garret Cashman in 1954 

message: According to both  The Straight Dope and another article, Walters used 42 balloons, not 45.
::Even more confusing, one place in the article, it says he used 45. Another place, it says he bought 45, but used 43. SlowJog (talk) 09:25, 22 August 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  If you listen to the David Letterman interview he clearly states there were 43 balloons. Is is possible he purchased 45 (I think I read that somewhere) but it seems that only 43 were ultimately required. He discusses the weight calculation in the interview. Verne Equinox (talk) 01:23, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of weather balloons. 

message: This section was moved here from the article and was tagged as unreferenced and POV. It is more appropriate here: 
Many exaggerated or simply inaccurate stories have circulated around the Web regarding Walters' flight. The following facts have been confirmed from interviews with his friends and family, and by analyzing a recording of his CB radio transmissions.
* Larry was launched from his girlfriend's backyard in San Pedro, California with the assistance of another friend, Ron Richlin.
* Larry dropped his glasses during lift-off, but had a spare pair with him, and radioed his "ground crew," saying, "I can see perfectly — don't worry." (Later in the flight, when his girlfriend reported she had found his glasses, he replied "Well, that's good news.")
* Larry did not pass near LAX, but rather Long Beach airport, where TWA and Delta Airlines pilots sighted him and reported him to the tower.
* Larry came down in a residential area north-east of Long Beach airport.
* Larry did not drop his BB gun during lift-off. However, later in the flight, after using it to pop balloons to begin a descent, he did drop the gun.
* Larry did float over Long Beach harbor but did not float out to sea.
* Larry did not, as some newspapers reported, purchase the balloons from a military surplus store, but from a balloon supplier.
* Larry was not rescued by a helicopter, but rather came down on his own intent while possibly trying to land in an open field.
* Larry's chair was a piece of patio furniture, not a folding lawn chair.
* Larry gave the patio furniture away to a neighborhood kid, later regretting this generosity when the Smithsonian asked to place the chair in its archives. Today that same person still has the chair (with ballast water jugs and tethers still attached), and has said he intends to donate it to Larry's mother.
*Larry was also contemplating taking his pet cat with him on the flight, but acted against it when his girlfriend was hesitant about the cats health in the air. 
* Larry paid $1,500 after battling the FAA. Of 4 total charges, some were dropped (it was decided that his lawn chair did not need an airworthiness certificate) and Larry admitted to one other (not establishing and maintaining two-way contact with the airport control tower). According to the FAA, "The flight was potentially unsafe, but Walters had not intended to endanger anyone." The original poster was Special Contributor 4.12.124.255 on January 5, 2005, usinf the heading "The Truth". Verne Equinox (talk) 03:59, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Myths dispelled 

message: The Larry Walters article claims that Walters received an "honorable mention in 1982's Darwin Awards" but the Darwin Awards article says "The Awards have circulated since 1985...". Something sounds wrong there? --Asianartfan (talk) 13:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Darwin Award Date

message: I removed this, as it's not a list of trivia but a list of valid pop culture references. Anyone going around marking pop culture lists with trivia cleanup note is going to have a lot of work on their hands. PacificBoy 05:24, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Trivia cleanup notice

message: Like Who? Who else besides those two mentioned above I googled it but i couldn't find any? Can you guys show me any others?24.7.204.215 (talk) 04:18, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Numerous Imitators Of Larry Walters?

message: This article says, 
:"His intention was to ... float above his backyard at a height of about 30 feet (9.1 m) for several hours."
But Cluster ballooning says,
:"[Walters] intended to rise just a few hundred feet (about 100 metres),"
Which is it, if anyone knows?
—WWoods (talk) 17:57, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intended height? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Larry Walters. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070711093239/http://www.ktvz.com/Global/story.asp?S=6759982 to http://www.ktvz.com/global/story.asp?s=6759982
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080708014943/http://www.cnn.com:80/2008/US/07/05/lawnchair.balloons.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview to http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/05/lawnchair.balloons.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
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Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 10:23, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: If someone likes to find out coordinates to improve the article this YT-video@240sec may help. --Itu (talk) 06:03, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Site coordinates 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Larry Walters. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20100822171832/http://news.sky.com:80/skynews/Home/Strange-News/Balloon-Man-Jonathan-Trappes-English-Channel-Bid-Daredevil-Attemping-To-Cross-Water-With-Cluster/Article/201005415639649 to http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Strange-News/Balloon-Man-Jonathan-Trappes-English-Channel-Bid-Daredevil-Attemping-To-Cross-Water-With-Cluster/Article/201005415639649
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 00:07, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Is Walters a one-event person? WP:BLP1E and all that. Maybe we could rename this article to "Lawnchair Larry flight" and make the appropriate adjustments.--Sa57arc (talk) 03:46, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  One-event person 

message: It looks like the last line of the "In Popular Culture" section is just advertising some clickbait.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Viperfan7 (talk • contribs) 01:22, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible youtube channel advertising? 

message: There's already a cite to "Video", which is a YouTube video  of Larry's appearance on David Letterman's complete show of July 12, 1982, with more details of his flight than are mentioned in the article; he is on from ~10.45 to ~21.10, of a total 43 minutes (with ads cut). Before Larry is called onto the stage set, Letterman shows a brief video clip of the initial takeoff, and the arrangement of three vertically separate clusters of balloons.
I've also found an extensive article by George Plimpton dated May 24, 1998, in The New Yorker issue of June 1, 1998, titled The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair . Plimpton had interviewed Larry at length not long after his flight; and then after the suicide, he talked to Carol and her mother Margaret Van Deusen, and separately to Larry's mother Hazel Dunham and his sister Kathy. This article also includes far more details not in WP's article, or in the Letterman show.
There are several discrepancies between the Letterman and Plimpton interviews and other reports in WP's article, including the number of balloons, and the tilt angle of the chair (Letterman 40 or 45 degrees, but Plimpton only 10 degrees). However, in both of these two interviews Larry says that he was not strapped into his chair with a safety belt, because with the tilt he could not fall out. Milkunderwood (talk) 09:27, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I have made no edits to the article here, and do not plan to -- I leave to other interested editors to review both Letterman and Plimpton to expand the article with data, which I personally feel is more important and useful than the huge and apparently still growing list of "Imitators". At least an earlier section of "In Popular Culture" is no longer included. Milkunderwood (talk) 09:40, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  More details and discrepancies 

message: Soon to be a musical apparently: https://42balloons.com/ EzraJones (talk) 12:52, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Musical