Forest Park Balloon Race Program 2018

6 The Great Forest Park Balloon Race • Presented by PNC Bank (Editor’s note: the four men who organize the Race got themselves organized many flights ago. Here’s their story.) “THE PICTURE.” IT HAPPENS EACH YEAR , JUST after the final pilots’ meeting in the center of the launch field at the Great Forest Park Balloon Race (GFPBR). It happens after the last look at the tips of trees and a final launched helium balloon to check wind direction and speed; in the midst of television cameras, pilots in jumpsuits and funny hats; under the watchful eyes of officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and officials from Lambert Tower; in the midst of balloon fans who sneaked onto the fringe of the pilot circle to hear “what’s really going on;” in a field surrounded by more than 100,000 excited balloon fans, waiting for the RACE to start within minutes. The four men responsible for the GFPBR stop to have “The Picture” taken, as they have for 39 years. The four make up the GFPBR, Inc. Ted Staley is a slightly mysterious balloon pilot who once borrowed a Cessna 172 to chase and locate partners Marlow and Schettler, when they flew and landed their balloon in an impossible spot on the Missouri River bottoms. “We saw the yellow Cessna dip its wing earlier and figured he was getting a little close,” recalls Marlow. “We thought we’d spend the night where we landed, or never be found,” adds Schettler. “Then Ted arrived with two hot Big Macs and said, ‘You’ll never guess how I found you.’ We guessed.” John Schaumburg is an architect by training and uses those skills to design and then supply complicated, high-tech bakery systems for supermarkets internationally. He also builds beautiful wooden sailboats with hand tools -- and once a river cabin from the foundation to roof-peak with partner Schettler. Some part of Dan Schettler’s training for corporate international material purchasing and management for Monsanto came from annual trips to the non-tourist parts of Mexico on the largest Norton Motorcycle created. After first son Brian, he named his second son John Edward to honor his three partners -- and was promptly presented by them with the traditional initialed silver baby cup, with an asterisk on an engraved bottom which read; “You can have our names, but not our money.” John Marlow seems in constant motion, but sits for late-night hours fabricating intricately beautiful trout flies from bits of yarn and feathers, pausing occasionally to harmonica a set with Muddy Waters or other old blues singers coming from a speaker lying near his bench. He rarely travels without a blues harmonica or a four-piece fly-rod, jut in case there might be a band of trout around. Ask him about his roughest landing, and he pauses, then offers, “Chu Lai, Vietnam, 1965.” Ask him about his favorite balloon race -- other than Forest Park -- and he’ll talk about how his partners and their wives trailered four balloons 125 miles to Marlow’s home town, Herrin, Illinois (9,600), just to make a success of the first “Herrinfest Balloon Race.” There were a total of five balloons. For the four men who make up the GFPBR, “The Picture” is an unorganized moment that’s a tradition. For that moment everything stops -- in those hectic last minutes before the launch of the Hare Balloon and the culmination of thousands of hours of work and organization. That organization includes everything from the location of Porta-Potties to fencing golf course greens, to assuring lost children will be found, to making sure the bands will be fun enough for the pilots’ parties -- everything including the gathering of dozens of devoted volunteers who help make the GFPBR a real event, the “most well-attended single balloon race in the world,” as has often been written. For that moment --when the camera freezes the four men in a moment in time --everything stops. The Fab Four: The Story of the Organizers of the Balloon Race The Fab Four in 1986 (left to right): Ted Staley, John Marlow, Dan Schettler, John Schaumberg.