Tony Sarg (inset) invented the ballons (seen here in 1930) that New Yorkers still enjoy today. (AP)
Balloons over Broadway
The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade
by Melissa Sweet
Houghton Mifflin
Showman Tony Sarg was already a renowned master puppeteer when he moved from London to New York. Almost immediately his amazing troupe of mechanical marionettes were a hit on Broadway.
His puppet shows were sellouts in the early 1920s, and he opened toy stores around the city.
“Dear Tony Sarg, Please send me one king, two princesses, three fairies and a Devil. I am sure that my father will pay for them. Also a dragon,” one hopeful boy wrote to the showman puppeteer.
R.H. Macy was so impressed, he hired Sarg to decorate his Herald Square store windows with holiday scenes using mechanized marionettes.
This collaboration would eventually lead to a New York Ctiy staple — the giant floating balloons of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
In the new children’s book “Balloons Over Broadway,” writer and illustrator Melissa Sweet tells the story of the “father of American puppetry” and creator of the Macy’s iconic balloons.
The idea of the parade was inspired in 1924 by the mostly immigrant staff that worked at the department store. Homesick during the winter holidays, R.H. Macy decided a parade would lift his employees’ spirits and they could show off their own traditional music and dance.
Sarg was hired to build horse-drawn floats. He sculpted giant cartoonish papier-mâché heads for people to wear. A circus caravan of wild beasts from the Central Park Zoo were also part of the procession, but the animals frightened the kids and R.H. Macy had to figure out how to replace them.
He called Sarg to come up with a better idea.
Sarg’s blueprint was part-puppet, part-balloon made of rubber that could stand up to wind conditions. The inflated balloons would be held up on sticks and controlled by ground crews on the parade route from Harlem to Broadway, ending up in Herald Square.
He called the Goodyear rubber company in Ohio to make the 18-foot-high air balloons that he would attach together and paint. The first air balloons were Felix the Cat, a dog, a hummingbird and probably a tiger, Sweet says.
The crowds went wild. They had never seen anything like it before. Sarg realized he had to make the balloons bigger and be able to move, gesticulate and especially be easier to see by the growing yearly swells of delighted onlookers.
In 1928, he had Goodyear design the next generation of balloons, this time out of rubberized silk, stronger and lighter than rubber. Most importantly they would be filled with helium, so the balloons could rise and wobble in the air on ropes pulled by crews below — they even flew higher than they do now, Sweet says.
In the 1930s, Sarg collaborated with Walt Disney and soon the cartoon character of Mickey Mouse and others comic-book characters were added to the balloon cortege.
But Sarg “had one more trick up his sleeve,” says Sweet. He released the balloons into the air after the parade.
“He thought it would be great if each one of the balloons had a waterproof envelope adhered to it. In that envelope was a $100 reward if the balloon was returned to Macy’s,” she says. “The first year they didn’t realize that helium expands under pressure [as they rise] and they just burst.”
The next year Sarg had Goodyear affix a slow-release valve so when the balloon floated away it would stay in the air for a week and could travel as far as 100 miles.
“But this was the Depression and people shot at them, fought over them,” Sweet says.
“The worst was in 1932, when a novice female pilot and her instructor hit a balloon and it wrapped around the wing of their biplane and it began to dive bomb. The instructor took over the controls and managed to start the engine again 75 feet above the rooftops of Queens.”
That was “more exciting than it should be, and they stopped it,” she says.
But Sarg’s legacy lived on, and the balloons will again fly this Thursday. “He really was a character,” Sweet says.