Lawnchair Larry’s Wild, Exhilarating and Ultimately Sad Ride Through Life

On July 2, 1982, 33 year old California truck driver Larry Walters, nicknamed Lawnchair Larry, went into his San Pedro backyard and put on a parachute and took his pellet gun, a CB radio, sandwiches, cold beer and a camera and then strapped himself into his lawn chair. He had already attached helium balloons to the chair and then his girlfriend and other friends filled the balloons with helium and cut the cord holding Lawnchair Larry to the ground and up and away he went.

Larry’s original plan was to simply float some 40 feet from the ground in his back yard and check out the local area from a height. Larry had been dreaming of doing this since he was 13 years old. He had always dreamed of flying but could not join the Air Force as a pilot due to his poor eyesight.

As Larry floated up from the helium filled balloons he started ascending a lot higher than he had originally planned. He did not dare use the pellet gun to shoot any of the balloons for fear of becoming unbalanced and tipping himself out of the chair. He kept rising and rising and soon achieved a height of some 16,000 feet. He slowly drifted over the city of Long Beach and caused quite a stir from people on the ground watching him. He eventually drifted into the primary approach corridor of Long Beach Airport startling a pilot who radioed the tower, “I’m starting my descent at 16,000 feet and I just passed a guy in a lawn chair with a gun.”

With his CB radio Larry alerted authorities that he was okay and did not need assistance. After being in the air the better part of an hour and starting to get really cold, Larry started shooting some of the balloons with his pellet gun. He started descending and was doing fine until he lost his pellet gun overboard and then he drifted into power lines which caused a 20 minute blackout in a Long Beach neighborhood. But Larry reached the ground in one piece and was fine. A reporter quickly asked him why he had done it and Larry replied, “A man can’t just sit around.”

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Larry was immediately arrested by the Long Beach Police. Lieut. Rod Mickelson said after he stopped laughing, “I know it sounds strange, but it’s true. The guy just filled up the balloons with helium, strapped on a parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off.” Authorities were a little baffled about what to charge Larry with. Since he did not have a pilots license they could not suspend him. He was eventually charged with “operating an aircraft within an airport traffic area without proper communication with the control tower”. Larry’s response to this was to say that “If the FAA was around when the Wright Brothers were testing their aircraft, they would never have been able to make their first flight at Kitty Hawk.”

Dubbed Lawnchair Larry by the press who widely covered his story, Larry Walters received some notoriety from his flight. He received invitations from The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman, was asked to do some motivational speaking and was featured in a Timex print ad. The Smithsonian asked Larry for his lawn chair to put it on display but Larry had already given it away to an admiring young fan.

Lawnchair Larry recently inspired Oregonian Kent Couch and Brazilian Catholic Priest Adelir Antonio to follow in his footsteps. Couch flew 193 miles from his home all the way to Idaho in a helium balloon powered lawn chair.

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Adelir Antonio was not as lucky as his helium balloon powered lawnchair flew into a storm which took him out to sea and he died.

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In 1993 at the age of 44, Larry Walters committed suicide in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains. But he did live his dream and and when someone once asked him about the flight he said, “It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn’t done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm. I didn’t think that by fulfilling my goal in life — my dream — that I would create such a stir and make people laugh.”