3/10/97 - Larry Walters is among the relatively few who have actually turned their dreams into reality. His story is true, as hard as you may find it to believe ... Larry was a truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly. When he graduated from high school, he joined the Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot. Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him. So when he finally left the service, he had to satisfy himself with watching others fly the fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard. As he sat there in his lawn chair, he dreamed about the magic of flying.

Then one day, Larry had an idea. He went down to the local Army-Navy surplus store and bought forty-five weather balloons, and several tanks of helium. These were not your brightly colored party balloons, these were heavy-duty spheres measuring more than four feet across when fully inflated. Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn chair, the kind you might have in your back yard. He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep, and inflated the balloons with helium. Then he packed a few sandwiches and drinks, and a loaded BB gun, figuring he could pop a few balloons when it was time to return to earth. His preparations complete, Larry sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord. His plan was to lazily float into the sky, and eventually back to terra firma. But things didn't quite work out that way. When Larry cut the cord, he didn't float lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a cannon! Nor did he go up a couple hundred feet. He climbed and climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet! At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying. So he stayed up there, sailing around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss about how to get down. Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International Airport. A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet, with a gun in his lap... now there's a conversation I would have given anything to have heard! LAX is right on the ocean, and you may know that at nightfall, the winds on the coast begin to change. So, as dusk fell, Larry began drifting out to sea. At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him, but the rescue team had a hard time getting to him because the draft from their propeller kept pushing his home-made contraption farther and farther away. Eventually, they were able to hover above him and drop a rescue line, with which they gradually hauled him back to safety. A difficult maneuver, flawlessly executed by the Navy. As soon as Larry hit the ground, he was arrested. But as he was led away in handcuffs, a television reporter called out, "Sir, why'd you do it?" Larry stopped, eyed the man, then replied nonchalantly, "A man can't just sit around!"

Postscript: From the Archives, L A Times (www.latimes.com): Larry Walters; Soared to Fame on Lawn Chair, Wednesday, November 24, 1993 -- Larry Walters, who achieved dubious fame in 1982 when he piloted a lawn chair attached to helium balloons 16,000 feet above Long Beach, has committed suicide at the age of 44.

(UPI) LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Look, up in the sky. Is it a bird, a plane, the space shuttle?
No, it's Larry Walters at 16,000 feet in his lawn chair. Walters, 33, a truck driver, spent nearly two hours in the air on Friday in an aluminum lawn chair suspended from a 50-foot cable attached to 45 helium-filled balloons. Among other things, he threw a scare into a couple of airline pilots who happened across the path of his weird flying contraption. "I know it sounds strange but it's true," said a Long Beach police officer. "The guy just filled up some balloons with helium, strapped on a parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off." But everything didn't go as planned and Walters had a few dicey moments as he started getting numb in the cold atmosphere at 16,000 feet and decided to descend -- which he accomplished by popping some of the balloons with the BB gun. As he neared the ground he saw power lines. "That's when I got scared," he said. "Those things can fry you." He didn't get fried, the balloons draped themselves across the wires, leaving Walters dangling in his chair a few feet from the ground and he dropped earth. The landing knocked out power in the neighborhood for 20 minutes. "I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I've proved to myself that the thing works." In addition to the BB gun and the parachute, Walter carried several one-gallon water jugs for ballast, a life vest and a CB radio. "But the best piece of equipment was the lawn chair," Walters said. "It was a Sears. It was extremely comfortable." Walters told authorities that he was trying to drift to the Mojave Desert, site of Sunday's schedules space shuttle Columbia landing, but the winds didn't cooperate. "I wasn't trying to upstage the space shuttle," Walters said. "I would have landed well away from there. I just wanted to lay back and enjoy it all, but I had to do something when my toes started getting numb."

Police said they probably would not file charges against Walters. But the Federal Aviation Administration was investigating, mainly because of the scare Walters gave the airline pilots who came across him at 16,000 feet in his flying lawn chair.

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