I think back to when I was in grade school in the mid-to-late eighties. Our school did something called Balloon Day. Basically, every kid got a balloon and they tied a little message with the schools address on it asking anyone who found the balloon to write and tell about themselves. Then at the end of the day all the kids got together and released large amounts of latex into the universe.
I assume that this isn’t done anymore because it is obviously not so good for the environment.
Did anyone else do this at their school? Did anyone actually get a reply to their balloons? As I recall, only one girl actually got a response at my school.
We did it at my grade school, and there were dozens of replies each year, many of them from extremely far away (launched from NE Kansas, recovered in Pennsylvania). Looking back, I have a suspicious feeling that it was all a complete farce, and that there was some funny business going on.
I remember doing it once in the late-70’s to early 80’s but it may have happened more than once. I don’t remember if we got any responses.
I can’t help but think of the beer commercial where a guy is throwing beer bottles in the sea with a message in each one. They all end up drifting to a castaway on an island who is being tortured by the arrival of beerless bottles.
We did that in my grade school. Never got a reply back although a few people did. I guess my balloon always ended up in the middle of a lake or something.
I found one of these when I was a teen. It was launched from a school maybe a half-mile from where I found it here in central Jersey.
I wrote a long letter explaining how I found it while climbing Mount Elbert in the Rockies. I mailed it to my brother in Colorado, who then mailed it to the kid back here (with the proper Colorado postmark).
We did this in . . . mustabeen second or third grade. Mine went from Iowa to Wisconsin, but we released the balloons in spring and mine landed in a corn field (big surprise, eh?), and it wasn’t found until harvest time, so it was the next school year.
So I got a called to the principal’s office, which nearly gave me a heart attack. (I was a very well-behaved student, but part of the reason I was so well-behaved was that I was terrified of being yelled at by authority figures.) It turned out they had my muddy balloon card and a letter from the lady who found it. Pretty neat!
I was one of several people who got a response. Those who got more timely responses had them posted on the main school bulletin board with a map that spring—but, then, I got to take mine home.
If the schools want to do something similar, but more environmentally friendly, maybe they should try Where’s George.
The cool thing about our Balloon Day was that it was a Student Council fundraiser, so students could buy as many balloons as they wanted. We had thousands of balloons going off that day each year.
Wow, I’ve never heard of Balloon Day.
But when my boys were little and we happened to have helium balloons, I would let them write notes and send them off. Maybe 5, 6 times. We did hear back from somebody once–he lived maybe 20 minutes away in the next town.
I said this the other day in the “what’s the coolest thing you ever found thread.”
When I was a teenager I was riding my ATC down a set of old railroad tracks when something red caught my eye. It was a balloon launched by a 9 year old girl Jennifer from Ohio. I’m upstate New York, so it made it quite a bit and over Lake Erie. She wrote me back and said her went the farthest of the ones that were recovered.
We did this when I was in the fourth grade in a little town in WI. I remember the principal announcing the letters received back over the PA during the morning announcements. After many weeks of not hearing anything from anyone’s balloon, my name was called. My balloon had made it all the way over to Michigan!
I was so proud. Like I had actually trekked all that way myself or something.
I was so envious of those who had answers.