STAS 19: Larry Walters

What Was That Like - True Stories. Real People.

The episode recounts the extraordinary 1982 flight of Larry Walters, who used weather balloons to lift a lawn chair into the atmosphere. It

Key takeaways

• Larry Walters used 42 helium-filled weather balloons to lift a $109 Sears lawn chair.
• The flight reached an altitude of 16,000 feet, exposing Walters to freezing temperatures and hypoxia.

Main topics

• Larry Walters' unauthorized flight
• The mechanics of cluster ballooning

Notable quotes

It was something I had to do.

Conclusion

A poignant reflection on how achieving one's greatest dream can someti

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) This is Scott, and you're listening to What Was That Like? Every other Friday, I have a guest come on, and we talk about something that they experienced that was extremely unusual. Today's Friday, and we're in between new episodes. So I want to tell you a story. And this story comes with a content warning for discussion of suicide. Today, I'm going to tell you about Larry Walters. He was one of those people who, if you asked him the question, if you could have one superpower, what would it be? His answer would always be the same, to be able to fly. But Larry wasn't just the type of person to have a dream and give up on it. Larry actually made it happen. Speaker 1 (0:57) In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Speaker 1 (1:03) Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. I didn't Speaker 2 (1:13) believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Speaker 1 (1:19) Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to Examined, the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:31) Here on the podcast, some of the most popular episodes are the ones that include the actual 911 audio that took place while the incident was happening. You know when you hear that, it's real life, and sometimes it's an actual life or death situation. Well, there's actually a podcast that features the 911 audio in almost every episode. The show is called Music City 911. Music City because it's hosted by my friend Brandon Hall, who's in Nashville, but the calls you hear are from all over the U.S. And Brandon is not just a podcast host. He's an actual 911 dispatcher, and he's been doing that for more than 25 years. So he doesn't just play the calls. He pulls back the curtain to tell you what's really going on in each story. And what a range of calls you'll hear. Crimes in progress, citizens calling because they're seeing something happening, people in trouble, because for anything that can happen, there's someone calling 911 about it. Lots of true crime shows talk about something that happened. But with Music City 911, you're going to actually hear it. This is real life, and you have a front row seat. Search for Music City 911 wherever you get your podcasts and start with any episode that catches your attention. Just don't blame me when you end up binging it. Speaker 2 (3:00) Larry Walters lived Speaker 3 (3:02) in the huge, sunny landscape of Los Angeles, California. He was a man who spent his life grounded on the asphalt, but his mind was always drifting high up in the stratosphere. Speaker 3 (3:17) Larry was born on April 19, 1949, and he grew up in a world full of post-war ambition and technological advances, but his own personal dreams were again and again brought down by the harsh realities of his circumstances. As a young boy attending Hollywood High School, he dreamed of nothing but the open sky. He wanted desperately to look down at the world from the cockpit of a fighter jet, and that burning desire led him to join his school's science fair with a project titled Hydrogen and Balloons. Unfortunately, his school did not share his vision. His teachers slapped a discouraging grade of D onto his project. But Larry was not the type of person to let a letter grade ground his imagination. When he became an adult, Larry attempted to make his ultimate dream a reality by trying to enlist as a pilot in the United States Air Force. This was the time of the Vietnam War. when the military needed as many capable pilots as it could get its hands on. But Larry hit a huge roadblock. His eyesight was profoundly poor. The rigid medical standards of the military immediately disqualified him from ever sitting in a cockpit. He was devastated by this, but he still wanted to serve his country. So Larry went to war anyway, not as a pilot, but as a military cook. He spent his deployment in the heat of military kitchens, surrounded by the smell of grease and standard-issue rations rather than jet fuel and clouds. Speaker 3 (5:16) After receiving an honorable discharge, his options for professional employment were pretty limited. He ultimately found a steady job as a commercial truck driver. Yep, a truck driver, spending his long working hours staring at flat stretches of interstate highway. It was a far cry from the limitless blue skies he had once envisioned. Speaker 3 (5:43) Here's the thing about Larry. He was, for the most part, a pretty eccentric and intensely focused man who possessed a peculiar brand of determination. Sometimes his private passions took things a little too far. In his spare time, he began mixing and manufacturing his own homemade rocket fuel directly in his backyard. He didn't seem to care if the highly unstable chemical mixtures exploded at completely inconvenient moments, shattering the quiet of the neighborhood. He just felt genuinely sorry for his poor mother, who spent her days constantly worrying about her son's erratic, dangerous enthusiasm. Speaker 3 (6:33) At some point, Larry fell in love with a woman named Carol. The two were together for a long time, eventually sharing an enduring relationship that lasted for 15 years. Like Larry's mother, Carol spent an immense amount of time deeply concerned about Larry's obsession with breaking free from the earth. But after listening to his endless talk for years, she came to a realization. She decided it was probably best for Larry to actually go through with his bizarre plan, fly off into the sky, and finally get the crazy idea out of his system once and for all. However, she wasn't completely reckless. She strictly convinced Larry that if he was going to execute this crazy idea, he absolutely had to wear an emergency parachute and take the time to learn how to properly use it. The specific spark for Larry's plan went all the way back to when he was a 13-year-old kid. He had walked into a local military surplus store and looked up at the ceiling, and he was completely transfixed by the sight of large, heavy-duty weather balloons hanging over the aisles. Right then and there, a wild concept took deep root in his mind. If a person gathered enough of those massive balloons and filled them with helium, they could easily carry a human being high into the sky. By the time 1982 rolled around, Larry decided he was done waiting. He devised an explicit