42 Balloons, a BB Gun and a packed lunch: The flight of Lawnchair Larry
Forget art, music or going down in history. All Larry Walters ever wanted to do was fly.
It’s a relatable desire. A phase that I think most people have been through at one point or another. Lawrence Richard Walters was different, though. The LA native built his entire life around wanting to fly planes, deciding at a very early age that no matter what, he was going to be a pilot. This was until he took an aptitude test to join the US Air Force, and it was found that he had a medical condition affecting his eyesight. No flying for Larry.
The poor kid was crushed. He did sign up for national service, quite literally serving in Vietnam as he was deployed as a cook before taking a job as a truck driver upon his discharge. From then, he lived his life. At least as much of it as he could while also being profoundly unfulfilled. As his depression was reaching critical mass, he remembered a thought he’d had as a 13-year-old. He’d seen a number of weather balloons hanging from the ceiling of a military surplus store and thought, “How many of those would you need to fly?”
In mid-1982, Walters and his girlfriend found another military surplus store. Deciding that there was no kill like overkill, the couple bought 42 eight-foot weather balloons. One must wonder what the store clerk must have thought, but then, it was an LA military surplus store.
Chances are, they’d seen weirder. A few days later, Walters attached each of his haul of weather balloons to his lawnchair, inflated them, then strapped himself to said lawnchair armed with a veritable survivalist’s tool kit. He brought lunch, a camera, a BB Gun, a CB Radio and, most importantly of all, a parachute.
How did the flight of Lawnchair Larry go?
Right from the off, Larry’s flight went wrong. The idea was that once the balloons were filled and he was ready for lift-off, he would first notify the proper authorities of his intentions before lift-off. Unfortunately, the rope attaching the lawnchair to the ground broke, and suddenly, Larry found himself 16,000 feet in the air, doing what he’d always wanted to. Apparently, two commercial airline flights spotted him on his ascent. They must have thought someone spiked the in-flight meal.
The presence of his lunch, a camera and a couple of beers in Larry’s bag alludes to him thinking that his flight was going to be somewhat tranquil. This was not the case. Each was unused while in the air as Larry, for all his dreaming of flight, hadn’t accounted for the thinness of the air at altitudes like that, nor the cold. He spent 45 minutes airborne before beginning his descent by shooting the balloons with the BB gun. He then dropped overboard. Oh no.
What made matters worse was that he’d drifted into federal airspace. However, somehow, things got even worse. His descent was suddenly interrupted by the cables of his balloons getting caught in a power line that Larry miraculously avoided contact with. The Long Beach police were waiting for him at the end of his descent, but he got off with a fine. The real problem came afterwards when Larry alluded to the real darkness at the core of his being when he said, “If I hadn’t done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm.”
The stunt made Larry famous, but it didn’t make him rich. After the initial hype died down and his media appearances dried up, Larry could only find sporadic work as a security guard over the next ten years. A little over a decade after the flight that made him famous, Larry Walters took his own life in the Los Angeles National Forest. He was 44 years old.