Word: balloonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...escapees were instant celebrities throughout West Germany. "What they did with what they had was fantastic," declared West Germany's champion balloonist, Arno Sieger. "It was like crossing the Atlantic in a raft." Museums vied with one another to exhibit the balloon...
...promptly recorded for posterity that Larry Newman proved to be the lucky transatlantic balloonist who got to sleep in the Lindbergh bed at the American embassy in Paris. But it's disappointing that the press did not report what Newman wore on the occasion...
Other credentials of a hard-nosed variety may then be displayed. MacArthur the successful businessman: founder of Graphics, a company devoted to making sophisticated copies of engineers' blueprints. MacArthur the licensed pilot and balloonist who ten years ago soared over the Arctic Circle in a basket of his own making, Q.E.D., Charlie MacArthur is no starry-eyed idealist. Charlie MacArthur is no nut. And having more or less settled that question, he can relax and go back to all the other things Charlie MacArthur is, including owner of the biggest clubhouse a boy and his gang could ever dream...
...Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery," H.L. Mencken once observed, "but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them." In 1976 six people died, and two have been killed so far this year. Minor mishaps usually result merely in awkward landings-in the midst of neighbors' cocktail parties, or atop trees. A balloonist once alighted on the grounds of the Santa Rita county prison in California and was hastily evacuated by officials...
...rest is silence. The land shrinks to lilliputian dimensions; horses run from this spectacle in the sky, and people on their porches, retrieving their Sunday papers, look up and wave. There is no sensation of movement-our balloon is moving with the wind, in the wind. As one balloonist puts it, "In a plane you're strapped down looking out; in a balloon it's like you're standing on your front porch, watching the world...